From one of the world's leading authorities on animal behavior, the astonishing story of how the female brain drives the evolution of beauty in animals and humans

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. In A Taste for the Beautiful, Michael Ryan, one of the world's leading authorities on animal behavior, tells the remarkable story of how he and other scientists have taken up where Darwin left off and transformed our understanding of sexual selection, shedding new light on human behavior in the process.

Drawing on cutting-edge work in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, as well as his own important studies of the tiny T�ngara 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.

Vividly written and filled with fascinating stories, A Taste for the Beautiful will change how you think about beauty and attraction.

Michael J. Ryan is the Clark Hubbs Regents Professor in Zoology at the University of Texas, Austin. He received a BA in Life Sciences at Glassboro State College in New Jersey (1975), an MS in Zoology from Rutgers University at Newark (1977), and his Ph.D. in
Neurobiology & Behavior from Cornell University (1982). 

He was then a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley (1982-1984) before beginning a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas where he has remained. He has been a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama since 1982, and currently is a Senior Research Associate there. Ryan’s primary research interests are in the evolution and mechanisms of animal behavior, especially animal communication and sexual selection.

Ryan is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin. He has received the Distinguished Animal Behaviorist Lifetime Achievement Award from the Animal Behavior Society (2017), the E.O. Wilson Naturalist Award from the American
Society of Naturalists (2010), the Joseph Grinnell Medal from the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (UC, Berkeley; 2008), and the Exemplar Award from the Center for Integrative Studies in Animal Behavior (Indiana University, 2007). 

He also was selected as one of the 25 Leaders in Animal Behavior (book published 2010, Cambridge Univ. Press). Ryan has presented more than 150 invited lectures. He has also published more than 350 scientific papers (excluding Perspectives, News & Views, Primers, etc.) including 13 scientific papers in Science, 3 in Nature, 5 in PNAS USA, and 4 in Current Biology. He has also published five books, two as sole author, one co-authored, and two edited volumes. His 1985 book The Túngara Frog, A Study in Sexual Selection and Communication is considered a classic in its field, and most recently in 2018, A Taste for the Beautiful, The Evolution of Attraction.

Ryan has served on numerous external reviews for science departments, has been a panel member for the National Science Foundation, and served on numerous editorial boards. 

He is currently on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science which he first joined in 2011, and is chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute in Seeweisen, Germany, he has been on that board since 2010

Source: The University of Texas - College of Natural Sciences