Seven Deadly Colours : The Genius of Nature's Palette and How It Eluded Darwin

'To suppose that the eye ...should have formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree' -- thus wrote Charles Darwin in ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. The eye's 'perfection', he found, was the one problem he could not resolve with his theory of evolution by natural selection: no intermediate stages between a non-eye and a working eye seemed possible. But was he right? Taking the colours of the spectrum as his keys to the natural world, Andrew Parker shows us that Darwin in fact had no reason to worry, and that Nature's palette is a far more miraculous thing than we had previously imagined. With vivid and fascinating examples of how colour has affected flora and fauna in different environments across the globe, SEVEN DEADLY COLOURS not only shows the endless wonder of the natural world but also extends our understanding of evolution itself.