A taste for the beautiful: How evolution shapes attraction

Enlarge / Peacock. (credit: Mateusz Drogowski / Flickr)

"Why All the Fuss about Sex?" wonders Michael Ryan. He wonders enough to make it the title of the first chapter of his new book, A Taste for the Beautiful. One would be forgiven for thinking it would be a short chapter-consisting of the single word "duh"-but Ryan is a zoologist who studies evolution and animal behavior. So he has a slightly different take.

"I have a unique perspective to offer on these issues," he writes, "as I have spent the past 40 years studying the sexual behavior of a tiny, bumpy frog in Central America."

It's not that he has a fetish; it's that he uses these tingara frogs-along with bowerbirds, howler monkeys, fireflies, peacock spiders, collared lizards, corn borer moths, hairy caterpillars, surf perches, and bee orchids-to demonstrate how beauty, and the appreciation of it, may have evolved in animals. Like us.

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