Richard Dawkins

I suppose you could say that poetry is something extravagant and overdone.

And if I think about the nearest approach to poetry in Wild Creatures, it might be something like a peacock's tail, where it's far from utilitarian.

The idea is that the male is attempting to seduce a female.

And there's massive overkill there.

It's too much.

When Charles Darwin proposed his theory of sexual selection, his co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, didn't like it because he wanted it to be more utilitarian.

And Darwin was happy to say simply it's female whim.

Females simply like this extravagant thing.

This argument wasn't really settled until the 1930s when R.A.

Fisher said,

pointed out mathematically, well intuitively mathematically, that if you make certain assumptions there is a runaway process, an exponential runaway process as natural selection works upon female taste, genes of female taste getting more and more extravagant, male tails get more extravagant and this runs away exponentially to produce this ridiculous,

extravagant advertisement.

There are other theories, but I think that's perhaps the nearest approach you get to what you want.

Eventually, utilitarian considerations will interfere.

I sometimes wonder whether, I think Jeffrey Miller has suggested this, that

It might be that human poetry, epic poems, recitals, singing, is a form of sexual selection, and that humans might have evolved the capacity to advertise to the opposite sex by being virtuoso poets, virtuoso reciters of tribal epic poems, something of that sort.

Like a peacock's tail.

That is true.

The phrase junk DNA is rather overused in different ways, but I think what you're talking about is what are called pseudogenes.

where they're just dead vestiges actually.