The tale of how the peacock got his eyespots has taken a new turn.

Basic principles aren’t in doubt for the peacock exemplar. Yet “everybody uses it without knowing much about how it works,” says Roslyn Dakin of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.

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The long-awaited shakeup of the Obama administration’s national security team has begun. Leon Panetta will leave the CIA to replace Robert Gates as secretary of defense. Gen. David Petraeus will leave command of the Afghanistan war to replace Panetta. It’s a good day to be an armed Predator drone or a shadow warrior.

Neither man is an obvious choice for his new job. Panetta is an accidental CIA director. With practically no intelligence experience, he became director in 2009 after President Obama’s first choice dropped out in the face of liberal opposition. Unexpectedly, he forged a tight r...