Pretty Bird!

purpose or do they just like looking hot? Joining me today to discuss this question is science writer for The New York Times, magazine, Scientific American and many other publications, Farris Jaber. Welcome, Hi, Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you. I love your articles and your Twitter feed. Often it gives me inspiration for this very podcast, and I love that you bring attention to some of these The best word I can

come up with is like whimsical. Just animals that are They seem like they're from a fairy tale, from some kind of fantasy setting, and they are amazing both to look at and in terms of their behaviors. And I just love relishing the these like details of beauty in the natural world. Yeah, I never get tired of looking at or talking about all the fantastic creatures out there. Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about the science the biology of beauty because it is it sounds like a very light topic, but it's actually extremely controversial and behind these deep schisms in evolutionary biology, and it's it's a topic that is far from being frivolous. But to give the listeners a sense of what we're talking about, first, I want to talk about one of the most incredible birds in terms of beauty and style and presentation, the bower bird, which has always amazed me. It's the most

ostentatious animal I think in the natural world. There are twenty seven species of bower birds found in Australia New Guinea. They're famous for building their bowers. So, Ferris, can you describe what a bower is and what these bower birds do? So, in a literal sense, a bower is this arrangement, this assemblage of twigs and wood, and it can take various shapes. Usually, you know, it might be a corridor, kind of a

hallway like structure. It could be sort of a hut or teepee, or it could be sort of a spire or pole. And then the bower birds will decorate these structures with all kinds of colorful and interesting objects like flowers and berries and snail shells, and if they're near a place where there's been a lot of people, they might even use plastic debris like bottle caps or cutlery. Um. But in a less literal sense and more functional sense, a bower is many things. It's a sculpture, it's a gallery,

and it's a court. It's a space for courtship. So male bower birds are creating these structures so that female bower birds can come along and inspect them and judge them, you know, sort of evaluate how well the male bower bird has constructed this power, what kind of objects has he collected, how much attention has he paid to curating this collection. And that is part of their mating process.

So the females, you know, they choose which males they want to mate with, partly based on the artistry displayed in these bowers. And that's very different from the typical bird's nest, right because there are birds who will show off their nests like males will build a nest and show it off to the female. But this is quite a bit different from the bower itself, right right, And so interestingly, the bower doesn't end functioning as a nest at all, So it's a it's entirely sort of aesthetic

structure used in the mating process. The female comes along, she inspects it. If she decides to mate with the male based on that bower and based on his overall appearance and dance moves, then they will mate, and then she'll fly off and she'll build an entirely separate, cup shaped nest in which she will lay the eggs, and then she'll raise the offspring entirely on her own. So the male is not involved in the in the the the raising process of the children, just in this elaborate mating.

So he builds this fancy dance platform, puts on a show mate, and then is out of there. Does he mate with only one female or multiple females? I believe he will mate with as many as we'll give him the chance to do so. And but females at the same time will also visit multiple bowers, so they're not just yeah, they're not mating with the first one. They come across gender equity in bower mer So, uh, that's really interesting. So the bowers, they don't have a practical

function in terms of mating. They're not used for security protection. It is purely to set a stage for this bird's display. And often it's like color coordinated, like they'll focus on getting only blue things or only red things, or like different colors and then grouping the colors together. To me, what is striking about these bowers is they look like

an art project that a human would make. Absolutely they remind me a little bit of Wes Anderson style of like, you know, highly curated things in very discreet categories, but like beautifully arranged. They also remind me a bit of like um Cabinet of Wonders, you know, from the eighteenth century and such, and sort of placing things in these a little discreet um windows of you know, to view.

But what's interesting is that some scientists have propose that they're may be a functional purpose for the females, which is that these structures may allow them to more safely evaluate a male up close without as much risk of the male forcing himself on the female. So it becomes almost like a screen, you know, a physical barrier which you know, between her and him, so that she has more time to evaluate before copulation takes place. It's kind of like it's kind of like meeting at a coffee

shop for your first date exactly. It also reminds me of these these scenes from like Jane Austen novels where you know, people are overhearing things across like a hedge maze, you know, and the characters like just across but they're just barely separated. That Yeah, I could definitely see what is the Mr Darcy as some kind of fancy, ostentatious bird. Uh, yeah, that is. It is very interesting. I mean it is.

It is a courtship. Like I do not watch Britain, but I would imagine it would be like a scene from Britain based on what I have seen of the show, just like this this very and it's it's a ritual like the male It's not just like, hey, here's all my stuff. He does an elaborate dance and she evaluates that and she either stays and mates with him or

moves on to the next mail exactly. They like the bower Birds just you know, they they're sort of firing on all throttles when it comes to meeting, like they have the colorful plumage, they have the elaborate dance moves, they have crazy cool songs, and then they have these probably you know, one of the most compelling examples of what could be considered art in the animal kingdom. I can't it's hard to think of another animal that makes

a structure that is this aesthetically elaborate. Yeah, I mean, I know of animals who do make things that look artistic. Like there's the pufferfish, the certain species of pupper fish that does those designs in the sand, and you know he's working with what he has, which is just sand, and so it's very meditative. It looks like, you know, a a sand garden like this, you know, very meditative thing.

But it is it's definitely not as Again, this looks like something you would find at a modern art museum. It's so incredibly elaborate. And so when you see this, it's it's so show it's I think there's something shocking about it because it defies this expectation that evolution produces just the brute, most efficient animals that it can. Now this is a misconception, of course, like evolution. There's nothing

efficient necessarily about evolution. It's you know, this very long process and it it comes from a very simple rule like whether or not something survives and procreates, and that creates an incredible abundance of complexity. And I think that is what you see here when you see beauty in the natural world and these like elaborate structures, elaborate rituals, it's like, Okay, this is not this is an unexpectedly roundabout way for a male to get a female's attention

for mating. And so there are kind of these two competing theories about why something like the bower bird could create something like this or you know, other instances of beauty like bright plumage, beautiful songs, anything that doesn't have a clear practical purpose. One is that it's an honest signal of the animal's fitness. So maybe with long plumage the bird has to be particularly healthy, a good immune system to fight off parasites. Or maybe building the bower

is advertising this bird's ability to forage, like its eyesight. Uh, it's mental acuity. Um. But there's another theory that Darwin himself was kind of partial to right, right, So Darwin proposed that maybe, instead of some sort of on a signaling going on, maybe certain animals just like the way that certain colors or certain flourishes appear to them, and that females are making these mating choices based on essentially

arbitrary aesthetic preferences. And I think he was kind of um an exception among his peers at the time for suggesting something like that, because it required a certain level of recognition and respect for the sentience and agency of animals, and at the time, I think it was still fairly

popular to think of animals more like automatons. You know, they're kind of machines, are just making these robotic behaviors and actions and not actually deciding things, and they certainly don't have conscious aesthetic preferences, you know, the way that people might. But Darwin, you know, Darwin had a different way of looking at it, and he suggested that this was a possibility. Yeah, I mean, it's interest seen because

it runs a foul of two antiquated notions. One is that animals don't really have agency, and also that females or women in human society don't have agencies. So like, if you're saying that female a female animal somehow has some agency that would be the ultimate taboo back uh, during Darwin's time exactly, and I and one of his peers, I think was you know, became infamous over time for saying that it could not be that, you know, nature was controlled by vicious feminine caprice as we called it.

But you know, the these the winds of women could not possibly dictate, you know, the evolution of species. Yeah, I love that. I I read that in your article. And actually everyone should read this article if you like this episode. It's how beauty is making scientists rethink evolution. It's a wonderful article and unlike a podcast, you can actually look at these images of birds. So that's a

nice thing about the written medium. And yeah, I this uh, this guy st George move Art having this like being offended at this notion that a bird and a female bird could somehow shape evolution. It's so it's so interesting to me how these social hang ups, like are kind of cultural issues, can influence how we analyze animal behaviors.

Do you think that's still a problem now? Yeah, absolutely, That's something I think about a lot because I think, first of all, in sort of a fundamental biological level, all species are kind of trapped in their personal bubbles of perceptions, you know, which are really determined by partly determined by their biology. What kind of hardware do they

have with which to perceive the world. And then, um, any animal that has culture that add so many extra layers of perceptual bias, and as you know, as humans as having particularly complex cultures that change so dramatically over time, that makes it even more complicated. And I think, um, you know, even if we look at just Western thought and Western culture alone, we can see a very dramatic shift in the way that we think about other animals

and non human species. I think for a long time now, we've been in this this difficult process of trying to kind of you know, shed some of these older ideas about animals as automatons and have greater recognition for animal agency animal sentience. But it's it's certainly not something that's been universally adopted, even within Western culture. It's definitely an

ongoing process. But I think that that you do see kind of this art bending towards greater recognition, and in some ways you could even think of it as a return to the earliest ways of engaging with animals because I you know, I think that if you look at um a lot of the cave art, where early humans were clearly obsessed with other species, even in this sort

of worshiping, ritualistic way. When you think about a lot of indigenous cultures and mythologies, there used to be a much greater respect for other species and thinking of them as people as you know, as rathren that you know, they were just different kinds of people that we shared the planet with. It's an interesting thing because I've encountered these two kind of attitudes, which is one is that

we over anthropomorphize animals. So when you know, in evolutionary biology, uh, when you study it, you're sometimes like told like, okay, you can't anthropomorphize you you can't think of this in terms of human terms, like if you're talking about you know, maybe the ant wants to protect its colony, Well, does it really want that? Is it just driven by an instinct? Uh? And then on the other hand, I think there is

also this mistake of under anthropomorphizing in a way. Of course, animals are not going to have human behaviors because they're not humans. They won't have a human mind frame. But just because an animal is not like a furry human, uh, it is also you know, the the the all the things that make up our consciousness is present in many, many animals, and so this idea that they couldn't do

something like say appreciate beauty is also a mistake. So like we it's it's this like tug of words like, oh, well, we have to think about these animals scientifically. We can't attribute our own human emotions to an animal. And people often when I have guests on my show, they're always apologizing because they're saying like, oh, I'm probably saying it like this animal has these feelings and they probably don't. It's like, well, you know, maybe they don't have the

same feelings you would have as a human. But I think it is a mistake also to overcorrect and think like they don't have they can't just do something because it's fun, or they can't do something because it it's pretty and it's it's interesting. Uh. And so like you know, when you see an animal playing, people think like, well, it's got to be because they're practicing for some purpose.

It's like, well, they could just be having fun. And I think that's such an interesting idea of what's going on with these birds, Like maybe these birds, uh just find bright, flashy feathers, cool dances, bowers with lots of like blue and red items altogether just really pretty and cool. And you know, I think that it is interesting that like, as humans are like that's pretty and that's really cool, and the female birds are also, you know, perhaps thinking

in their own bird way, the same thing. Absolutely, I completely agree. I think that especially in mainstream scientific communities, there is this almost reflexive tendency to avoid and challenge and resist anything that seems like it's being too anthropomorphic, you know, projecting too much of human mindsets onto other creatures.

And it's certainly understandable why that would be the case, because it can go too far, and that can become its own kind of bias, and we just start to see what we want to see, not what's really there. But there's equally this danger of going too far in the other direction, and then we start to undervalue what

other species are capable of and objectify them. Really in some ways, we start to remove their agency, and it just you know, when you when you really think about evolutionary biology, doesn't make sense that there would be only one species that would be capable of, you know, appreciating beauty in that sense. There has to be some sort of longer history of this, you know, ability forming over time,

so it can't just be restricted to a single species. Yeah, it's a bit, it's a bit self isolating and self absorbed. Isn't it for us to think, Oh, we're the only ones who can think things are just cool or pretty or have fun? Uh? It's I think more comforting to feel like other animals, you know, have those same emotions or similar emotions at least absolutely. Yeah, to think about, do you know, how did they develop in different species? And where are sort of the where could it be

convergent evolution? You know, where could it be and you know, something entirely independent and what those differences might be Like. It's also interesting to think about that just being something that may be inevitable once you reach a certain level of intelligence. Like I love looking at the behavior of octopuses because they're about as far evolutionarily as you can get from us, Like we diverged when we were what like little flatworms of some kind, and they independently evolved.

The complex brain, complex eyes, basically you know, all of these things they evolved that are you know, recognizable to us, right as like in behaviors that are recognizable to us from like a flatworm. And they also demonstrate things like curiosity, which you know, we can't know that they're curious, but

they sure act in that way. And so I think there's something I find sort of inspiring over the idea that like, you know, maybe like birds and humans share, you know, an appreciation for beauty because we're you know, both terrestrial animals and we kind of we've share more in common at least than humans and octopuses. But maybe there's also something to the idea that we could you know,

these kinds of things. This this ability to start to appreciate the environment that you're in just kind of happens as soon as you reach a certain level of awareness

and intelligence. Yeah, I'm really fascinated by that idea as well, And so it's interesting to think of For example, you know, a lot of minor staying is that a lot of primates do not necessarily have great color vision, but the lineage of primates we descended from sort of regain some better color vision over time, and there are lots of hypotheses for why that might be the case. You know, maybe it helped us pick out ripe fruits amongst a

tangle of green. Maybe it helped us socially because we could see when somebody was read in the face because they were angry, or blushing because they were embarrassed and such, and so we could think that, you know, birds and humans might have this sort of attention to color and detail for some of the same pragmatic evolutionary reasons. You know,

they providing these discrete advantages. But then you know, if a human, a bird, an octopus, whatever it might be, achieves a certain sort of baseline level of intelligence, of cognition, of self awareness, you start to have all these extra abilities and phenomena emerging. You know, from that overall condition that you know, it wasn't anticipated, you know, it's certainly it's just the sort of unexpected by products, and asthetic

appreciation could be at least partly an example of that. Yeah, I think that sometimes something can start from a purpose that is more strictly speaking, quote unquote practical, and then evolve into something that is more it's still practical, but it is more complex, and so we see it as sort of this higher um state of being. So with birds and with beauty, Uh, I guess that is kind of the question. So like if they are attracted to beauty,

what determines beauty in the first place? So, you know, they it seems like it has to start somewhere all the maybe some people would are you know, it doesn't necessarily have to start anywhere. It could be spontaneous, but it seems like there there may have been at some point, like a practical purpose to being attracted to bright colors or plumage, Like, is there is there even an answer

to how this bird appreciation for beauty started? Yeah, So, like you said, some scientists I think would argue that, you know, certain esthetic preferences are truly arbitrary and do not have clear origins or explan nations. There's another group of scientists that are really interested in sort of uncovering the origins of these types of preferences, and in some cases they've been able to trace them to quirks of an animal's anatomy or to something to do with their

evolutionary history. Um. For example, there's a group of guppies in Trinidad I believe that are really attracted to right orange patches on their mates, and it turns out that they are also really attracted to these bright orange tree fruits that fall into the water that they feed on.

So some some reasons are proposed that maybe this you know, initial practical, pragmatic, evolutionary advantageous attraction to orange for sustenance was then co opted into the mating process and became this more aesthetic preference, and that type of co opting of kind of bleeding of you know, the pragmatic into the aesthetic could be happening um in all kinds of

species and throughout evolutionary history. This is a complete shot in the dark and probably not true, but I do wonder and I have wondered those sometimes that when we see a cute animal and we joke like, oh, I'm going to eat you up, like if there is something And again this is complete guesswork, but like it's at some point it was based in an appetite, but then it also triggered our cuteness thing of like maybe it has a human baby kind of face, like those proportions,

and we wanted to eat them, but then we're like, oh, you look too much like a baby. I don't actually want it, you're too cute. But then they are like

that cuteness and then like I'm gonna eat you. It's like they kind of get mixed up and it's you know, I don't know, it's it's something that I think is kind of funny because like when I'm with my dog and she's really cute, I'm like, I'm gonna eat you, and it's like maybe my great great great great great great great great grandma was like thinking that about actually eating a dog, but then was like, actually, you're too cute,

I can't eat you. That's really interesting. That makes me think of one of the one of the hypop the seas for the origin kissing is that you know, in some cultures there is this really intimate and and another species too, there's an intimate mouth to mouth feeding process where the parent will chew up food and then regurgitate it to the infant um. And so this sort of you know, extremely intimate mouth to mouth contact eventually gets co opted again becomes something else, um, you know, moves

from the parental to the sexual to the reproductive. Yeah, So it's interesting how I think a lot of times and evolution we see something starts out one way and then you know, through this combination of natural selection and chance and then sometimes sort of conscious perception becomes something else entirely. And that's actually, you know, something that may

have happened with feathers and plumage. So you know, there's this thinking that initially dinosaurs evolved you know, sort of early feathers maybe for warmth, for temperature regulation, but they became this incredible canvas for aesthetic experimentation because now you have this really interesting surface area and this material that can do all kinds of interesting things with pigment and with form, and so that initially pragmatic adaptation became something

more aesthetic over time. Yeah, that's so interesting to me. I mean, I do love that we've kind of revitalized our image of dinosaurs to have all of these you know, the colors that we see in more modern paleo art showing dinosaurs. Is maybe they actually were instead of like the kind of skin wrapped like Jurassic Park, although I

love Jurassic Park. You know, the kind of more you know, olive and brown tone dinosaurs, and it's I would love like because then when you think about it, like maybe they had some kind of like mating rituals, like funny dances, like imagining some kind of dinosaur doing uh goofy little dance that like the bower bird does pretty incredible. Yeah, I'm like a moonwalking t red. You know, I can see it. I can definitely see it. So what is runaway selection? Like? How can you have a trait that

goes from being practical to being pure decorative frippery. Like you start out with wings and then they kind of like turn into something like you you'll have, maybe more accurately, you'll have like a tail feather and that's very useful for flight. In a bird of Paradise becomes really long, it actually becomes kind of a burden for the birden it doesn't really help flight, it actually hinders them. But the ladies love it. So having these long tail feathers

really helps them in sexual selection. So how does it go from being like, how can you have an impractical trait in evolution? Yeah? So I think we could imagine a population of birds that, let's say they have long maroon tails others and the feathers are useful for both flight and they're also this maroon color because it's helpful for camouflage in their particular habitat, and then, for whatever reason, females really strongly prefer males that have the longest and

the sort of brightest maroon tail feathers. So though and if the preference is strong enough, those males will be much more reproductively successful than any of their counterparts, regardless

of their other traits and abilities. And then their children will have, you know, also extremely long and extremely bright maroon tail feathers, and then generation by generation, the you know, the the males with the longest and the brightest feathers will get chosen over and over again until they reach ridiculous proportions, and they may even come up against some physical physiological limit where the feathers are now so long that they're actually hindering their ability to fly or to

survive in general, and it you know, kind of reaches you know that that's sort of counterbalancing, but it can still get to this really extreme point. And that's exactly what we see in birds of pair of dice and embower birds in many other creatures. I mean, it's astounding because it is the birds themselves, their preferences, shaping evolution

more powerfully than say environmental dangers. Yeah, and I find that incredibly interesting to think about, is that this internal preference, you know, this aspect of the bird's consciousness has become this incredibly powerful agent in their own evolution um, which is just so there's like this internal landscape in addition to the external environment that is you know, shaping literally shaping their anatomy and their behavior is an incredibly powerful way.

What is an example of runaway sexual selection that you love that we have not mentioned yet? So one of the examples in the article and that a lot of people find really interesting is the club winged mannequin, which is this fascinating little tropical bird which I believe is the only bird that produces sounds through a process called stridu lation, which is similar to how some insects do it.

Like you can think of like, um, you know, certain crickets or grasshoppers rubbing their rubbing their sort of their wings are that browning parts together really really fast and really really quickly to produce this intense running And so the club winged mannequin, for whatever reason, the females love this this stridulated thrumming sound, and so the males evolved over time to produce it completely contorting the bones and their wings to the point that it actually hinders their

ability to fly. And even the females have inherited some of this sort of warped bone anatomy and the genetics underlying it, and even their flight is a bit hindered by it, which is very you know, that really goes against some of the sort of classical ideas of evolution by natural selection always making animals, you know, better adapted

to their environments. Well, this adaptation makes them more reproductively attractive the males anyways, but it's not really conferring any advantage whatso over to the females to have that kind of worked skeletal system. So it's a really extreme example of runaway selection. I'm gonna play really quickly the sound of a club wing mannequin because it is it is absolutely incredible. I mean it's incredible. It's hard to even tell that this is not like a call it's making

through vocalization. It is the stridulation of its wings, and you can when you're watching it, it's vibrating so quickly you can barely tell that's what's going on. Yeah, there are certain animal sounds that are just so surreal or otherworldly, Like I always think of wet all seals, Like I couldn't believe that was coming from an animal. The first time I heard these sort of space age you know, murmurs coming from these seals. Yeah, I was like, what and this is similar, Like it sounds so to me.

It sounds so electronic, like almost artificial. It's like, wow, that's come from a living organism, a synthesizer. You could probably make a synthesizer out of club wing mannequins, although that would not be ethical, but it would sound great. But yeah, that's actually at the end of the show, I always play a game called I Guess He's squawking, and I play a mystery animal sound that won't happen yet because we're not we're not near the end yet,

but I'm excited to do that. But yeah, I mean, that actually reminds me of another animal you bring up in your article, which is, uh, these frogs that create this really interesting sound. Right. So you know a lot of different amphibians will make crookings and sounds during the mating process. Um, but there's a certain type of total itt that has had a really interesting evolutionary history um

with doing this. And so if I remember correctly, there's kind of this danger because if the totalts are too loud in their mating calls, they actually will attract bats that eat them. Um. But the males need to sort of make these little croaks, which sound actually a lot like laser guns. They're they're very they're kind of, you know, similarly interesting to the clubbing mannequin's calls, to make these

little wines in order to attract females. And it was very perplexing to researchers why females were attracted to this

particular sound. Um, And over time there's been some research suggesting that it basically was a quirk of their evolutionary history in that males that happened to produce this particular frequency activated this sort of long abandoned auditory channel, so they were simply more noticeable to females compared to other males that weren't making the sounds in this correct frequency.

And whereas originally the thinking might have been that the total it's making this particular sound were fitter in some way, they were larger, they were better mates for the females, now it's seams like that perhaps is not the case. Um, they just sort of chanced upon this cork revolution that allowed them to be more noticeable to the females and

therefore more attractive, you know, to us. You know, none of these sounds like are particularly interesting or attractive, like as humans, like they're you know, they're just for yourself. Well yeah, some people, I should say, they're just sort of it's it's difficult to understand why this particular whiting you know, would be sexy or attractive, but to the

you know, to the totalts, it is incredibly appealing. Um. And so that just you know, sort of speaks to how different, um, these sort of asthetic preferences can be from one species to another. And this could also be through visual channels, right, Like you could have a visual cute bright colors that just happened to be extremely noticeable. Like we we each all animals have their own perceptive field through hearing, vision, taste, smell, electro reception, all sorts

of senses. And so if you're looking for a mate, uh, and you hit on one of the like one of the most important thing in mating and dating is be noticeable. So if you can make your perspective mate. Notice you that is a huge, huge step in terms of getting towards a successful mating. I mean, I think we just we just talked about this on the show a couple of weeks ago. But there are the the mobular rays which will jump up out of the ocean and slam

back down. It's like, why are they doing that? That seems like such a waste of energy, and they're trying to get attention so that they can try to find a mate. So it seems like that is that like those kind of that kind of avenue of like you just if you can hit on a specific perceptive, I guess um a person something that is specific species will perceive especially strongly, like a certain sound, a certain color,

and that just is like so bright to them. That may be a selective pressure for having some kind of sexual selection that incorporates that extremely strong signal for that specific species. Absolutely. One of the scientists I talked about in the article, Molly Cummings, has done some really interesting work on fishes, and she's shown that, you know, different fish in different environments will have different esthetic preferences based on the way that light is moving through their environment.

So you know, different types of aquatic habitats, different opacity of water, whether it's really clear, whether it's murky, that affects what type of wavelengths are best able to penetrate and move through that water. And so different species of fish will have different preferences for say, polarized light, you know, versus a different type of light, depending on how their environment constrains what they were able to best perceive. That's

so interesting. I mean, we've already mentioned a few animals that are are not birds, like fish, the toatlets. Do you think that these other animals could also potentially have like a concept of beauty, um, even if it's not necessarily beautiful plumage, Like, even if it's the sound, the weird squeaking sound of a totally like to them, do

you think it is something that could be beautiful? Yeah, I think that, you know, the further we kind of go back in evolutionary history, you know, like getting back to the ocean, back to you know, the mother of all life, back to the fish before they came on land, Like, it gets harder and harder to sort of put ourselves in their mindset and sort of understand, you know, how they perceived the world, but I think you know they're there.

There's the famous Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness. Like, there seems to be pretty widespread acceptance among scientists that all vertebrates and some invertebrates like octopuses and honey bees and such, have consciousness. You know, they are conscious. They have this basic level of being able to understand and engage with the world and perhaps even be aware of themselves. So I would think that it is certainly possible amongst any

type of vertebrate we're discussing, including fish. And then maybe where it gets trickier would be something like the peacock spider um, you know, which is which is an invertebrate like the octopus, and it is very small, you know, so like like a honeybee has a very little brain just in terms of you know, size, but has an incredibly interesting and complex mating ritual and these beautiful, glittering irajustine abdomens that almost look like faberge eggs with incredibly

intricate patterns, you know, really intense blues and reds and oranges, and they flip up their abdomens and they wave their legs around and do this really cool little mating dance um as part of their courtship. So that has a lot of parallels to what birds um, you know, do um, even though these spiders are invertebrates. And yeah, it's really it's fascinating to think about what's going through the spider's mind.

You know, what's going through their their mind is they're sort of evaluating their mates, um colors and dance moves. And I mean, it's just an extraordinary level of beauty from our perspective, folving in a creature that is that many people are terrified of or even revile, you know, but these are just incredibly beautiful animals. Yeah. I love jumping spiders so much there. I mean, to me, every jumping spider is so cute. It's those two big eyes

that they have and they're uh. I think that they're really the only spider, or one of the only spiders that has such a visual perception. I think they're the only type of spider that can like actually move their

retinas around. And there was a recent study looking into actually I think I discussed this last week, but a recent study that looks into that the possibility that jumping spiders might have r E M sleep like rapid eye movement sleep, and so of course we don't know that they're dreaming and having visual dreams, but we do know that animals that do have rapid eye movement sleep like humans,

probably do have visual dreams. So it's a possibility maybe these spiders are dreaming about seeing uh an amazing display from another eligible spider. But it's it's hard to it's so hard to imagine something so small and simple having a really rich, deep consciousness. And I'm not saying that they do, but it is fascinating that they have that there is evidence that there's more to them than them just being basically like having the awareness of you know,

a robot or you know, like a tiny automaton. Absolutely, yeah, you do spiders dream and technicolor a spiders anyways. Yeah, And you know, something that I've always found really interesting about this is from jumping spiders to birds, is that an animals perception of beauty often over lapse with our own. Sometimes it doesn't, like with the toadlets, little pup you

sound owns, but a lot of times it does. Oh. Other examples of when it doesn't are like hooded seals when they inflate their nostril that creates this bright red balloon maybe not so attractive to us, um, but very alluring to female hooded seals. But yeah, I mean peacock jumping spider birds. Uh, the bower birds that create things that look like works of art that a human would make.

With birds, they are aesthetic preferences seem to align with our own, which is you know, really interesting, like how can we share this sense of beauty with a bird that were so otherwise different from there? They are living dinosaurs, they are very unlike us. Do you think there's any reason that there's this overlap? Is it pure coincidence or

is it maybe because of some shared evolutionary history. I do think there has to be at least some shared evolutionary history blaming that just because we are both vertebrates, so you know, going back to our vertebrate ancestors, we must have inherited some sort of basic sensory perceptions, you know, and of course those would have continued to evolve over time and are very different lineages, um, but there's probably still some very fundamental you know, abilities there that we

do have in common. And and you know, you know, clearly with bower birds and certain other kinds of words.

We do share this attention to this interest in bright color, you know, in fruit, in flowers and and actually flowers is one of the most interesting ways that I have found a sort of you know, think through these questions of beauty and the potential purpose of beauty, um and and the origin of beauty, because if you think about it, it's really bizarre that we as humans are so obsessed with flowers because they really have nothing to do with

us in terms of their evolutionary history. You know, flowers co evolved with insects and birds and other illinators to attract those pollinators. That is sort of why they look the way they do and why they smell the way they do. Um, and insects and birds are privy to this entire dimension of floral beauty that's totally hidden to us because they can see in the ultra violet part of the spectrum, and they can see um patterns on flowers that we cannot with with our own just you know,

human biological eyes. So what is it about flowers that you know, we don't just like flowers like we become completely obsessed with them, Like tulip mania. You know, many centuries ago in the Netherlands, women tulips reached absurd prices, or the continuing passion for orchids that kind of began with the invention of like early glasshouses and bringing tropical

specimens abroad and things like that. Um And so you know, I think you could think of um pragmatic reasons that would be true for a lot of species, like understanding that flowers turn into fruits, turn into food, so there's this potential for sustenance. But then could flowers also just be impinging upon what we were talking about earlier, to kind of these emergent phenomena that come out of a

certain level of cognition and intelligence. So they're just you know, they're hitting upon our sort of ability to appreciate color and form and smell and the harmony of all of those things in a natural creation, you know, in an organic form um. And so you know, it's just it's just fascinating to sort of use flowers as a way to sort of explore all of those interests. And I love the fact that bower birds choose flowers as well. That's one of the ornaments they choose for their bowers

is flowers. So clearly we're not the only ones who have that appreciation. So if you want to flatter a bower bird, you could get them like a bouquet, exactly good information for everyone who wants to flirt with a bower bird. I mean, that's that is incredible. I I think it is. I think it's too often that we think about things like beauty and art as something frivolous, unimportant, just like window dressing, you know, something that is not

really it's not it's not a serious topic. It's not serious science or something, and it is such a huge mistake, I think because that is when you think, when we think about our consciousness, it's not such a mystery why we find food appealing, right, like we need to eat. It's pretty obvious why we would enjoy food, or why

we would enjoy having food around holidays and stuff. But like something like appreciating beauty not just in each other but in the natural world, like seeing flowers, like some of the most famous painters were absolutely obsessed with natural scene, natural beauty, flowers, uh, painting animals. Uh. It is I think really interesting that we have that in our consciousness and if we get behind, if we solve this mystery of like why we enjoy beauty, why other animals enjoy beauty.

I think that would unlock a lot of really interesting things about the brain, about our psychology, that would be really informative. But I think in order for us to do that, we really have to appreciate this as something that is super important, deeply, deeply important. That's a great point, and I think that you know your point about you know,

thinking of beauty is frivolous. It even gets embedded in scientific concepts and scientific ways of thinking because you know, the technical term for all of this incredible plumage that we've been talking about is sexual ornaments, right, And so the word ornaments, like it immediately is kind of um downplaying the importance because we think of something as oh, that's just decorative, right, It's it's not really that important.

It's just an ornament. Whereas as you're saying, you know, this question of where beauty comes from and what it is doing gets at some of the biggest questions, biggest outstanding questions and evolutionary biology and some of the longstanding tensions you know, in the history of science. Yeah. Absolutely, So if we could all just kind of like get over ourselves and admit it's really interesting that stuff is

pretty and flowers are awesome exactly. Yeah, I've never never understood flowery as a you know, as a disort insult like you know, I think that if I could write a sentence as beautiful as a flower, I'd be very proud of that sentence. I know, I know, I I also love flowers. If I, as a podcaster, could somehow put flowers in all y'all's ears, I would do it,

uh if the technology existed, which it doesn't unfortunately. But before we go, as I mentioned earlier, we have a game at the end of the show, which is gives his squawk in the Mystery Animal sound game. Now I do say squawking, but this is not restricted to the birds. It is any animal in the world. Uh, and you the listener, and even you the if you would like, uh, you can try to guess who is squawking. So this

is last week's sound that this was the hint. It is the largest of its order, but that doesn't mean it'll refuse a good cuddle. All right, Well, can you guess who squawking? And no pressure because if I honestly, if I had to play this game, I would probably lose most of the time, so your your prestige is not on the line here. That is a really interesting one. So at first my mind was going, like aquatic, like

some sort of cetacean, you know. But then I was like listening to the background sound and it didn't quite seem to match. And then then I was thinking, maybe that is a bird of some sort. So you're saying it's the largest of its order, Um gosh, I'm wondering. I'm wondering if it's like one of those really big birds, like an ostrogen email or casserie. I don't know. I know I've heard that sounded very similar sound before me

having a really hard time pinpointing what it is. You're closer with aquatic, although only only halfway there, only halfway there was an aquatic mammal, then an aquatic is semi aquatic mammal or no, actually semi yes, sorry, semi aquatic mammal. Okay, something something like a semi aquatic mammal, something like um, like a walrus or a seal, something of that nature or close but not not quite. Yeah, I'm stumped, officially stumped. This is actually a cappy bara yes, the largest rodent

in the world. Congratulations to the three fastest guessers who gives correctly Grant W. Michael D. And jest See. I had guinea pigs as a kid, and they're not they're they're relatively they look like huge guinea pigs and they're relatively related. But guinea pigs will make this kind of like this little like squeaking sound as well when usually when they're eating and they're really happy. But it is bizarre to hear it coming out of this like giant you.

It's hard to expect it because this animal is so huge. I before looking this up, I had no idea that cappy barras sounded essentially like a little guinea pig. My mind was not going there at all. That is really interesting, no, I know, and I mean I was shocked to hear because I would have thought, because cappy barrows are so huge, I would have thought that their voices would be deeper. But instead you're basically hearing what a guinea pig sounds like.

So they are the largest rodent in the world. They are a semi aquatic herbivore who lives in South America, and it looks like a giant guinea pig. They can weigh around a hundred and already pounds or a little over sixty ms. So yeah, I think people are pretty familiar with the laid back vibes of the cappy bara. There very chill. But it's interesting because these like this chill vibe that they have. It's not because they're so

big they lack natural predators. They do actually have predators, but it is because they actually enjoyed the company of their peers. They typically live in groups of around twenty. They can even live in huge groups of up to a hundred individuals. And the squeaking sound that this cappy bara is making is probably just like a little happy

sound because he's expecting to be fed soon. Wow. I love that, just like it's the same sound my pet guinea pigs would make when I'm like getting out the alfalfa for them and they see me do on it uh and make that little squeaking noise. I love that.

This is I was actually just looking into the sort of controversy over what types of cat can roar versus pur and you know, classically it was divided amongst the big cats and and smaller cats and supposedly only the big cats could roar and only the smaller ones could purr, but there's some really interesting exceptions, like, um, I think nobody has ever heard a snow leopard roar before, even

though it should technically be capable of it. And there's also a lot of you know, sort of debate about what technically qualifies as a roar or a purr, and so you can kind of, yeah, it gets it gets pretty complex over that. But sometimes you hear, like a very large, anatomically large cat, like a cheetah or something, make a very domestic cat like sound, and it's it's very there's some dissonance there, like you weren't expecting that

sound to come out of that animal. Yeah, they can like do really high pitched chirping sounds that sounds like a little baby chick, but it's coming out of this huge cheetah. And when I first heard that from coming from a cheetah, I was shocked. I thought it was like a hoax. Yeah, so onto this week's mystery animal sound.

The hint it is actually good for these guys to have an inflated sense of pride, And if you've been paying close attention to the episode, and you read Ferris Jaber's article how beauty is making scientists or rethink evolution, you are sure to know the answer. So, Ferris, you cannot answer this because I know you know the answer to it. But I I think I've left enough clues that some of you out there will get it. So Ferris, thank you so much for joining me today. Tell people

where they can read your articles and your writings. Thank you so much. This was absolutely wonderful. Um most of my magazine writing has been for the New York Times magazine lately. UM My website is just Ferris Jaber dot. My most recent article was in National Geographic and it's all out the tiny microscopic organisms that live in forlorest soil and are really important for forest ecosystems as a whole.

So if I have an episode sometime in the future that is about forest ecosystems, you can probably guess that I read one of Ferris's articles and was inspired. Uh so, yeah, thank you so much. Definitely check out how beauty is making sciencests freethink evolution. It's a great article. It's a great companion to this episode. And thank you guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you leave our writing or view, I read all the writings.

I read them all. I print them all out, put them in a big binder, and put it under my pillow. I don't actually do that, but mentally I do. I cherish them all. Uh and thanks so much to the Space Classics for their super awesome song Exo Alumina. Creature features a production of I Heart Radio. For more shows like the one you just heard, visit VR, Hurt Radio, app, Apple Podcast, or Hey guess what. Wherever you listen to your favorite shows. See you next Wednesday. M