An illustrated exploration of colors and patterns in the animal
kingdom, what they communicate, and how they function in the social life
of animals.
Are animals able to appreciate what humans refer to as "beauty"? The
term scarcely ever appears nowadays in a scientific description of
living things, but we humans may nonetheless find the colors, patterns,
and songs of animals to be beautiful in apparently the same way that we
see beauty in works of art. In Animal Beauty, Nobel Prize-winning
biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard describes how the colors and
patterns displayed by animals arise, what they communicate, and how they
function in the social life of animals. Watercolor drawings illustrate
these amazing instances of animal beauty.
Darwin addressed the topic of ornament in his 1871 book The Descent of
Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, and did not hesitate to engage
with criteria of beauty, convinced that animals experienced color and
ornament as attractive and agreeable in the same way that we do, and
that the role this played in mate choice pointed to a "sexual selection"
distinct from natural selection. Nüsslein-Volhard examines key examples
of ornament and sexual selection in the animal kingdom and lays the
groundwork for biological aesthetics. Noting that color patterns have
not been a research priority--perhaps because they appeared to be
nonessential luxuries rather than functional
necessities--Nüsslein-Volhard looks at recent scientific developments on
the topic. In part because of Nüsslein-Volhard's own research on the
zebrafish, it is now possible to decipher the molecular genetic
mechanisms that lead to production of colors in animal skin and its
appendages and control its pattern and distribution.
