Butterfly Mimicry Still a Challenge for Evolution

Earlier this year, Casey Luskin wrote that butterfly mimicry is a "huge" problem for evolutionary biology. Has anything changed since then? No. A new study published in Nature takes just one baby step beyond "preliminary" in providing a genetic basis for this wonder of the living world.

A glimpse of the problem is found in the paper. The first figure shows seven species of Melinaea, a genus of butterflies in Peru, and seven morphotypes of Heliconius numata, a "distantly related genus" ...