> if you're just storing random data, like text, it probably offers little to no fitness benefit to the organism.
Wow, this makes me even more interested in the idea of using mating rituals as a mechanism for very-long-term knowledge storage!
Things like birdsongs, dances, and the aforementioned courtship art... If an individual can only reproduce if it correctly retransmits the "data", then the data will survive as long as the species does..no?