Motley been recently thought to be one pattern with different coloured threads running through it. Motley Motley is the traditional costume of the court jester, fool, or the harlequin character in "commedia dell'arte". The harlequin wears a patchwork of red, green and blue diamonds that is still a fashion motif. The word "motley" is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as a cognate of "medley", although the unrelated "mottled" has also contributed to the meaning. The word is most commonly used as an adjective or noun, but is also seen as a verb and adverb. When used as a noun, it
Court jester hypothesis species to mutually drive each other to adapt. There is dispute over how strongly evolution at the scale of speciation is driven by these competitions between species, and how much it is driven instead by abiotic factors like meteor strikes and climate change, but there was not an artful metaphor to capture this alternative until one was coined by Anthony Barnosky. The term "Court Jester hypothesis" was coined by Anthony Barnosky in 1999 in allusion to the Red Queen hypothesis. In a 2001 paper on the subject, Barnosky uses the term without citation, suggesting that he is the one who