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THE GAY ANIMAL KINGDOM
By Jonah Lehrer
Seed Magazine
June 7, 2006

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/06/the_gay_animal_kingdom.php

Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about
natural selection -- she's no bible-toting creationist -- but about his
other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden,
sexual selection can't explain the homosexuality that's been documented in
over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality --
long disparaged as a quirk of human culture -- is a normal, and probably
necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says,
Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.

Male big horn sheep live in what are often called "homosexual societies."
They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in
ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a
social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males
"effeminate."

Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales,
gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand,
are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos,
one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian
sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in "penis
fencing," which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give
each other genital massages.

As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological
equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450
different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it,
there's a vertebrate out there that does it. Nevertheless, most biologists
continue to regard homosexuality as a sexual outlier. According to
evolutionary theory, being gay is little more than a maladaptive behavior.

Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford University, wants to
change that perception. After cataloging the wealth of homosexual behavior
in the animal kingdom two years ago in her controversial book Evolution's
Rainbow -- and weathering critiques that, she says, stemmed largely from her
being transgendered -- Roughgarden has set about replacing Darwinian sexual
selection with a new explanation of sex. For too long, she says, biology has
neglected evidence that mating isn't only about multiplying. Sometimes, as
in the case of all those gay sheep, dolphins and primates, animals have sex
just for fun or to cement their social bonds. Homosexuality, Roughgarden
says, is an essential part of biology, and can no longer be dismissed. By
using the queer to untangle the straight, Roughgarden's theories have the
potential to usher in a scientific sexual revolution.

Darwin's theory of sex began with an observation about peacocks. For a man
who liked to see the world in terms of functional adaptations, the tails of
male peacocks seemed like a useless absurdity. Why would nature invest in
such a baroque display of feathers? Did male peacocks want to be eaten by
predators?

Darwin's hypothesis was typically brilliant: The peacocks did it for the
sake of reproduction. The male's fancy tail entranced the staid peahen.
Darwin used this idea to explain the biological quirks that natural
selection couldn't explain. If a trait wasn't in the service of survival,
then it was probably in the service of seduction. Furthermore, the mechanics
of sex helped explain why the genders were so different. Because eggs are
expensive and sperm are cheap, "Males of almost all animals have stronger
passions than females," Darwin wrote. "The female...with the rarest of
exceptions is less eager than the male...she is coy." Darwin is telling the
familiar Mars and Venus story: Men want sex while women want to cuddle.
Females, by choosing who to bed, impose sexual selection onto the species.

Darwin's theory of sex has been biological dogma ever since he postulated
why peacocks flirt. His gendered view of life has become a centerpiece of
evolution, one of his great scientific legacies. The culture wars over
evolution and common descent notwithstanding, Darwin's theory of sexual
selection has been thoroughly assimilated into mass culture. From sitcoms to
beer ads, our coital "instincts" are constantly reaffirmed. Females are
wary, and males are horny. Sex is this simple. Or is it?

Indeed, biology now knows better. Nobody is hornier than a female macaque or
bonobo (which mount the males because the males are too exhausted to
continue the fornication). Peacocks are actually the exception, not the
rule.

Roughgarden first began thinking Darwin may have been in error after she
attended the 1997 gay pride parade in San Francisco, where she had gone to
walk alongside a float in support of transgendered people. Although she had
lived her first 52 years as a man, Roughgarden was about to become a woman.
The decision hadn't been easy. For one thing, she was worried about losing
her job as a tenured professor of biology at Stanford. (The fear turned out
to be unfounded.)

After living for a year in Santa Barbara while undergoing the "physical
aspects of the transition," Roughgarden returned to Stanford in the spring
of 1999 and decided to write a book about the biology of sexual diversity.
In particular, she wanted to answer the question that had first surfaced in
her mind back in 1997. "When I was at that gay pride parade," Roughgarden
remembers, "I was just stunned by the sheer magnitude of the LGBT [Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, Transgender] population. Because I'm a biologist, I started
asking myself some difficult questions. My discipline teaches that
homosexuality is some sort of anomaly. But if the purpose of sexual contact
is just reproduction, as Darwin believed, then why do all these gay people
exist? A lot of biologists assume that they are somehow defective, that some
developmental error or environmental influence has misdirected their sexual
orientation. If so, gay and lesbian people are a mistake that should have
been corrected a long time ago. But this hasn't happened. That's when I had
my epiphany. When scientific theory says something's wrong with so many
people, perhaps the theory is wrong, not the people."

The resulting book, Evolution's Rainbow, was an audacious attack on Darwin's
theory of sexual selection. To make her case, Roughgarden filled the text
with a staggering collection of animal perversities, from the penises of
female spotted hyenas to the mènage à trois tactics of bluegill sunfish. As
Roughgarden put it, "What's coming out [in the past 10-15 years] is to the
rest of the species what the Kinsey Report was to humans."

According to Roughgarden, classic sexual selection can't account for these
strange carnal habits. After all, Darwin imagined sex as a relatively
straightforward transaction. Males compete for females. Evolutionary success
is defined by the quantity of offspring. Thus, any distractions from the
business of making babies -- distractions like homosexuality, masturbation,
etc. -- are precious wastes of fluids. You'd think by now, several hundred
million years after sex began, nature would have done away with such
inefficiencies, and males and females would only act to maximize rates of
sexual reproduction.

But the opposite has happened. Instead of copulation becoming more
functional and straightforward, it has only gotten weirder as species have
evolved -- more sodomy and other frivolous pleasures that are useless for
propagating the species. The more socially complex the animal, the more
sexual "deviance" it exhibits. Look at primates: Compared to our closest
relatives, contemporary, Westernized Homo sapiens are the staid ones.

Despite this new evidence, sexual selection theory is still stuck in the
19th century. The Victorian peacock remains the standard bearer. But as far
as Roughgarden is concerned, that's bad science: "The time has come to
declare that sexual theory is indeed false and to stop shoe-horning one
exception after another into a sexual selection framework...To do otherwise
suggests that sexual selection theory is unfalsifiable, not subject to
refutation."

Roughgarden is an ambitious scientist. She believes it is impossible to
comprehend the diversity of sexuality without disowning Darwin. Although she
isn't the first biologist to condemn sexual selection -- Darwin's theory has
never been very popular with feminists -- she is unusually vocal about
cataloguing his empirical errors. "When I began, I didn't set out to
criticize Darwin," she says. "But I quickly realized that most scientists
are pretty dismissive about same-sex sexuality in vertebrates. They think
these animals are just having fun or practicing. As long as scientists clung
to this old dogma, homosexuality would always be this funny anomaly you
didn't have to account for."

Roughgarden's first order of business was proving that homosexuality isn't a
maladaptive trait. At first glance, this seems like a futile endeavor. 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 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. As Roughgarden points out, "a 'common genetic disease' is
a contradiction in terms, and homosexuality is three to four orders of
magnitude more common than true genetic diseases such as Huntington's
disease."

So how might homosexuality be good for us? Any concept of sexual selection
that emphasizes the selfish propagation of genes and sperm won't be able to
account for the abundance of non-heterosexual sex. All those gay penguins
and persons will remain inexplicable. However, if one looks at homosexuality
from the perspective of a community, one can begin to see why nature might
foster a variety of sexual interactions.

According to Roughgarden, gayness is a necessary side effect of getting
along. Homosexuality evolved in tandem with vertebrate societies, in which a
motley group of individuals has to either live together or die alone. In
fact, Roughgarden even argues that homosexuality is a defining feature of
advanced animal communities, which require communal bonds in order to
function. "The more complex and sophisticated a social system is," she
writes, "the more likely it is to have homosexuality intermixed with
heterosexuality."

Japanese macaques, an old world primate, illustrate this principle
perfectly. Macaque society revolves around females, who form intricate
dominance hierarchies within a given group. Males are transient. To help
maintain the necessary social networks, female macaques engage in rampant
lesbianism. These friendly copulations, which can last up to four days, form
the bedrock of macaque society, preventing unnecessary violence and
aggression. Females that sleep together will even defend each other from the
unwanted advances of male macaques. In fact, behavioral scientist Paul Vasey
has found that females will choose to mate with another female, as opposed
to a horny male, 92.5% of the time. While this lesbianism probably decreases
reproductive success for macaques in the short term, in the long run it is
clearly beneficial for the species, since it fosters social stability.
"Same-sex sexuality is just another way of maintaining physical intimacy,"
Roughgarden says. "It's like grooming, except we have lots of pleasure
neurons in our genitals. When animals exhibit homosexual behavior, they are
just using their genitals for a socially significant purpose."

Roughgarden is now using this model of homosexuality to reimagine
heterosexuality. Her conclusions, published last February in Science, are
predictably controversial. While Darwin saw males and females as locked in
conflict, acting out the ancient battle of their gametes, Roughgarden
describes sexual partners as a model of solidarity. "This whole view of the
sexes as being at war is just so flawed from the start. First of all, there
are all these empirical exceptions, like homosexuality. And then there's the
logical inconsistency of it all. Why would a male ever jettison control of
his evolutionary destiny? Why would he entrust females to serendipitously
raise their shared young? The fact is, males and females are committed to
cooperate."

Consider the Eurasian oystercatcher, a shore bird that enjoys feasting on
shellfish. A consistent minority of oystercatcher families are polygynous,
in which a lucky male mates with two different females simultaneously. These
threesomes come in two different flavors: aggressive and cooperative. In an
aggressive threesome, the females are at war; they attack each other
frequently, and try to disrupt the egg-laying process of their fellow
spouse. So far, so Darwinian: Life is nasty, brutish and short. However, the
cooperative threesome is everything Darwin didn't expect. These females
share a nest, mate with each other several times a day, and preen their
feathers together. It's domestic bliss.

In Roughgarden's Science paper, she uses "cooperative game theory" to
elucidate the diverse mating habits of the oystercatcher. Whereas Darwin
held that conflict was the natural state of life (we are all Hobbesian
bullies at heart), Roughgarden sees cooperation as our default position.
This makes mathematical sense: The family that sleeps together has more
offspring. Why, then, do oystercatcher females occasionally engage in all
out war? According to Roughgarden, violence occurs when "social
negotiations" break down. Although the birds really want to get along (who
doesn't like being preened?), something goes awry. The end result is risky
violence, in which one female or both will end the breeding season without
an egg.

The advantage of Roughgarden's new theory is that it can explain a wider
spectrum of sexual behaviors than Darwinian sexual selection. Lesbian
oystercatchers and gay mountain sheep? Their homosexuality is just a prelude
to social cooperation, a pleasurable way of avoiding wanton conflict. But
what about the peacock and all those other examples of sexual dimorphism?
According to Roughgarden, "expensive, functionally useless badges like the
peacock's tail...are admission tickets": they just get you in the door. If
you don't have a ticket, you are ruthlessly denied breeding rights, like an
uncool kid at the prom.

Of course, most humans don't see sex as a way of maintaining the social
contract. Our lust doesn't seem logical, especially when that logic involves
the abstruse calculations of game theory. Furthermore, it's strange for most
people to think of themselves as naturally bisexual. Being gay or straight
seems to be an intrinsic and implacable part of our identity. Roughgarden
disagrees. "In our culture, we assume that there is a straight-gay binary,
and that you are either one or the other. But if you look at vertebrates,
that just isn't the case. You will almost never find animals or primates
that are exclusively gay. Other human cultures show the same thing." Since
Roughgarden believes that the hetero/homo distinction is a purely cultural
creation, and not a fact of biology, she thinks it is only a matter of time
before we return to the standard primate model. "I'm convinced that in 50
years, the gay-straight dichotomy will dissolve. I think it just takes too
much social energy to preserve. All this campy, flamboyant behavior: It's
just such hard work."

Despite Roughgarden's long list of peer-reviewed articles in prestigious
journals, most evolutionary biologists remain skeptical of her conclusions.
For one thing, it's tough to measure the benefits of diversity -- or lesbian
pair bonding. It's even harder to imagine how traits that are good for the
group get passed on by individuals. (As a result, group selection has
largely been replaced by kin selection.) In the absence of anything
conclusive, most scientists stick with Darwin and Dawkins.

Other biologists think Roughgarden is exaggerating the importance of
homosexuality. Invertebrate zoologist Stephen Shuster told Nature that
Roughgarden "throws out a very healthy baby with some slightly soiled
bathwater." And biologist Alison Jolly, in an otherwise positive review of
Evolution's Rainbow for Science, conceded that Roughgarden ultimately fails
in her ambition to "revolutionize current biological theories of sexual
selection." As far as these mainstream biologists are concerned,
Roughgarden's gay primates and transgendered fish are simply interesting
sexual deviants, statistical outliers in a world that contains plenty of
peacocks. As Paul Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, put
it, "I think much of what Roughgarden says is very interesting. But I think
she discounts many of the modifications that have been made to sexual
selection since Darwin originally proposed it. So in that sense, her Darwin
is a straw man. You don't have to dismiss the modern version of sexual
selection in order to explain social bonding or homosexuality."

Roughgarden remains defiant. "I think many scientists discount me because of
who I am. They assume that I can't be objective, that I've got some bias or
hidden LGBT agenda. But I'm just trying to understand the data. At this
point, we have thousands of species that deviate from the standard account
of Darwinian sexual selection. So we get all these special case exemptions,
and we end up downplaying whatever facts don't fit. The theory is becoming
Ptolemaic. It clearly has the trajectory of a hypothesis in trouble."

Roughgarden's cataloging of sexual diversity has challenged a fundamental
biological theory. If Darwinian sexual selection -- whatever its current
variant -- is to survive, it must adapt to this new data and come up with
convincing explanations for why a host of animals just aren't like peacocks.

............

450+ SPECIES CAN'T BE WRONG

For a list of over 450 species exhibiting homosexual behavior, pick up a
copy of the June/July issue of Seed, or subscribe here:

https://secure.palmcoastd.com/pcd/document?iid=0957YI63SL1

------------

NHNE HUMAN SEXUALITY REFERENCES:

Here is a quick list of links to previous News List articles that deal with
human homosexuality. This list is not all-inclusive. For a complete list of
all the topics we have covered over the years that relate to human
sexuality, you can conduct a search of the News List archive at this
address:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nhnenews/messages/

And visit NHNE's new Male/Female/Relationship Resource Page:

http://www.nhne.org/tabid/491/Default.aspx

...........

RELATED NHNE NEWS LIST ARTICLES:

GROUPS GATHER FOR HUMAN SEXUALITY SUMMIT (6/19/2005):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nhnenews/message/9390

GAY & STRAIGHT MEN REACT DIFFERENTLY TO SEXUAL ODORS (5/10/2005):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nhnenews/message/9152

'HOMOSEXUAL' PENGUINS SPARK GAY PROTEST (2/11/2005):
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ALL ABOUT KISSING (2/28/2002):
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HUMAN SEXUALITY STUDIED USING MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGES (12/21/1999):
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