Attracts mates is part of the reproductive advantage part, but I’m not sure about the intimidating predators. It certainly makes him less likely to evade predators. Plenty of males attract mates without such an encumbrance, but the plumage must have represented a local maxima for reproductive advantage.
It’s just another argument against design. Designers don’t get stuck in local maxima so easily.
Right. I was thinking of environmental changes, actually. Given no or minor change in environment, you’re not going to see a regress to genes with less reproductive advantage.
Have you encountered one at the zoo? They fan and shimmer the tail which makes them huge and intimidating.
Natural selection is what I really had in mind when I posted. When I was thinking about is the rapid changes that humans make around the cities and how so many animals have adapted to this in less than a hundred years. Urban coyotes would be a good animal to study on this. I sometimes wonder if Urban raccoons have any distinct differences between their rural cousins. At a glance day appear the same physically and I do know that behavioral changes are usually associated with physical changes as well.
Stephen Jay Gould suggested that for some creatures (ones with a very short lifecycle) even a few years of a locally changed environment might lead to speciation - and subsequent extinction of the new species when conditions changed back to the original environment,