#peafowl mate choice

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A museum specimen drawer half-drawn from a cabinet, one long-tailed widowbird skin with its half-metre tail coiled the length of the drawer beside a shorter-tailed skin and a small pinned paper label, a brass drawer-pull catching the light

The Peacock Problem: Darwin's Second Theory and Its Hard Tests

An ornament that costs its owner survival needed a theory natural selection could not supply. Darwin wrote one in 1871. It took a century to be taken seriously, and the experiments built to test it still disagree with each other.

By Brecht Corbeel · September 1, 2026 · 21 min read

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