What can the study of animals tell us about beauty? How can the mate choices of birds or frogs give us insight into human attraction? As a part of the animal kingdom, humans share more than we think with the ways of other animals, and by studying how they assess and reward beauty, we can unlock truths about our relationship to beauty as humans, too.

Michael J. Ryan is a biologist and author of several books. He is a Senior Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and a professor of Zoology in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. Michael is an expert in the fields of animal communication and sexual selection. His latest book, A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction, examines the ways in which animals display, enhance, and evaluate beauty in choosing mates.

Michael and Greg talk about Michael’s famous work with Túngara Frogs in Panama, as well as the mating preferences and selection habits of several other animals, from fish to birds, as well as bats and bees. They discuss beauty in the wild and how it drives natural selection. They go over some discoveries of surprising factors that enhance or decrease attraction and how adding a third choice can resolve a stalemate in preference.

Episode Quotes:

The female brain as agents of selection

10:50: The female brain, they're agents of selection because they generate selection on the males. They determine who gets to mate, who gets to pass on their genes. But they're also the target of selection because if those preferences backfire, for instance, if they mate with the wrong species, then usually they're not going to have any offspring. So then there's going to be evolution of female preference. So it becomes the target. And that is very unusual, if not unique, that one aspect of a phenotype can both generate selection and be the target of selection.

3:00: Natural selection favors traits for you to survive, but if you survive and you don't reproduce, then you're not passing your genes on to the next generation.

Is sexual selection a subset of natural selection?

01:53: Some people consider sexual selection as a subset of natural selection, a type of natural selection. And Darwin clearly proposed it as a parallel theory, but if you consider it within the realm of sexual selection, that's fine too. The important thing is that we understand that selection is acting on different functions.

Why do people in biology don’t worry about nature vs. nurture?

31:00: Most of us in biology don't worry about nature versus nurture anymore. We don't think that's conflict because we think that everything has some kind of gene-by-environment interaction. So nothing is purely nurture, and nothing is purely nature. But these genetic predispositions, even in animals that are learning, can be very important in having a genetic disposition to learn some things more easily than others.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

University of Texas at Austin’s Influential People in Biodiversity

Guest Profile:

Faculty Profile at University of Texas Austin
Michael J. Ryan on Twitter

His Work:

226. Beauty Lessons From the Animal Kingdom feat. Michael J. Ryan

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc