Few things seem so silly as a peacock preening its gaudy tail or an elk clanking through the trees with its cumbersome antlers or even a male human displaying its hairy chest, but now we know that these secondary sexual characteristics have evolved because they attract mates, and in the animal kingdom, procreation leads to better odds of survival.
These days, the study of evolution has shifted from the question of why such male traits exist to what makes them work and where they came from. In Thursday’s edition of the science journal Cell, a team lead by world-renowned University of Wisconsin-Madison molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll has published the first study to come up with some of the genetic nuts and bolts behind this ornamentation.