@unseen – I’m not sure. Here’s an article about it. Evolution of dance and color in the birds of paradise
From your article, a summary:
Of course, a female bird of paradise evaluating a male’s display is probably not scoring his choreography and color. Instead, an animal must perceive the display in its entirety, which encompasses auditory and tactile signals as well as visual. And within the visual display itself, gesture is even used to show off specific color ornaments. In this way, modular evolution allows the integrated display’s complexity to be multiplicative rather than additive: its attractiveness to the receiver is more than the sum of its modular parts. However, it is only by examining these parts individually that we can understand what drives their independent evolution.
Okay, but how does evolution explain how one species’ female responds to one sort of display while ignoring others?
In the end, this study doesn’t really explain anything, but instead moves the mystery back a step.
