A Taste for the Beautiful
The Evolution of Attraction
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A Taste for the Beautiful
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Narrated by:
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Eric Martin
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By:
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Michael J. Ryan
About this listen
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.
ly 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.©2018 Princeton University Press. (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 180
Anthropologist Jeremy Narby has altered how we understand the Shamanic cultures and traditions that have undergone a worldwide revival in recent years. Now, in one of his most extraordinary journeys, Narby travels the globe - from the Amazon Basin to the Far East - to probe what traditional healers and pioneering researchers understand about the intelligence present in all forms of life. Intelligence in Nature presents overwhelming illustrative evidence that independent intelligence is not unique to humanity alone.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Favorite part was untrue :(
- By Al A'scgh on 08-13-18
By: Jeremy Narby
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Nature's Nether Regions
- What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves
- By: Menno Schithuizen
- Narrated by: Steven Menasche
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
The story of evolution as you’ve never heard it before. What’s the easiest way to tell species apart? Check their genitals. Researching private parts was long considered taboo, but scientists are now beginning to understand that the wild diversity of sex organs across species can tell us a lot about evolution. Menno Schilthuizen invites listeners to join him as he uncovers the ways the shapes and functions of genitalia have been molded by complex Darwinian struggles.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A New Favorite
- By S. Pepper on 05-15-15
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What a Fish Knows
- The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins
- By: Jonathan Balcombe
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 505
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 448
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 447
An underwater exploration that overturns myths about fishes and reveals their complex lives, from tool use to social behavior. There are more than 30,000 species of fish - more than all mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined. But for all their breathtaking diversity and beauty, we rarely consider how fish think, feel, and behave.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Title misled me
- By Margaret Weidemann on 08-12-17
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Gifts of the Crow
- How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans
- By: John Marzluff, Tony Angell
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 259
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 210
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 210
New research indicates that crows are among the brightest animals in the world. And professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington John Marzluff has done some of the most extraordinary research on crows, which has been featured in the New York Times, National Geographic, and the Chicago Tribune, as well as on NPR and PBS. Now he teams up with artist and fellow naturalist Tony Angell to offer an in-depth look at these incredible creatures - in a book that is brimming with surprises.
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4 out of 5 stars
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You Will Never Look At A Crow The Same Way Again
- By Diane on 06-30-12
By: John Marzluff, and others
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This Is Your Brain on Parasites
- How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society
- By: Kathleen McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,113
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 990
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 988
A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures - including humans - think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can live only inside another animal, and, as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Entertaining but questionable studies
- By mdkoci on 01-02-17
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The Creative Spark
- How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional
- By: Agustín Fuentes
- Narrated by: Agustín Fuentes
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 150
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 127
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 125
In the tradition of Jared Diamond's million-copy-selling classic Guns, Germs, and Steel, a bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth? Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight.
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4 out of 5 stars
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What's new?
- By Mark on 05-02-17
By: Agustín Fuentes
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The Blind Watchmaker
- Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,816
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,437
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,408
The Blind Watchmaker, knowledgably narrated by author Richard Dawkins, is as prescient and timely a book as ever. The watchmaker belongs to the 18th-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Charles Darwin's brilliant discovery challenged the creationist arguments; but only Richard Dawkins could have written this elegant riposte.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Challenging textbook more than an enjoyable listen
- By Eric on 01-15-12
By: Richard Dawkins
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Superlative
- The Biology of Extremes
- By: Matthew D. LaPlante
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 91
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 77
The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms. For a long time, scientists ignored superlative life forms as outliers. Increasingly, though, researchers are coming to see great value in studying plants and animals that exist on the outermost edges of the bell curve.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating survey of amazing biology
- By Nerd's-eye view on 12-06-19
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Why Evolution Is True
- By: Jerry A. Coyne
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,925
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,441
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,437
Why evolution is more than just a theory: it is a fact. In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design", there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned: the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection.
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5 out of 5 stars
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As great as everyone says it is
- By Joseph on 12-01-10
By: Jerry A. Coyne
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Blueprint
- The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
- By: Nicholas A. Christakis
- Narrated by: Nicholas A. Christakis
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 906
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 774
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 766
For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions - our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations - we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Many interesting thoughts
- By Jonas Blomberg Ghini on 06-01-19
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The Accidental Mind
- How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God
- By: David J. Linden
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 321
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 211
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Story4 out of 5 stars 210
You've probably seen it before: a human brain dramatically lit from the side, the camera circling it like a helicopter shot of Stonehenge, and a modulated baritone voice exalting the brain's elegant design in reverent tones... to which this book says: Pure nonsense.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Best general-public Brain Science book to date
- By Francisco on 02-14-11
By: David J. Linden
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Genesis
- The Deep Origin of Societies
- By: Edward O. Wilson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 83
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4 out of 5 stars 66
Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Genesis demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least 17 - among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp - have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Simply awful
- By Mike A Klotz on 02-07-20
By: Edward O. Wilson
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Wild Justice
- The Moral Lives of Animals
- By: Marc Bekoff, Jessica Pierce
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 83
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 60
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Story4 out of 5 stars 59
Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. Yet what are we to make of a female gorilla in a German zoo who spent days mourning the death of her baby? Or a wild female elephant who cared for a younger one after she was injured by a rambunctious teenage male?
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5 out of 5 stars
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What Some Of Us Have Always Known...
- By Douglas on 12-12-13
By: Marc Bekoff, and others
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The Wonder of Birds
- What They Tell Us About Ourselves, the World, and a Better Future
- By: Jim Robbins
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 84
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 80
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 78
Birds, Jim Robbins posits, are our most vital connection to nature. They compel us to look to the skies, both literally and metaphorically, draw us out into nature to seek their beauty, and let us experience vicariously what it is like to be weightless. Birds have helped us in so many of our human endeavors: learning to fly, providing clothing and food, and helping us better understand the human brain and body.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Stories about birds with something for everyone
- By D on 07-24-17
By: Jim Robbins
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Sex, Time, and Power
- How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution
- By: Leonard Shlain
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 48
Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female's pelvis and the increasing size of infants' heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for reconfiguration of hormonal cycles, entraining women with the periodicity of the moon - and imbuing women with the concept of time.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Interesting conjecture
- By DJKPP on 10-15-20
By: Leonard Shlain
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The Most Perfect Thing
- By: Tim Birkhead
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 31
How are eggs of different shapes made, and why are they the shapes they are? When does the shell of an egg harden? Why do some eggs contain two yolks? How are the colours and patterns of eggshells created, and why do they vary? And which end of an egg is laid first - the blunt end or the pointy end?
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book about eggs!!
- By Timothy on 03-24-21
By: Tim Birkhead
What listeners say about A Taste for the Beautiful
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Luiz
- 01-22-19
Beauty is in the brain of the beholder! Loved that
The only thing that bothered me during the whole book was the author saying that "a trait evolve to something" . Biologists understand the concept, but people who do not understand the theory of evolution, may have misperception about it.
Beauty is in the hand of the beer holder! Fantastic!
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