Bird Brains, Bird Sex, and All Kinds of Beauty (with Matt Ridley)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2025

⏱️ 77 minutes

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Summary

Bright colors, long tails, and dances of seduction: they may hurt a bird's chances of survival in the wild, but they seem to increase the chances of reproduction. Is this all part of natural selection or is sexual selection its own force in the bird world? Is there such a thing as beauty for beauty's sake? What can we learn from birds about the human experience of beauty? Listen as author and naturalist Matt Ridley speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about a puzzle that kept Darwin up at night and that still troubles modern evolutionary biologists.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is March 4th, 2025, and my guest is author, naturalist, and scientist Matt Ridley.
0:42.0	This is Matt's fifth appearance on Econ Talk.
0:44.3	He was last year in August of 2020 discussing innovation, which was voted the third best episode of that year by listeners.
0:51.7	His latest book, and our topic for today is birds, sex, and beauty.
0:56.5	I want to alert those listening with young children. We may get into adult topics in this
1:00.5	conversation. Matt, welcome to Econ Talk.
1:04.2	Thank you. My ambition is to get to second best talk of the year.
1:08.0	Okay, yeah, move up. This is quite an extraordinary book.
1:11.8	You alternate your own extensive observations about birds, their mating behavior with an
1:16.8	incredibly thorough history of how we've thought about such matters since Darwin, and you
1:21.0	have multiple goals in the book to understand the quote, extravagant sexual display of birds,
1:30.7	to rescue Darwin's focus on sexual selection and equally to convey a sense of wonder about the natural world,
1:35.3	and in particular the rather extraordinary behavior of the black grouse.
1:38.7	So I want to start with a distinction that's at the heart of the book and runs all the way through it,
1:43.8	which is the
1:44.6	difference between natural and sexual selection?
	...

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