Interesting.
Let me see if I follow: once the snake population has the warning coloration, and predators know not to eat them, then individual snakes being successful at eating poisonous newts is unrelated to the snakes living long enough to pass their genes (i. e. being successful in terms of natural selection). So a snake which has the right colors will be successful, regardless of its diet.
I wonder, is there a point where mimicry can fail? Can predators at some point start to eat the mimics?
> I wonder, is there a point where mimicry can fail? Can predators at some point start to eat the mimics?
The same sources of variation which provide the variety for evolution to work on to evolve avoid eating things with this appearance behavior will also provide variation that evolution can work on to evolve back to do eat things with this appearance behavior; the frequency with which eating causes death vs. the degree to which not-eating results in insufficient nutrition will decide which wins.
That's all true, but I should point out that there are finer grains of behavior, and some of them asymmetrically make it easier to learn that "actually it's OK to eat those". Predators could evolve the ability to tell the difference between mimics and originals (which is generally rare but extant; consider how human children are taught to tell the difference between coral snakes and king snakes, or how certain birds can reject eggs that they didn't personally lay, but most can't), or they could evolve the behavior of "don't eat things that look poisonous, unless you're really hungry" (which is not rare, and which doesn't work well in a low-mimic environment, but does work very well in a high-mimic environment).
As you note, the behavior you end up with is determined by how much stress the mimics place on you.
I suspect that as the number of mimics increases (either an individual species or convergent evolution of mimicry, like we see with the number of insects with bee or wasp-like coloration), the relative risk of consuming things that look poisonous drops to a level where it’s sustainable for a population of predators.
To your point I wonder if eventually some truly toxic species can become a victim of their own success
> Let me see if I follow: once the snake population has the warning coloration, and predators know not to eat them, then individual snakes being successful at eating poisonous newts is unrelated to the snakes living long enough to pass their genes (i. e. being successful in terms of natural selection). So a snake which has the right colors will be successful, regardless of its diet.
Sort of. Whether the snake is poisonous is unrelated to its success, because it dies upon being eaten whether there are consequences to its predator or not. (The article takes some pains to show that this is untrue of the newts, but not the snakes.)
However,
> the snakes living long enough to pass their genes (i. e. being successful in terms of natural selection)
This does not reflect a good understanding. Success means having more children, not having any children.
> This does not reflect a good understanding. Success means having more children, not having any children.
I never said "any children", so your remark doesn't reflect a good understanding of what I wrote.
Try not being pedantic for pedantry's sake, and engage with a question asked in good faith without playing games of one-upmanship.
You said that living long enough to reproduce constituted Darwinian success. That idea is (1) extremely common, and (2) dead wrong.