I never said it was meritorious. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. It's probably going to die off because it doesn't deserve to live, assuming giant butt feathers have no real purpose.
> And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid.
Exactly. The stupid, useless, inane, will die off and be selected out of existence eventually.
> Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity.
If this were true, society would be going backwards. This is not true though. Evolution was my example because of this. The more deserving to live will always have more probability of living, otherwise evolution wouldn't work. Sure stupidity exists, but only because a perfectly meritocratic society is quixotic. The universe is non-determistic, which means even if humans could be perfectly meritocratic, it wouldn't be perfectly meritocratic. And if the stupid around you seem to have more probability of perpetuating... then perhaps you should redefine who and what is stupid?