The peacock feather effect

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2021-07-07 05:30:17

Therefore, male birds with more impressive tails get to mate more often and have more children. Among those offspring, the male peachicks inherit the genes for long colorful tail feathers from their father, grow up with long, colorful plumage and so the cycle repeats on and on.

This positive feedback loop leads to peacock tail feathers becoming longer, more colorful and more impressive from one generation to the next.

This is the basic concept of sexual selection as articulated by Charles Darwin [0] - some features survive and flourish solely because they increase the likelihood of reproduction, besides which they don't seem to serve any purpose [1].

What Darwin was suggesting is that if peahens could talk and were asked why they chose a specific peacock to mate with, their answer would be something like: "Duh! Because plumage."

Our world of ideas happens to suffer from a similar fate. Some ideas rise to extreme prominence simply because they have an unexplainable cognitive sexiness about them. In tech, the two most obvious examples of this are AI & Blockchain.