Careful or Colorful? The Evolution of Animal Ornaments

Event Details

Type

Center for Studies in Physics and Biology Seminars

Speaker(s)

Danny Abrams, Ph.D., professor, Northwestern University

Speaker bio(s)

Extravagant and costly ornaments (e.g., deer antlers or peacock feathers) are found throughout the animal kingdom. Charles Darwin was the first to suggest that female courtship preferences drive ornament development through sexual selection. In this talk I will describe a minimal mathematical model for the evolution of animal ornaments and will show that even a greatly simplified model makes nontrivial predictions for the types of ornaments we expect to find in nature.

Open to

Tri-Institutional