Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
These are supposedly the 13 rarest breeds of cats. My favorites are the Burmilla, the Chartreux, and the Kurlian bobtail. (and the British shorthair is not to be sniffed at). The caracal, however, is not a cat breed, but a wild felid species, and shouldn’t be on this list.
Here’s a new Maru, part of which is appealingly titled “Sleeve cat under the buttocks”. The buttocks apparently belong to Hana, Maru’s companion who’s sitting on the sleeve.
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The Guardian features an adorable panoply of kittens caught in mid-leap (and just posing cutely), all taken by Seth Casteel and included in his new book, Pounce. Here are four of my favorites, along with the kittens’ names:
FuzzbucketChickenBug-a-BooPetuniaZeppelin
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Lagniappe:The “water cat cake”, from Bored Panda, is a popular kind of ‘mochi’ in Japan now. You can find the recipe here; it’s basically sugar, water, and agar. But you can mold it into cool shapes like this kitty:
Biologist/naturalist/photographer Lou Jost has photographed lots of species at the Tambopata Research Center in Peru (see previous posts here and here). Here’s another installment; his notes are indented:
At the Tambopata Research Center we got up around 4:30 am most days, and evenings after dinner there were often talks, so we had little time to explore the forest at night. But one night before bed I couldn’t resist exploring for an hour. In that hour I found so many things that I only managed to advance about 20 meters from the lodge.
Many big hairy spiders were commonly perched on leaves or branches, probably waiting for one of the Orthoptera I sent earlier [see links above]:
These membracid treehoppers, and the ants that tended them in exchange for sugar droplets, were very active at night, while during the day they don’t seem to move much.
This strange insect was also hanging out near the treehoppers. I don’t know if it was eating the plant or the treehoppers. [JAC: does anyone recognize it?]
Another species of treehopper:
And a landscape from Stephen Barnard in Idaho, sent October 17. The title is “Fresh snow this morning.”
PCC(E) here, back at the helm. Thanks again to Grania for filling in during my trip!
Today is Saturday, November 19, 2016, and I’m still jet-lagged. Perhaps I’ll wake up if I have some coffee, for it’s National Macchiato Day. I abjure that form of coffee: I like either no milk (the drug experience) or lots of it (the latte experience). It’s also World Toilet Day (I am not making this up) as well as International Men’s Day, which, sadly, focuses only on our health and not our general awesomeness.
On this day in 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean became the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon, and I recalled when I read this that no woman has yet set foot on the Moon. I wonder if anyone will during the next several decades? Do you know how many men have set foot on the Moon? The answer is here; they’re all Americans. On that very same day, November 19,. 1969, Pelé scored his 1000th goal. Also on this day in 1998, the House Judiciary Committee began impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton with regard to his statements during the Lewinsky affair. (For some reason I just had a moment of panic as I remembered that Donald Trump will be our next President. Woe is we.)
Notables born on this day Indira Gandhi (1917, assassinated by her Sikh guards), Allison Janney (1959♥), and Jodie Foster (1962). Those who died on this day include The Man in the Iron Mask (1703), and Emma Lazarus (1887), author of the sonnet The New Colossus, which contains these familiar and stirring words:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
(We’re now going to keep out the huddled masses with a Big Wall.) Mike Nichols also died on this day in 2014. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, looking wise, has some deep thoughts—or perhaps it’s only a Deepity.
Hili: I do not doubt…
A: What is it you do not doubt?
Hili: That one always has to doubt.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie wątpię…
Ja: W co nie wątpisz?
Hili: Że zawsze należy wątpić.
As lagniappe, a picture of Lion Hugs from Grania. We could all use some of these.
Lord is this man prolific! Like Steve Pinker (another man I admire), Dan just keeps cranking out the books, and they’re often very good ones. These two men seem to have books arrayed in their heads like planes coming in for a landing at O’Hare, all arrayed in a sequential order.
One of America’s foremost philosophers offers a major new account of the origins of the conscious mind.
How did we come to have minds?
For centuries, this question has intrigued psychologists, physicists, poets, and philosophers, who have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and explain. Disciples of Darwin have long aspired to explain how consciousness, language, and culture could have appeared through natural selection, blazing promising trails that tend, however, to end in confusion and controversy. Even though our understanding of the inner workings of proteins, neurons, and DNA is deeper than ever before, the matter of how our minds came to be has largely remained a mystery.
That is now changing, says Daniel C. Dennett. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his most comprehensive exploration of evolutionary thinking yet, he builds on ideas from computer science and biology to show how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett’s legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought.
In his inimitable style—laced with wit and arresting thought experiments—Dennett explains that a crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. Competition among memes—a form of natural selection—produced thinking tools so well-designed that they gave us the power to design our own memes. The result, a mind that not only perceives and controls but can create and comprehend, was thus largely shaped by the process of cultural evolution.
Well, I’ve never been keen on memes, which in my view haven’t added anything to our understanding of anything, but never mind: Dan’s argument probably doesn’t rest on “memetics.” At any rate, I just got a prepublication copy of this book and will give a report when I finish it.
As I’ve said repeatedly, for some reason that I don’t fathom, major “sciencey” magazines like National Geographic, Smithsonian, and even (ugh!) Nature are showing increasing osculation of religion’s rump, espousing a harmony between these two incompatible areas. I have no idea why they do this—perhaps in an era of click-bait journalism, they think it will draw readers.
[as] the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he studies the fundamental nature of our universe through the lens of supersymmetry—a theory that predicts twice as many fundamental particles as the Standard Model and could be the next step towards a grand unified theory. He’s also the first African-American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major research university in the United States.
He also seems to be religious.
And I have to say that I envy this bit of his bio given in Wikipedia:
On February 1, 2013, Gates was a recipient of the National Medal of Science.[5] Gates was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. As of 2015, Professor Gates has a base salary (9 months not including grants and other income) of $339,254.78 and taught 1 class in 2015 and none in 2016.
What is sad is how such an accomplished and well-paid professor has such a nebulous, almost incoherent, view of why science and religion aren’t in conflict. Though most of Smithsonian’s interview isn’t about that issue, the relevant part is at the end, with Ash’s question in bold and Gates’s answer below it:
In science, both mathematics and physics play large roles in describing and probing the earliest stages of our universe. But some people view the question of where our universe came from as the sole domain of faith or religion. What do you think about how science and faith are often pitted against each other?
I have never found a schism in my life between doing science and having religious beliefs. Evolutionary biologist Steven J. Gould explains why faith and science don’t conflict using the phrase “non-overlapping magisteria.” I find this idea fascinating, because if it’s correct, there ought to be mechanisms in each sphere of belief—whether it’s in faith or in science—that are responsible for this property of the non-overlapping attribute.
I spent some years thinking about it and it occurred to me that science seems to have one such mechanism. In science, not only do we tell people our best estimation about what’s going on in the universe, we also pay rigorous attention to what we don’t know. This is quantified in science as what are called “error bars” or “confidence bars.” We pay just as much attention to these uncertainties as we pay to that measured values of things around us. And there will always be uncertainty in any argument based on science.
That’s interesting in the context of faith because just as there will be uncertainty in any belief we may have, we will also have uncertainty in any disbelief we have. In my mind, this is the protection mechanism that science has built into it so that it does not intrude into faith-based belief systems.
In religion there’s a different protection mechanism. Saint Augustine, a Catholic saint mind you, said that people of faith must recognize that when people talk about the natural world and honestly record and observe phenomena that are in opposition to their belief, it is their belief it has to give way and not the other way around.
In my mind there’s this beautiful symmetry about why Gould got it exactly right. They don’t overlap, they’re just very different things. I believe that both faith and science are essential for the survival of our species.
I’ve explained in Faith Versus Fact (pp. 106-112) why Gould’s view of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) doesn’t work, and in fact has largely been rejected by theologians for its claim that the domian of religion doesn’t include statements about “the factual character of the natural world.” In fact most religions do at bottom depend on facts about God, about the afterlife, about heaven and hell, about Jesus, about Muhammad, what constitutes sin, and so on. Has Gates not thought about that? Apparently not.
As for the rest of Gates’s “accommodationism,” I find it hard to understand. It seems to be that both science and religion have “protection mechanisms” to assure the truth of what they find. In science that seems to be the use of statistics to affix a degree of uncertainty to our claims, and in religion it seems to be that one’s beliefs must be susceptible to the findings of science, so that one can retain and protect those beliefs not invalidated (or not addressed) by science.
But 64% of Americans have said that if a scientific fact invalidates a tenet of their religious beliefs, they’ll jettison the fact and keep their belief. In other words, religion’s “protection mechanism” doesn’t work very well, and not at all in the case of the 42% of Americans who are creationists.
I’m puzzled by how fuzzy Gates’s thinking is. If a student were to hand me an essay in which she gave Gates’s answer for why science and faith were compatible, I’ll mark it all up and say “think harder and try again.” But it all goes to show you that even a smart and well known scientist goes all wonky when he starts talking about religion and its compatibility with science. Gates says he’s religious, and he must therefore find a reason, however weird, for how he can have his science and his Jesus too.
As for religion (“faith”) being essential for the survival of our species, well, them’s just fancy words, for our species can survive just fine without religion. If it didn’t, Denmark and Sweden would be toast.
If you’re a regular, you know that all the biologists who post here love mimicry. I’ve tried to explain why: it shows the power of natural selection and the degree of perfection that natural selection can attain (i.e., how closely something can come to mimic the background or another animal—the “target”), and the very remarkable and unpredictable ways that evolution can go. But one of the main reasons is simple aesthetics: it’s remarkable to see how natural selection, sculpting an animal or plant gene by gene, can get it to look like something it’s not. Animals can look like plants, like other animals, or the background; and plants can look like plants (seed morphology mimics in weeds), rocks (Lithops) or animals (bee-mimicking orchids). And so when we see nice cases, we put them up here
Here’s a particularly nice one brought to my attention by Matthew Cobb and Erica McAlister. As described in some detail in a paper in the Journal of Arachnology (reference below; access free) and a National Geographic piece by Carrie Arnold, it’s an orb-spider from Yunnan, China that’s probably a new species. We’ve seen spiders mimic all sorts of things (including snake heads), but here’s one that apparently mimics a leaf. It is in fact the first observation of a spider mimicking a leaf.
Here’s the undescribed spider that, say the authors, is probably found in rainforests throughout SE Asia judging from photographs taken by others. The authors found only one female and one juvenile in two weeks of searching, so it’s not common (or else it’s a hell of a mimic!).
Notice the weird body shape and the tapered abdomen (the photos, from the National Geographic site, are all by Matjaz Kuntner, the paper’s first author).
Note the leaf “veination” on the abdomen as well and its “pedicel”-like extension
As the paper reports, and as you can see above and below, the females are green and brown, and their abdomen looks like a pedicel (a stalk bearing a flower). The spider further mimics leaves by pulling dead leaves into its web alongside the live ones it uses to anchor its web. And those dead leaves have to be hauled up to the web from the forest floor!
When the web is disturbed (below), the female moves higher up her twig to mingle with the leaves. Note how she draws her legs in to hide the appendages:
The selection pressures producing this mimicry probably involve either hiding from predators or hiding from prey—or both.
As you see from the title below, the paper calls this a case of “leaf masquerade,” which they define as “avoiding predation by being misidentified.” They distinguish this from “crypsis”, which they define as “blending in with background not to be detected at all.” I find this distinction not that interesting, as both cases involve mimicry of the background. To differentiate masquerade from crypsis one would have to know whether the predator (or prey) actually notices the leaf-mimicking spider. That would be very hard to do, and, at any rate, the selective pressures operating in both cases seem identical.
Matthew also sent me a tw**t by Matt Simon, which shows all the color pictures in the paper.
As you can see from the many posts I’ve written about Rice University sociologist Elaine Ecklund, she’s made a career out of showing that scientists are far more religious—or friendly to religion—than commonly assumed. But her methodology is often suspect, so that her data are cooked or twisted to meet her agenda: to show comity between science and faith. I hardly need to mention that behind this perverse and misguided agenda stands the swollen coffers of the Templeton organization, which has funded Ecklund’s “research” for years.
And now we have the most bizarre publication of all from the Ecklund/Templeton Enterprise, a paper consisting solely of statements by scientists who, by and large, don’t like the way Richard Dawkins popularizes science. It’s just a hit job on Dawkins, and the bizarre thing is that it’s a byproduct of a survey of scientists not on Dawkins himself, but on their religiosity and attitude toward science and religion. Ecklund’s team took the scientists who mentioned Dawkins, and showed that most of them didn’t like his style. From that she managed to squeeze out an entire publication! She and her coauthors conclude that the opinion of UK scientists is that Dawkins “misrepresents science” and that British scientists “reject his approach to public engagement”.
As part of a study of “the social context of science” in Italy, India, France, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the UK and the US, Johnson et al. interviewed 609 biologists and physicists, 137 of them in the UK. Of these, 48 mentioned Richard Dawkins, 35 without prompting and another 13 when asked about “influences on their perception of the science-faith interface.” (23 scientists outside the UK also mentioned him but “had relatively little to say about him”, so the conclusions are limited to UK scientists).
The Big Result: of the 48 scientists who brought up Dawkins, 10 were favorable to his science popularization and his view of the incompatibility of science and religion.
BUT 38 of them (80%) had bad stuff to say about Richard as a “celebrity scientist”. These critics were both religious (15) and nonreligious (23). When you read their comments, though, most of them seem ticked off by Richard’s comments on religion, his “stridency”, and his atheist “fundamentalism”. Here are all the quotes given in the paper by Dawkins’s detractors (each is a separate comment):
Some people like Richard Dawkins … He’s a fundamental atheist. He feels compelled to take the evidence way beyond that which other scientists would regard as possible … I want [students] to develop [science] in their own lives. And I think it’s necessary to understand what science does address directly.
You can understand someone like Richard Dawkins being particularly hacked off by it and retaliating, but … people on both sides … [are] overly dogmatic … [and go] beyond perhaps what the state of the agenda is. The agenda of the scientist is to ask how, but it’s not because I want to prove that God doesn’t exist.
He’s much too strong about the way he denies religion … As a scientist you’ve got to be very open, and I’m open to people’s belief in religion … I don’t think we’re in a position to deny anything unless it’s something which is within the scope of science to deny … I think as a scientist you should be open to it … It doesn’t end up encroaching for me because I think there’s quite a space between the two.
I mean I haven’t read any of his recent books … The impression I get from the newspaper reports … I just kind of feel that … he’s kind of trying to be sort of a perfect, rational person somewhere but you know he’s … kind of portraying that that’s how scientists kind of think, that’s what scientists say and so on and that kind of does … create the wrong impression.
Well, he has gone on a crusade, basically … I think that it’s an easy target, and I think that he’s rather insensitive and hectoring … [A]lthough there is a lot of truth behind what he says … he does it in a way that I think is deliberately designed to alienate religious people.
He picked quite an easy target I would say … If you say they have these extreme atheists and extreme radical religious persons, when they meet they will not be able to talk, they won’t be able to understand … But if you talk beliefs to people which are next to each other, probably they have more in common there … [T]hey will be able to talk even though they have slightly different beliefs.
I think you have to be very careful about stripping away people’s beliefs without offering anything in return…If I talked to people, I talk to them [about] how I view things and how I understand things and I will ask questions of them…But just sort of shouting at people, “You’re wrong and stupid” is not very productive.
If you’re talking to somebody who is indoctrinated and has a hundred percent belief in their belief system, then you’re getting absolutely nowhere by saying [God doesn’t exist] … [To] break them down, by far the easiest way is to actually study what their faith is.
There are other snippets as well, for example someone calling Dawkins “Mr. Anti-God Europe” and others calling him “extremely arrogant” and “overly aggressive.”
Note that in none of these quotes does someone say that Dawkins “misrepresents science”—one of the major conclusions of the study that appears in the abstract and conclusion. Rather, the common theme of the comments is that Dawkins is too strident in denying religion, is on a crusade, is attacking peoples’ beliefs without replacing them, and is ineffective in dispelling religious belief. As is typical of Ecklund’s approach, she simply distorts what she finds in the service of her agenda (and that of Templeton). Given the data, the center does not hold.
Again, here’s the abstract, which is not qualified:
The “misrepresentation of science” trope is repeated throughout this paper, but is not at all supported by the quotes themselves. Indeed, where are the quotes showing how Dawkins distorts evolutionary biology—his primary scientific subject? People could have said that his gene-centered approach misrepresents the opinion of evolutionary geneticists (it doesn’t), but nobody said anything close to that. No, it’s all about religion. You could, I suppose, say that Dawkins misrepresents science by saying that it’s in opposition to religion, but you don’t find that, either. Instead, you find comments about his style, his stridency, etc. Where, oh where, is the “misrepresentation of science?” Nowhere. It’s in Ecklund’s mind and agenda.
The only comments that come close to a “misrepresentation of science” are these. First:
He’s much too strong about the way he denies religion … As a scientist you’ve got to be very open, and I’m open to people’s belief in religion … I don’t think we’re in a position to deny anything unless it’s something which is within the scope of science to deny … I think as a scientist you should be open to it … It doesn’t end up encroaching for me because I think there’s quite a space between the two.
But that’s bizarre. Should we be open to the possibility of Santa Claus or fairies? And, in fact, Dawkins doesn’t absolutely deny the existence of God: he says that, based on the absence of evidence when there should be evidence, he puts himself as either a 6 or a 6.9 on the 7-point “spectrum of theistic probability,” where 0 represents a strong theist (“I know there is a God”) and 7 represents a strong atheist (“I know there is no God”). So his position is that he finds very little evidence for God, but leaves open the possibility. That is not complete denial of God, and of course not a “denial of religion”—whatever that means.
and this:
You can understand someone like Richard Dawkins being particularly hacked off by it and retaliating, but … people on both sides … [are] overly dogmatic … [and go] beyond perhaps what the state of the agenda is. The agenda of the scientist is to ask how, but it’s not because I want to prove that God doesn’t exist.
That’s a bit confusing, yet Johnson et al say that this quote instantiates “the public impression that scientists practice organized dogmatism.”
Johnson et al.’s conclusions are also suspect for several reasons:
The authors don’t consider the obvious: that those UK scientists who disliked Dawkins were more likely to bring up his name unprompted.
Religious scientists despise Dawkins for having written The God Delusion, and so would be likely to denigrate him.
As with Carl Sagan, many scientists are jealous of Dawkins’s popular success, and so would have a motivation to criticize him besides his supposed misrepresentation of science.
Most scientists don’t like criticism of religion because it “rocks the boat”—even if they themselves are atheists. I’ve experienced this with Faith Versus Fact, which accrued many of the same criticisms although nobody I know of has said that I’ve “misrepresented science”.
Johnson et al. ignore the many laypeople who have been converted to both evolution AND atheism by Dawkins’s efforts. You can see examples of those in the old “Converts Corner” website that was once part of the Dawkins Foundation site. Note that there are 159 pages of testimony on this site! We see that many people have been convinced by Dawkins’ messages about both religion and evolution, and, as I often say in my talks, there’s a salubrious synergy between these areas, so that people who get converted to accepting evolution often give up their faith, and those who lose their faith often subsequently accept evolution. In contrast, there is no person I’ve ever seen who has said, “You know, I’d accept evolution if only Dawkins stopped banging on about atheism.”
As senior author of this paper and of many other papers on science and religion, Elaine Ecklund has proven herself an execrable scholar, constantly distorting her findings in the service of her agenda, which just happens to be one that attracts Templeton money like dung attracts scarabid beetles. This “paper” is not scholarship, but a simple hit piece on Dawkins, and the conclusions—that British scientists think Dawkins misrepresents science—are worthless in view of the paper’s methods. It may well be that most British scientists don’t like Dawkins, or think he’s too hard on religion, but that isn’t shown in the paper either, for this is not a random sample of scientists. It’s a summary of what people said who brought up Dawkins without asking. Here’s one more distorting quote from the paper (my emphasis), with a next-to-last sentence that’s nothing other than a gratuitous slur:
To be clear, none of the scientists we interviewed questioned Dawkins’ identity or integrity as a scientist. The critique is aimed at his representation of science to the public. What makes this critique so ironic is the fact that Dawkins held a pre-eminent endowed chair in public understanding of science at Oxford from 1995 until 2008. It is also noteworthy that many of his critics are, like Dawkins, atheists.
What are her (and possibly her team’s) motivations and conclusions? To show that Dawkins is disturbing the Force Field of comity between science and religion. Here are two quotes from Johnson et al.:
To be sure, diverse publics are intelligent enough to make their own judgments about science and scientists, but for those who are interested in a more nuanced perspective than can be offered by specific celebrity scientists, dialogue and social exchange between scientists and non-scientist publics could be a valuable mechanism for change. Implicit in these narratives of understanding the public and foster- ing dialogue is a view that even in a socially contentious debate, scientists can promote public understanding of science by focusing on areas where scientists and skeptical groups can agree.
(Always run for the hills when you hear the word “more nuanced” in a discussion of science and religion. They’ll always be uttered by the religionists!)
Although the empirical context is scientists’ perceptions of Dawkins, Dawkins is simply an analytic case through which the role of the celebrity scientist in socially contentious debates can be analyzed. This study is important because it is the first of its kind to empirically assess whether scientists perceive celebrity scientists as ideal representatives of science. The study of Dawkins’ role in debates about the relationship between science and religion in the United Kingdom, his home nation, is an interesting case as well; while he argues that there is an intrinsic conflict between science and religion, many scientists—even most nonreligious scientists—do not perceive a conflict between being religious and being a scientist in the abstract sense (Ecklund, 2010; Ecklund et al., 2016; Ecklund and Park, 2009). Analyzing how scientists perceive Dawkins thus represents an important case from which recommendations can be made for improving dialogue in debates related to conflict between science and social values.
There’s no mystery about what’s going on here. Ecklund’s agenda is not a secret: her constant theme, reinforced by collecting data and then twisting it in any way she can to support her agenda (and get her Templeton grant renewed), is that science and religion are compatible, and that scientists are far more spiritual and religious than most people think. Just search for her name on this site and you’ll find many critiques of the work of her and her colleagues. I find the whole enterprise reprehensible: a caricature of what sociology should be. But of course, follow the money, in this case in the acknowledgments of the paper:
Data collection for this study was funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation; Elaine Howard Ecklund, PI; and Kirstin R.W. Matthews and Steven W. Lewis, Co-PIs (grant no. 0033/AB14).
Reader Mike Hannah send some photos from the Land of Kiwis and notes (indented):
I understand that you are visiting New Zealand next year – so I have attached three photos of endemic species to whet your appetite. All the pictures were taken in an urban sanctuary called Zealandia situated in the suburbs of Wellington. It’s a great place to visit and people whose homes back onto the predator-proof fence that surrounds the park are treated to the calls of wild Kiwi at night.
Kereru, the New Zealand Pigeon (Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae)– a big bird with an unfortunately small head. But its plumage is beautiful.
Kakariki, a New Zealand parakeet – this species is the red-crowned parakeet (Cyanoramphus novaezelandiae):
Tuatara, the famous non lizard – the last ryncocephalian, Sphenodon punctatus . I was told that this is a young one about 7 years old. I understand (but I may be wrong) that the Tuatara in the sanctuary are all the result of the breeding program at Victoria University where I work.
As an aside, Tuatara is the also the name of an excellent craft beer brewery in Wellington.
Reader Christopher Moss documents the continuing efforts of squirrels to get access to his bird feeder. He says this:
The birds are getting to much food, so they are attempting a little redistribution of wealth. Perhaps that’s why they are red squirrels!
And one beautiful moth photo from reader Simon Lawson:
I was taken with the post by Greg on the snake mimicking spider and posted a comment here.
Attached is the photo of the Atlas Moth (Archaeoattacus staudingeri) I referenced in that comment as another potential snake mimic. Not sure what the model candidate would be, but there may be herpetologist readers of the site who could have a stab.
JAC: Simon is presumably referring to the pattern of the round curved tips of the forewings (see photos at bottom):
That impeachable fount of biology information, The Daily Mail, suggests that the Atlas moth is mimicking a cobra:
(From the Daily Mail): When threatened, the insect drops to the ground and slowly fans its wings (pictured) in a movement that also looks similar to that of the snake’s head. The rare insect is typically found in the forests of South East Asia.
