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Nature has perfected the art of deception. Thousands of creatures – including butterflies, moths, fish, birds, insects and snakes – have honed and practised camouflage over hundreds of millions of years. Imitating other animals or their surroundings, nature's fakers use mimicry to protect themselves, to attract and repel, to bluff and warn, to forage and to hide.
The advantages of mimicry are obvious – but how does 'blind' nature do it? And how has humanity learnt to profit from nature's ploys? Dazzled and Deceived tells the unique and fascinating story of mimicry and camouflage in science, art, warfare and the natural world. Discovered in the 1850s by the young English naturalists Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace in the Amazonian rainforest, the phenomenon of mimicry was seized upon as the first independent validation of Darwin's theory of natural selection. But mimicry and camouflage also had a huge impact outside the laboratory walls.
Peter Forbes' cultural history links mimicry and camouflage to art, literature, military tactics and medical cures across the twentieth century, and charts its intricate involvement with the dispute between evolution and creationism. As Dazzled and Deceived unravels the concept of mimicry, Forbes introduces colourful stories and a dazzling cast of characters – Roosevelt, Picasso, Nabokov, Churchill, and Darwin himself, to name a few – whom its mystery influenced and enthralled. Illuminating and lively, Dazzled and Deceived sheds new light on the greatest quest: to understand the processes of life at its deepest level.
Peter Forbes is a writer interested in science and art. A science graduate, he was editor of the Poetry Society's Poetry Review from 1986 to 2002 and has written books on biomimetics and nanoscience. Dazzled and Deceived was awarded the 2011 Warwick Prize for Writing.
"Forbes [...] sees with lovely clarity that nature, like art, is a bricoleur, a tinkerer, and that the thrill of it all is not in a stately grand design – as Darwin understood, there never has been any such thing, it's all expendable – but in life's multiple choices, chances and small-scale experiments: so many possibilities"
– Guardian
"The natural armoury of deceptions as depicted in Dazzled and Deceived is astounding, and the history of research into the phenomenon is just as surprising. Starting in the 1850s in the Amazon rainforest, Forbes presents an authoritative account of research into mimicry and brings it bang up to date"
– New Scientist
"A revealing and entertaining review of mimicry and camouflage in nature, art, and war [...]"
– Natural History
