In an invited perspective published January 6, 2017, in Science, Hamilton Farris, PhD, Associate Professor-Research at LSU Health New Orleans Neuroscience Center of Excellence, finds that the key insight of an important study by Nachev, et al. is that perception can drive the evolution of observable traits.
“The study integrated field and laboratory experiments with computer simulations to explain how perceptual mechanisms in a pollinator – a bat – can cause the evolution of counterintuitive traits in flowers,” notes Farris.
This study examined how flowers evolve diluted nectar, even though bats prefer higher concentrations of sugar. It successfully integrated psychophysics and evolutionary biology.
“This integration is long overdue,” Farris concludes. “Even though proportional perception has been studied for more than a hundred years, it is still unknown how selection alters those proportions in different species and whether the underlying neural mechanisms are shared. Integrating psychology with evolutionary biology will result in a better understanding of how perception works and how traits evolve, and not just in animals. How humans look, sound and smell could be a result of how our eyes, ears and nose perceive the world.”