Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

Since Darwin was enthusiastic about the idea, Wallace asked the Entomological Society of London to test his hypothesis. The entomologist John Jenner Weir conducted experiments with caterpillars and birds in his aviary, and in 1869 provided the first experimental evidence for warning coloration in animals. The evolution of aposematism, literally a ‘stay away sign’ or ‘warning off’, surprised nineteenth-century naturalists because the conspicuous signal suggested a higher chance of predation. However, you might also argue that aposematic colouration might be explained as a form of costly signalling: ‘I’m not trying to hide, therefore there might be a good reason not to eat me.’fn4 It might be a good rule of thumb for animals to avoid eating brightly coloured animals, since something that doesn’t need to adopt camouflage has clearly survived through some strategy other than concealment, and hence it might be best avoided. Here again, we have a case where doing something ostensibly irrational conveys more meaning than something that makes sense. It has meaning precisely because it is difficult to do.