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Originally Posted by C4 Diesel
It's not that the tail is more important than fitness... It's an INDICATION of fitness. A tail costs a lot of energy to grow, slows the bird down. Therefore it takes a very fast, strong peacock to outrun predators even with the large tail, and it also means the bird is well fed since it had that extra energy. Therefore it actually helps the peahens select the most fit peacocks.
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This is a point of contention and is not accepted across the board by all biologists.
I am not an evolutionary biologist, so am not really qualified to comment on it, but I must say that I find it a bit far-fetched. I find 'memetic' explainations of sexual selection very useful.
Regardless, just to ensure people don't consider tentative hypotheses as on the same ground as established science.
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Although this is a matter of opinion as much as anything else, I would say no. The reason for that is even under many selection pressures, we still cannot evolve faster than our genes can mutate. This being the case, and with the generation time ever increasing, natural evolution is a slow thing for humans.
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Evolution happens at a faster rate when the selection pressure is high. Although the mutation rate is, in principle, a limiting factor, in almost all cases it is the selection pressure that determines the speed.