{"id":73276,"date":"2022-08-05T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2022-08-05T05:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=73276"},"modified":"2022-08-04T09:26:18","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T13:26:18","slug":"qotd-the-peacocks-feathers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/08\/05\/qotd-the-peacocks-feathers\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Peacock&#8217;s feathers"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Behold the peacock in all its glory: As an evolved organism, it doesn&#8217;t make sense. The peacock can barely fly, and its extravagant tail feathers signal &#8220;Hey, here&#8217;s lunch!&#8221; to predators for miles around. So why the fancy look? Simple: The girls love it. Peacocks with the biggest and most dazzling tail feathers mated with lots of adoring peahens and begat lots of offspring, a process that resulted in the utterly useless but amazing-looking birds that we decorate our parks with today.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;peacock principle&#8221; provides the answer to one of the abiding mysteries of nature: Males will evolve into any sort of weirdness to attract females. Since psychology recapitulates phylogeny, I have personally experienced the peacock principle. In my callow youth, I grew my hair to enormous length and strutted around in ridiculously colored garments. My bewildered parents thought I had become gay, but the explanation was the exact opposite of that. Long hair and gaudy clothes were my peacock feathers.<\/p>\n<p>Martin Gurri, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discoursemagazine.com\/culture-and-society\/2022\/04\/25\/get-the-kids-out-of-the-room-were-going-to-talk-about-sex\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Get the Kids Out of the Room \u2014 We&#8217;re Going To Talk About Sex&#8221;, <em>Discourse<\/em><\/a>, 2022-04-25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Behold the peacock in all its glory: As an evolved organism, it doesn&#8217;t make sense. The peacock can barely fly, and its extravagant tail feathers signal &#8220;Hey, here&#8217;s lunch!&#8221; to predators for miles around. So why the fancy look? Simple: The girls love it. Peacocks with the biggest and most dazzling tail feathers mated with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,41,16],"tags":[130,255],"class_list":["post-73276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-quotations","category-science","tag-evolution","tag-sexuality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-j3S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73276"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75442,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73276\/revisions\/75442"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}