Initially the peacock’s train, showy and cumbersome, seemed to contradict his grand theory of natural selection—that animals succeed or fail based on their adaptive traits. “The sight of a f ...

“It’s cool that this is a system Charles Darwin talked about so long ago when he was thinking through theories of natural and sexual selection,” she said. “[He] posed peacocks as a problem ...

Why does the peacock have such an elaborate tail ... The primary mechanism he proposed to explain this fact was natural selection: that is, that organisms better adapted to their environment ...

Richard Prum, Coe Professor at Yale University and author of “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” reveals details of Darwin's theory on gender. This particular hypothesis ...

Peacocks are spectacular for any zoo-goer ... The birds' large and elaborate tails, called trains, developed through natural selection. Do the females influence the evolution of the train ...

"The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail," Charles Darwin wrote in 1860, "makes me sick." The seemingly useless, even cumbersome, gaudy plumage did not fit with his theory of natural selection ...

Male peacocks shake their brilliantly-hued ... This doesn’t necessarily preclude the natural selection of males who can give the impression of powerful displays, while exploiting natural ...

The peacock’s tail gave Darwin fits. At first, it seemed to fly in the face of his theory of natural selection. How could evolution possibly favor such cumbersome and conspicuous accoutrement?

Still, the man who outlined the laws of natural selection well understood the evolutionary purpose of displays that, in humans, are often dismissed as mere vanity. So, too, do the peacocks that ...