Originally Posted by C4 Diesel

True, it is a hypothesis, but how are you going to prove it? The only thing provable is that females like the males with big tails. You can't ask the peahen what it thinks. Fact is, it does take a lot of energy to grow and only strong, fast peacocks can avoid predation because of it. From the standpoint of selection pressures, there would be no such pressure for a female to evolve to desire a mate with a feature that merely acts as a hinderance (which is what it is doing if she just wants the tail because it's pretty). The only way that this could be taken as an indication of fitness is because the bird wants it to be. On the other hand, it being an indication of fitness makes it easy to see what male has the best traits. I'm not saying that one is definitively correct, but I think theres an answer that definitely makes more sense.