Frank Trollman wrote:Because Evolution doesn't give a single rat's anus what your chances of dying a horrible death are.
Fuck you Frank, nice concession, but that's just bullshit in the short term for sexual selection, and it's bullshit in the long term for sexual selection. Like the period of discussion about the time of Human evolution since spreading around the globe we're having,
and like peacocks now.
wikipedia wrote:Fisher makes special note of two possible outcomes when the costs of ornamentation equal or outweigh the reproductive benefit. The first outcome is a counterselection for less ornamented males that will cease the further elaboration of the ornament condition until the advantage attained from sexual preference balances with the costs of ornamentation halting the further exaggeration of both the ornament and the preference to create a condition of relative stability and, (ii) a severing of the entire process if the costs associated with the ornament reduce the number of surviving and reproducing offspring which in turn makes the preference disadvantageous along with the ornamentation.
So you have to survive the process in order to be sexually selected, eh.
Or, hey, why not someone who doesn't even think it exists? That's it's just a survival trait even? Turns out the people who crap on about peacocks are all specialists in sexual selection and guess what they keep seeing everywhere.
wikipedia wrote:However, some disagreement has arisen in recent years concerning whether or not female peafowl do indeed select males with more ornamented trains. In contrast to Petrie's findings, a seven-year Japanese study of free-ranging peafowl came to the conclusion that female peafowl do not select mates solely on the basis of their trains. Mariko Takahashi found no evidence that peahens expressed any preference for peacocks with more elaborate trains (such as trains having more ocelli), a more symmetrical arrangement, or a greater length. Takahashi determined that the peacock's train was not the universal target of female mate choice, showed little variance across male populations, and, based on physiological data collected from this group of peafowl, do not correlate to male physical conditions. Adeline Loyau and her colleagues responded to Takahashi's study by voicing concern that alternative explanations for these results had been overlooked, and that these might be essential for the understanding of the complexity of mate choice. They concluded that female choice might indeed vary in different ecological conditions.
It has been also suggested that peacocks' display of colorful and oversize trains with plenty of eyespots, together with their extremely loud call and fearless behavior, have been formed by the forces of natural selection (not sexual selection), and served as an aposematic warning display to intimidate predators and rivals.
You know what they've discovered? To me, that reads that pet peacocks in Europe have bigger and prettier tails when they're healthier, because
we've selected them for pretty tails, and wild peacocks fucking don't, because they're selected by nature which doesn't give a shit about their tail.
Or rather, it did at some point in the past, step by step over a thousand years each times hundreds of little steps that were all just enough to win the chicks without getting preferentially predator selected, ... and then you soon need to scare off the predators with it because you can't run in the breeding season and it's not even sexual selection any more.
TLDR: Seriously, women who pick obvious genetic flaws to breed with die out. Women who think their brothers smell nice in a sexual way don't exist, because they died out. That's the lesson of sexual selection. Like I said.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.