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"I love reading Robin Hanson's blog Overcoming Bias. Today, a post on conspicuous consumption and public causes caught my eye. It reminded me of Tor Norretranders's keynote at EuroOSCON last year, and not just because Robin is keynoting this year. Tor took us through evolutionary psychology attempts to account for the peacock's tail. The tail is bright, colourful, and it makes the peacock an easy target to pick off. Tor's question was: why would any animal invest in advertising saying 'eat me'?

"Because, the reasoning goes, it attracts mates. Peacocks who can survive despite the handicap of a garish tail obviously have genes far stronger than those of bland peacocks..."

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