The beauty of the peacock tail and the problems with the theory of sexual selection

“One of the most dramatic and well-known examples of sexual selection occurs in the tail of the peacock. The display feathers come at an extreme cost to the individual male, but females apparently choose the males to mate with based on their plumage. How this mechanism originally developed is an enigma to evolutionists, and the fact that it contains several irreducibly complex systems increases the difficulty of finding an explanation in the evolutionary framework. The fact that the conspicuous nature of many courtship displays makes a male less able to hide and/or avoid predators transforms “survival of the fittest” into “survival of the handsomest.” The male that has the most extreme trait (long tails) will pass his genes onto his offspring, which will tend to have the longest tails in the future. How the females select the males is still a mystery to evolutionists and creationists alike. There is no evidence for a correlation between beauty and health or how the simultaneous development of a sexual trait and its preference would have emerged in the evolutionary story.

The feather pattern of the peacock (female peafowl are called peahens) contains many incredible features that defy an evolutionary explanation: all feathers are oriented to a central point, the intricate pattern of “eyes” are uniformly distributed, modified barb structures are in certain parts of the feather, feathers contain only one pigment, feathers produce colors using multiple layers of thin films, and many others.

The “eye” pattern is actually produced by the interaction of many thousands of barbules whose development must be strictly controlled, layering that varies by 1/20,000th of a millimeter. The mathematical accuracy within the pattern of an individual barb and the overall shape of the “eye” pattern defy mere chance and time as a designer. The amount of original information that must be encoded for this type of a pattern clearly points to the hand of the Intelligent Designer.

Although neither creationists nor evolutionists can explain all of the details of development of intricate sexual displays, the belief that a Creator put beautiful traits in creatures makes much more sense than the just-so story that time and chance got together to produce them by accident.” Evolution Exposed, Second Ed., The beauty of the peacock tail and the problems with the theory of sexual selection, Burgess.  www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i2/peacock.asp

The beauty of the peacock tail and the problems with the theory of sexual selection