Some links about Amotz Zahavi and his Handicap Principle: a Why We Take Risks, a feature article by Richard Conniff from December 2001, an introduction to The Theory of Honest Signalling from the site of Carl T. Bergstrom, a researcher in Theoretical Biology (here’s another academic page by Michael Lachmann), and a review of Zahavi’s book (The Handicap Principle, written with his wife), by Geoffrey Miller, which accurately describes how Zahavi often comes across:
Depending on your viewpoint, they (the authors – DD) act like (1) dangerous hyper-adaptationists even more extreme than Steven Jay Gould’s worst caricatures of Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, weaving just-so stories out of thin air, (2) harmlessly entertaining, pseudo-scientific fabulists in the tradition of Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead, (3) classical Victorian natural historians (somehow displaced to contemporary Tel-Aviv University) using the same hypothetico-deductive methods as Darwin himself, or (4) ardent, creative biologists who, whatever one’s qualms about their methods and examples, deliver a revitalizing shock to animal communication theory, sexual selection theory, kinship theory, reciprocal altruism theory, and evolutionary psychology. I favor this last judgment.