Why Females Decide What’s Beautiful

Michael J. Ryan, a professor of zoology, didn’t call his forthcoming book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Frog Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), but he sure could have. For 40 years, Ryan has studied the tiny tungara frog, mostly on the tropical Barro Colorado Island in Panama. The narrative of the tungara frog’s sex life, Ryan writes in A Taste for the Beautiful, the actual title of his forthcoming book, was uncovered, “during 186 consecutive nights of watching everything these frogs did from sundown to sunup—more than 1,000 of them, all individually marked so I could tell them apart, record the males’ voices, measure how often they mated, and figure out just what attracted females to a particular male.”

Ryan did indeed figure out what turned on the female frogs, a sexy call of whines and chucks. For Ryan, the frog’s seductive call opened a panoramic window on mating habits across the animal kingdom. Darwin had it right that evolution was served by sexual selection, Ryan says, once scientists, like himself, exposed the biological components, down to the genes, behind animals’ preferences for fanciful traits in potential mates, most famously, of course, the lush blue fan that is the peacock’s tail.

The brain is our most important sex organ, but it has lots