Evolutionary Own Goal?

Dan said what I was going to say here in many less words than I would have said it. Not only is it a social construction, but it's one dependent upon other social constructions, i.e. the Western cultural practices of love and monogamy and marriage and such.

Not that I believe things like this are remotely that simple.

Otherwise, what Rockist said. In a tight-knit primitive tribal society, people simply don't have the luxury of indulging exclusively in homosexual sex, the needs of the individual/tribe to procreate will force people to have heterosexual sex. This is why the phenomina of homosexualty appears only in more advanced socieies - not because its "socially constructed"

http://www.stonewallinn.com/Covers/BioExCover2.jpg

Even more likely (to my mind) is that homosexuality is tied to the genes that express gender-related behavior, so that the sexual traits expressed in a homosexual are actually vital to the success of the species, since they usually get expressed in the context of the opposite gender. Many sexual characteristics are present in both men and women (nipples are a good example) but are 'switched on' depending on DNA sequences on the X or Y chromosome. Responding sexually to male or female pheromones or physiognamy could be a matter of which switch is turned on - sometimes both. In that case, it would be even harder to select out.

even the section on lesbian hedgehog cunnilungus is less, um, exuberant than it sounds

Manifesting as a tolerance for shoe-shopping and a tolerance for golfing?

the section on lesbian hedgehog cunnilungus is less, um, exuberant than it sounds.

But are there photos?

(there ARE photos, but they are generally strangely unconvincing: the best — ie worst — is of a bisexual whale orgy... all you can see in the photo is choppy ocean, under which presumably the orgy is taking place)

it is very thorough, and in that sense impressive and convincing

it is also very terrifically boring, which somehow adds to the feeling that BB is right, but makes you totally want to slap him

homosexuality would appear to be a special case, since it arbitrates so strongly against breeding

(Homosexuality doesn't "arbitrate" against breeding very much at all, not now and not even before the idea of monogamous "homosexuality" was introduced. For obvious example see ancient Greece.)

This is why the phenomina of homosexualty appears only in more advanced socieies - not because its "socially constructed"

(Umm ... a phenomenon occurs in certain social contexts but not others because it's not socially constructed? I don't think I follow this.)

I think of it this way: in a time before marriage was socially prescribed, a "gay" man grows up feeling an aversion (in sexual terms) to women. In whose interests is it to *make* him have sex with women and thus increase his chances of breeding?

Presumably the other men have nothing to lose from the abstinence of a rival, so it's hard to imagine them making him. Would a woman attempt forcible copulation with him? Perhaps, although with what degree of success in provoking an orgasm it's kind of hard to estimate.

You might say that he could end up having sex with a woman himself from the same kind of despearation that makes men in jail have sex with each other, especially if he keeps getting fagbashed by the other men when he tries to strike up a friendship (poor guy!).

But on the whole, in the absence of society (and thus socially constructed rules), what is to stop this guy from abstaining completely from sex with women and thus, from an evolutionary point of view, throwing his lineage away?

In this state -- a world long before "homosexuality" or even really "sexuality" as concepts -- you couldn't make assumptions about "less likely to mate with opposite sex" and especially not "aversion to opposite sex." Even beyond that: both of those statements assume that "homosexuality" is a reproductive aspect of a person's identity, and not, say, a social one or even one based around simple entertainment: it's just as possible to think of same-sex desire and same-sex activity as just another thing an individual does, one that may not, in fact, preclude procreating simply for the purpose of procreating.

the assumption that 100% het and 100% homo are the two standard-issue models, with a few weirdo variants stuck between them, is an idea barely more than a century old

in the way-old presocial days we seem to be talking about, when genes overrode all, "man with aversion to having sex with women" (his actual tribal name) would discover this aversion by the experiment of actually having sex with several women and finding himself averse to it, then graduating to something more his style as he hit his mid teens, by which time his genes were safely passed on.

The tribal shaman — who could after all change sex at will — called this "going through a phrase".

I think it was a Scandinavian study. Or maybe I'm just confusing it with Strindberg. But anyway, yeah.

This looks on the surface like a site with an agenda, but still - I think the figures it quotes are probably accurate. About 10% of kids have 'surprising paternity'

So, anyway, on this spectrum heterosexuality is at one end and homosexuality is at the other, and dead-set in the center is the ellusive perfectly bisexual person (and one who likely exists only in statistics). We all fit somewhere along this line, regardless of whether or not we act on this orientation or are even aware of what it is that we really desire. I believe that no one is purely het or purely gay; such "complete" identifications strike me as being foolish absolutes with no validity in the real world (someone may say that they are totally het, but I believe that they would be repressing some bi-sexual inclination).
This spectrum thereby negates the labels, for we are all, to some extent, het and gay and bi, by virtue of the fact that we are human and are born with strong sexual desires and needs for release.
As far as the whole nature/nurture argument, I think that we are all born with learnings in one direction or another. And that what we experience as we mature leads us to select one label over another and one way of loving over another. It's a combination of many factors that eventually leads us to identify as being het or gay or bi, and those factors vary from person to person and likely vary throughout the individual's life, as well.

Actually, I see two different spectra or continua: I don't see why an increased interest in men has to decrease the interest in women, and Laura's model (not an uncommon one) neglects, as she acknowledges, the variation in level of interest in a sex. How about imagining people are on a bell curve for level of interest in men, and another for level of interest in women? The combination of the positive evolutionary drive towards procreation, plus societal pressures, might account for why more people rate highly in interest in the opposite sex than in the same sex (I assume no negative evolutionary pressure here, just the absence of a positive one), but I don't see a necessary connection between the two impulses. So for me, I have what seems a more or less average degree of interest in women, and a greater than average (in that most men claim to be het) interest in men - but this latter is still less than my interest in women, because the distribution is skewed as above. This model makes some sense to me. I see where anyone is on either scale as the result of a combination of factors, hereditary and environmental and so on, vaguely analogous to the degree of interest in sports or music or politics or whatever, or to various kinds of intelligence and talent.

true obv but why is the evidence so fugitive?

if we're going to do this by stats, there shd be a z-axis of preference also: monogamy <-> polyamory (what's the gene-push for that?)

I always imagined that monogamous people were just good at not giving in to temptation (i.e. it's more about general self-discipline than sexuality). Are there people who can genuinely only fancy one person at a time? That's very interesting if so.

I mean, I think we all consistently underestimate how much the terms and ideas we use to describe sexuality are mostly social ones, and as such how much we're affected by our acculturation into them.

http://a1055.g.akamai.net/f/1055/1401/5h/images.barnesandnoble.com/images/5340000/5340639.gif

But anyway, depending how you shape the curve and distribute it (I did suggest that the peak on the het one might cover far more people than that on the homo one, because of that possible biological pressure), you don't have to get such a huge number of bi people anyway.

I find it much harder to imagine even a compromised simple bell-curve distribution for monogamy etc. - that seems to be even more of a complex construct than sexuality. My oldest friend, to give the kind of example requested, says he couldn't even imagine having sex with someone with whom he wasn't in love, and he can't envisage being in love with more than one person at a time, so there are people whose preference is very monogamous, and who aren't resisting temptations or letting their superego control them or whatever.

And in any case, one's own survival has very little to do with sexual behaviour (STDs notwithstanding) - it's more to do with the survival of the gene, in which most people are arguably uniniterested. (Having babies per se is another matter).

I suppose you might argue that having children is kind of a big incentive for a theoretical genetically-gay man to impregnate a woman, say. We don't know for how much time people have consciously associated sex with having babies, but it's presumably longer than the precise biological mechanisms have been understood.

Still, it's an interesting area.

The better question: Why *would* it be selected out? Short-sighted people still have plenty of babies, right?

how about if I asked if there were a gene for foot fetishes. Or pedophilia. Or S & M. Or plushy sex

That there aren't genes for these behaviours doesn't mean they don't have a stong genetic component. Try this alternative question:

"Do chimps have a gene for poking a stick into a termite mound? Do songbirds have genes for their songs?"

Of course not. Does that make them social constructions? If you think it does, then the onus is now on you to provide a coherent definition of 'socially constructed'.

Probably more, less picky you see.

With a dreamy look on his face, he begins softly to sing "The Way We Were" to himself.