Why do people say they want to pay pointless taxes?

Virtue- and wealth-signalling often seem endemic to Silicon Valley. Millionaires and billionaires talk about their desire to help to the poor and the environment—all from their comfortable enclaves of mansions and private schools and private jets. The scientist Stephen Hawking offers an explanation for the hypocrisy in The Spectator.

The biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed the 'handicap principle' to explain just about every aspect of the evolution of animal signals. It is most starkly expressed with the example of a sexual display, such as the peacock's 'tail.' Darwin recognized that such an extravagant ornament did not serve the animals' survival. Far from it. But females prefer to mate with males sporting huge and magnificent tails. So genes (Darwin didn't talk in terms of genes) for being extravagantly beautiful get passed on to the next generation, and that's why peacocks (like male birds of paradise, gaudy fish, etc.) look as they do. Sexual selection, Darwin called it.
Nobody doubts that peacock tails (etc.) are a handicap to their owners. They are costly to grow, and they attract predators just as they attract females. We all thought (me included) that they evolved that way in spite of being handicaps. Zahavi's revolutionary idea was that they evolved that way precisely because they are handicaps. In the cute terms beloved of Zahavi; "Look at me, I've managed to survive in site of carrying around this ridiculous burden of a tail, you'd better mate with me because I obviously have superb genes." Less anthropomorphically, advertisements have to be honestly costly or they carry no weight.

Read the whole thing here.

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