Like Rudyard Kipling, only in a lab coat, Sean Carroll has for years been telling us how creatures such as butterflies get their spots.
Carroll, a molecular biologist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute on the UW-Madison campus, has published a steady stream of journal articles detailing the invisible workings of genes that power the adaptation and evolution of all animals — the genes, for example, that help a butterfly camouflage itself from predators with different colors or colorful eyespots.