A Taste for the Beautiful

The role of the female brain in driving the evolution of animal beauty is so fascinating that I’m recommending a second book on this topic called A Taste for the Beautiful.

Michael Ryan is an animal behaviorist who uses examples not just of birds but from all over the animal kingdom to show how animals—especially females—have a sexual aesthetic that has the power to drive the evolution of their own species.

Ryan is a superb storyteller and makes the material very accessible to his reader. After reading this book, you will never think about beauty in the same way again. 

Mingling state-of-the-art research information, Ryan synthesizes major theories about sexual selection with superb clarity and accuracy.

He demonstrates that females of many species have some built-in neural and sensory biases evolved to suit for such basic survival purposes as finding food and escaping from predators.

For males, however, whoever bears a trait that can better stimulate the pre-existing biases in females’ sensory systems would be rewarded with a higher level of success in wooing females. So, males were channelled to evolving such traits, often to a seemingly ridiculous degree, that fit females’ tastes.

It is a compelling idea for the… show more.

This book is reflecting on the evolution of beauty and attraction. Ryan uses a large number of examples from his own research, including the Tungara frog, a species he has been working on for many decades. He combines this with personal stories about how the research came about and about the people he interacted with. This is a highly readable, fun book on a serious topic.