Why do peacocks grow such an elaborate tail to attract a mate? After all, their unwieldy plumage makes them much more liable to being eaten by a predator or killed by a more agile rival. Charles Darwin was content to attribute it to the peahen’s love of beauty. His co-conceiver of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, wasn’t having that: “How can we imagine that an inch in the tail of the peacock…would be noticed and preferred by the female?” he wrote to Darwin. Instead, Wallace, more of a utilitarian, suggested the answer had to lie in the tail’s usefulness.
The question puzzled biologists for ages. Why have so many species, not just peafowl, evolved mating signals that seemingly endanger themselves? In the 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed a radical theory: animals evolve handicapping behaviors to signal trust. Squandering a resource or making themselves more vulnerable to predation shows the female that their genes must be fitter than any sexual
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