You are currently viewing the summary.
View Full TextLog in to view the full text
AAAS login provides access to Science for AAAS members, and access to other journals in the Science family to users who have purchased individual subscriptions.
More options
Download and print this article for your personal scholarly, research, and educational use.
Buy a single issue of Science for just $15 USD.
Summary
In a brief comment on the sense of taste, Charles Darwin noted that “Real taste [in] the mouth, in my theory must be acquired by certain foods being habitual—[and] hence become hereditary” (1). This view, that taste perception and diet form a coordinated evolutionarily guided system, has received renewed support from recent behavioral, physiological, and molecular studies of comparative taste. On page 929 of this issue, Baldwin et al. (2) describe a striking example of this coordination in sweet nectar–eating hummingbirds—the repurposing of an amino acid taste receptor to respond to sugars and other sweeteners, permitting these birds to occupy a whole new avian niche.