Barnacle
Well-Known Member
This is a favourite subject of mine... Animal behaviour is my area of research and I just love this evolutionary slant on the topic of homosexuality. So...
There is actually a whole lot of research now on same-sex partnerships in other species. It definitely occurs and it does not go against "survival of the fittest". Without going in-depth here, I would encourage everyone to google "kin selection". In short, if a behaviour benefits our relatives, because our relatives are likely to share those same genes (whether or not they 'express' them), that behaviour is passed on. This concept is extremely widely applied to explain all sorts of phenomena (e.g. the sterile workers in bee hives and other haplodiploid eusocial insects, the phenomenon of biological spite where individuals will commit suicide to harm others, or why individuals will altruistically sacrifice themselves for others) and is very much established in scientific circles. It's not limited to animals either and applies across all living things - anything that reproduces and passes on genes.
One hypothesis for the adaptive role of human homosexuality is also based on this principle. We see that homosexual male humans tend not to be the first-born male and this is linked to various trade-offs in life history which I won't go into but encourage you to read about if you're interested as it's fascinating. In other species homosexual partnerships may be maintained to climb the social ranks or maintain friendships (e.g. in Bonobos), which in turn might benefit your, say, sister - so that even though you don't have offspring yourself, she does - or even to raise offspring in a functional partnership when a mate has died or when a different family member actually does the reproducing.
On a related but slightly separate subject, there is a difference between ultimate and proximate causes, as we biologists say. The above is the "ultimate" cause. However, the proximate cause can be a number of things. Human homosexuals of both sexes experience the same emotions towards each other as straight couples do. The same when it comes to pleasure experienced during actual sex. It's a bit of a silly thing to assume this is not the case in other animals. Like us, they experience proximate motivators - i.e. emotions/feelings. There is no reason to think that when an animal mounts another and simulates sex it is not in fact doing so because it was motivated by the same things that would have motivated it to act under more "usual" circumstances. It's perfectly possible that a pair of colts are "gay" in the exact same way that a stallion is motivated to mate with a mare. This may be a "misfiring" in the case of horses (there's no particular evidence that there's an adaptive role for homosexuality in horses - nor that it occurs at all beyond the play and dominance of bachelor males)... But it is still, in fact, "gay".
Another note... It's actually NEVER about survival of the species. This is a very basic but widespread misunderstanding of evolutionary theory that leads to all sorts of mistaken conclusions. It's about survival of one's genes. And since genes are shared among kin, you get kin selection and this wonderful thing called "inclusive fitness". Another thing to go google. One of the best concepts in biology!
There is actually a whole lot of research now on same-sex partnerships in other species. It definitely occurs and it does not go against "survival of the fittest". Without going in-depth here, I would encourage everyone to google "kin selection". In short, if a behaviour benefits our relatives, because our relatives are likely to share those same genes (whether or not they 'express' them), that behaviour is passed on. This concept is extremely widely applied to explain all sorts of phenomena (e.g. the sterile workers in bee hives and other haplodiploid eusocial insects, the phenomenon of biological spite where individuals will commit suicide to harm others, or why individuals will altruistically sacrifice themselves for others) and is very much established in scientific circles. It's not limited to animals either and applies across all living things - anything that reproduces and passes on genes.
One hypothesis for the adaptive role of human homosexuality is also based on this principle. We see that homosexual male humans tend not to be the first-born male and this is linked to various trade-offs in life history which I won't go into but encourage you to read about if you're interested as it's fascinating. In other species homosexual partnerships may be maintained to climb the social ranks or maintain friendships (e.g. in Bonobos), which in turn might benefit your, say, sister - so that even though you don't have offspring yourself, she does - or even to raise offspring in a functional partnership when a mate has died or when a different family member actually does the reproducing.
On a related but slightly separate subject, there is a difference between ultimate and proximate causes, as we biologists say. The above is the "ultimate" cause. However, the proximate cause can be a number of things. Human homosexuals of both sexes experience the same emotions towards each other as straight couples do. The same when it comes to pleasure experienced during actual sex. It's a bit of a silly thing to assume this is not the case in other animals. Like us, they experience proximate motivators - i.e. emotions/feelings. There is no reason to think that when an animal mounts another and simulates sex it is not in fact doing so because it was motivated by the same things that would have motivated it to act under more "usual" circumstances. It's perfectly possible that a pair of colts are "gay" in the exact same way that a stallion is motivated to mate with a mare. This may be a "misfiring" in the case of horses (there's no particular evidence that there's an adaptive role for homosexuality in horses - nor that it occurs at all beyond the play and dominance of bachelor males)... But it is still, in fact, "gay".
Another note... It's actually NEVER about survival of the species. This is a very basic but widespread misunderstanding of evolutionary theory that leads to all sorts of mistaken conclusions. It's about survival of one's genes. And since genes are shared among kin, you get kin selection and this wonderful thing called "inclusive fitness". Another thing to go google. One of the best concepts in biology!
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