The Fantastical Ballet of Sexual Selection: Nature's Dating Game

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Only the winners get to pass on their genes

Here's a thought that might keep you up at night: everything beautiful in nature probably exists just so some plant or animal can reproduce. That tail, that song, those bright blue feet? All elaborate pickup lines in the grand singles bar of evolution.

The Reproductive Arms Race

Animals find mates through what amounts to nature's most desperate marketing campaign. Sexual selection, natural selection's flashier and slightly unhinged cousin, has driven creatures to develop traits so ridiculous they make human dating apps seem rational by comparison. The peacock's tail is basically a giant neon sign flashing "GENETIC JACKPOT" while simultaneously telegraphing "EASY MEAL HERE" to every predator within eyeshot.

Sex makes the evolutionary world go round, which explains quite a lot when you think about it. Why does the natural world resemble a combination of America's Got Talent, a fashion runway, and occasionally WrestleMania? Because only the contestants who win get to pass their genetic material forward in time. The rest become evolutionary dead ends, their fancy genes buried with them like so many unsold tickets to a canceled concert.

The Remarkable Price of Beauty

Darwin himself, that pillar of Victorian scientific exploration and understanding, was so confounded by the peacock's tail that in April 1860, he admitted that just the sight of a peacock feather "makes me sick!" Picture the scene: a brilliant man develops a comprehensive theory explaining all of life, only to be thoroughly flummoxed by what is essentially a bird's extravagant butt fan.

Peacock by flor ortega on Unsplash

Why would any creature evolve a feature so impractical that it essentially paints a target on its back? The answer lies in what Darwin eventually realized was the difference between natural selection (the "struggle for existence") and... continue to read