Are humans the only animals with a taste for the beautiful? What is the science behind hidden aesthetic preferences for partners and savvy camouflage strategies? We all use our eyes to navigate through the world, but some also use color vision to choose mates. From iridescent hummingbird feathers and peacock spiders to a male bowerbird's dazzling bachelor pad, color signals beauty, sex, danger, and death. Michael Ryan, a leading researcher in the field of sex sexual selection, and biologist Alex Wild guide us through color's fundamental role in the evolution of the life on planet earth. You'll discover why we can't resist the taste of beauty and why color is never "merely decorative."
Michael J. Ryan, Ph.D., Cornell University, is the Clark Hubbs Regents Professor in Zoology in the Department of Integrative Biology at UT Austin. Dr. Ryan has been a pioneer in the field of sensory ecology, which focuses on the information that animals gain from their environment, including what they obtain, how they acquire it and what they do with that information. His most recent book A Taste for the Beautiful, The Evolution of Attraction was published by Princeton University Press in 2018.
Alex Wild is a Texas based biologist who started photographing insects in 2002, as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work on ant taxonomy and evolution. Alex holds a Ph.D in Entomology from the University of California/Davis and is a Curator of Entomology at UT Austin. His photographs appear in numerous natural history museums, magazines, books, television programs, and other media.