Location Taken: National Zoo, Washington DC
Time Taken: March 2010
Hmmm… Imagine what our species would be like if we’d developed fabulous sex-specific characteristics like the peacock’s tail. Can’t you imagine guys wandering around with massive feathered tails, or intricate fur patterns, or a rainbow-colored throat sac for mating calls?
…Clothing would be very different, wouldn’t it, just due to having to adjust for proper display of these attributes.
And it usually is the males that have the really fancy stuff. In most species that have the male/female split, the females bear a much larger cost for reproduction since they have to actually, you know, carry the baby while it’s developing. This makes the females just a bit pickier about their mates, which means that males have to show off, which means the ones that show off best get to have kids, and it just escalates until you’ve got a gigantic tail that gets into everything.
I suppose we humans are lucky to have come from the primate line. Not too many extravagant displays there.
Though we, oddly enough, have an unusual display on the females of our species that few others even in the primates have. I’ll leave you to figure out what things I’m talking about. They are solidly awesome, though. Which is probably half instincts speaking, but hey…
