[Analemma_]

It's not a Hacker News thread unless there are a bunch of computer programmers telling people with PhD's how ignorant they are about their own field.

[qb45]

The problem in this case is that TFA presented this phenomenon as some black magic unexplainable by science, despite reasonable explanations having been provided half century ago and popularized even among lay audience by books like The Selfish Gene.

But hell if you are wrong about the general trend ;)

edit:

Really what TFA did is it just falsified some extremely naive and humanly-subjective interpretation of the slogan "survival of the fittest", without bothering to mention that this interpretation had already been known to be defective years ago and there are subtler alternatives which don't have this problem.

[emmelaich]

Well said and funny but it won't stop me piling on :-) ....

> Even the peafowl has a longer tail than she needs.

Surely he means peahen, the female peafowl (of which the male peacock has the extraordinarily long tail.)