Peacock is a great metaphor. The one hand you could save the display is wasteful and useless, but the other hand genuinely is evolutionarily, beneficial. Any i

Peacock is a great metaphor. The one hand you could save the display is wasteful and useless, but the other hand genuinely is evolutionarily, beneficial. Any individual Peacock might wake up one morning and say “wow this is silly,“ but they are still strongly incentivized to participate, because the rewards are significant. Participation in irrational, rituals can be a perfectly rational decision.