The effeminate sheep and other problems with Darwinian sexual selection

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Interesting article about a biologist’s attempt to address that nagging footnote in the theory of sexual selection: homosexuality. “Being gay clearly makes individuals less likely to pass on their genes, a major biological faux pas. From the perspective of evolution, homosexual behavior has always been a genetic dead end, something that has to be explained away. But [Joan] Roughgarden believes that biologists have it backwards. Given the pervasive presence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, same-sex partnering must be an adaptive trait that’s been carefully preserved by natural selection.”

I’m not convinced by her conclusions since they depend on group selection (the idea that genes that are good for the species–as opposed to the individual–will somehow get passed along), which Richard Dawkins has thoroughly dispatched. I think there needs to be a distinction between exclusive homosexuality (which does fly in the face of natural selection) and homosexuality that is practiced in addition to reproductive sex. It seems like the many examples of animal homosexuality that Roughgarden cites are of the latter type, while the former, as far as I know, is a relatively modern phenomenon that is exclusive to humans. If that’s the case, then a good argument can be made that memes and not genes are responsible.

Jun 28, 2006 | Comments

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