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C
harles Darwin, bundled in
a frock coat and bowler
hat against a freshening
English chill, trudged
along a sand path deep in thought.
It is 1860, less than a year since the
publication of
On the Origin of
Species
, and his mind reeled with a
particularly troubling question he
barely touched in his controversial
text: Why do the males of certain
species develop extravagant visual
traits? Such obvious encumbrances
to survival seem to fly in the face of
natural selection, the revolutionary
idea he so recently unfurled to the
world. That morning he had poured
out his frustration on the subject
in a letter to the American botanist
Asa Gray: “The sight of a feather in a
peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it,
makes me sick!”
More than 150 years later and 50
feet below the surface, the question,
still the subject of debate, percolates
through my mind as I watch a
dazzling example of sexual selection
26
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SUMMER 2012
Red-tail flasher (Paracheilinus rubricaudalis), Solomon Islands
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