Imagine these two scenes.

Firstly, consider a busy street filled with billboards and other bright, colourful advertisements.

billboards on a busy street

Secondly, consider a forest. In a typical forest, you might encounter flowers on some trees, fruits on other trees, and loud, colourful birds darting from tree to tree and singing their songs.

forest with flowers

To humans, these environments appear very different, evoke different feelings and emotions, and play different roles in the human experience. However, both of these environments are governed by analogous processes.

Billboards and advertisement use bright colours, emotive slogans, and sometimes eye-catching animations or ear-catching sounds to grab and hold the attention of the viewer. The viewer can be any user of the street, whether walking, driving, or whatever. The purpose of the advertisement is to get users of the street to act in a certain way - usually, this is buying a product, but viewers can also be asked to vote for a particular political candidate, or so on. If the advertisement is successful, then the company receives more money (or the political candidate receives greater influence), and this supports the production of additional advertisements.

In a forest, flowers use certain colours and smells to attract the attention of some specific animals (say, insects) but not others (say, birds) - flowers are, biologically speaking, genitalia that have been designed to have a certain appearance. The details will differ depending on what sort of pollinator the flower needs to attract in order to have sex with other flowers. Similarly, fruits use certain colours and smells to attract the attention of some specific animals (say, birds) but not others (say, monkeys) to carry the seeds to a new location. And birds sing whatever songs are necessary to get other birds to have sex with them. In all three of these cases, the success of the flower, fruit, or bird in achieving a specific visual design results in the production of more flowers, more fruits, or more birds.

So, you can now understand my dilemma: when I am in a busy shopping district and see all those advertisements, I think of the visual design of plant genitalia!

Image credit: Jacob Antony on Unsplash and Wotjek Witkowski on Unsplash