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    A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction
    A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction
    A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction
    Audiobook7 hours

    A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction

    Written by Michael J. Ryan

    Narrated by Eric Jason Martin

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Darwin developed the theory of sexual selection to explain why the animal world abounds in stunning beauty, from the brilliant colors of butterflies and fishes to the songs of birds and frogs. He argued that animals have "a taste for the beautiful" that drives their potential mates to evolve features that make them more sexually attractive and reproductively successful. But if Darwin explained why sexual beauty evolved in animals, he struggled to understand how.

    Drawing on cutting-edge work in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, as well as his own important studies of the tiny Túngara frog deep in the jungles of Panama, Ryan explores the key questions: Why do animals perceive certain traits as beautiful and others not? Do animals have an inherent sexual aesthetic and, if so, where is it rooted? Ryan argues that the answers to these questions lie in the brain?particularly of females, who act as biological puppeteers, spurring the development of beautiful traits in males. This theory of how sexual beauty evolves explains its astonishing diversity and provides new insights about the degree to which our own perception of beauty resembles that of other animals.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJan 9, 2018
    ISBN9781684411252

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    Reviews for A Taste for the Beautiful

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    • 3/5
      A better title for this book might have been "The Intricacies of Sexual Attraction". I came to this book with the expectation that it would reveal a biological source of aesthetics, but, as the author acknowledges in the last few words of the epilogue, that is not part of its scope.

      In separate sections, the author reveals the technical details of how sight, hearing and smell interact with the brain to determine mating preferences. Those details are entertaining, but the basic principles under which they operate are similar in each case.
      The chooser, in most cases the female, receives cues about the suitability of a potential mate and chooses the mate that best meets those criteria. So it is the chooser that drives the perpetuation of traits. Since the same traits that make an individual an attractive partner often make them more visible to predators, there is a brake on the extent to which attractive traits are cultivated. Traits that invite excessive predation are killed off and that defines the limit of male ostentation.

      I was most surprised to learn that the role that cognitive bias plays a role in mate selection is not confined to humans. One of these biases is mate copying, in which individuals that have been chosen become more attractive to other potential choosers. Furthermore, the attractiveness of the original choosers influence the attractiveness of the chosen one. Another category of biases are comparative biases that come into play when there is a choice between two potential mates and the weight of their attractive qualities shifts based on the presence of a third choice. For example, if there is a choice between someone who is average looking with a good sense of humor and someone who is very good looking and an average sense of humor, the presence of a good-looking person with a bad sense of humor will give more weight to a sense of humor, and vice versa.

      The author has a breezy, light-hearted style, and the technical details are easy to understand. If you are fascinated by the inner workings of biology, you'll enjoy this book.