Say you're walking through a dense forest.

What's most likely to catch your eye?

There's going to be lots of browns and greens everywhere,

patterns of branches and bark and leaf litter.

Maybe it's something moving through the treetops or in the underbrush.

But I'd be willing to guess it's a pop of color,

a cardinal or some purple wildflowers

or the yellow spots on a butterfly's wings, maybe.

We're lucky that way, I guess,

because we can see color and appreciate

the various ways that nature uses it.

These bursts of conspicuous coloration, they bring up a little bit of a

chicken or egg thing in an evolutionary sense. What came first? The bright colors of life or the

ability of animals like us to see and react to them. Welcome to the Quanta Podcast where we explore the frontiers of fundamental science and math.

I'm Samir Patel, editor-in-chief of Quantum Magazine.

This question of color and color vision is one of these interesting wrinkles in evolution.

It involves the very complicated visual system, but also

the very complicated ways that plant and animal species interact with each other in an ecosystem.

To talk about how researchers have explored this question recently, we're joined today by someone

from what we might call the quanta Extended Universe, Molly Herring.

Last year, Molly was one of our writing interns and has since written several stories for us as a freelance journalist.

Welcome to the show, Molly.

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