"An important question raised by both the Batesian and the Mullerian theories of mimicry concerns the process by which nauseous flavours, as a means of defence, have been evolved. Most other means of defence such as stings, or disagreeable secretions and odours, are explicable by increasing the chance of life of the individuals in which they are best developed, or of the social community to which they belong. With distastefulness, however, although it is obviously capable of giving protection to the species as a whole, through its effect upon the instinctive or acquired responses of predators, yet since any individual tasted would seem almost bound to perish, it is difficult to perceive how individual increments of the distasteful quality, beyond the average level of the species, could confer any individual advantage."
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The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
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