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

Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. Today is March fourth, twenty twenty five, and my guest is author naturalist and scientist Matt Ridley. This is Matt's fifth appearance on Econ Talk. He was last year in August of twenty twenty. Discussing innovation, which was voted the third best episode of that year by listeners.

His latest book and our topic for today is Birds. Sex and beauty. I want to alert those listening with young children. We may get into adult topics in this conversation. Matt, welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you. I'm my ambition is to get to second best talk of the year.

Okay, yeah, move up. Uh, this is quite an extraordinary book. You alternate your own extensive observations about birds. Their mating behavior with an incredibly thorough history of how we've thought about such matters since Darwin. And you have multiple goals in the book to understand The quote extravagant sexual display of birds.

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