Assuming that what evolution ‘wants’ is child-bearing heterosexual sex, then human sexuality has a large number of deviations from this in practice including homosexuality, asexuality, and various paraphilias.
I don’t think this is a safe assumption. Sex also serves a social bonding function beyond procreation, and there are many theories about the potential advantages of non-heterosexual sex from an evolutionary perspective.
I think you need to distinguish between homosexuality/asexuality, which compromise on heterosexual interest and thus surely cannot be adaptive, and bisexuality, which doesn’t.
I have seen multiple accounts how homosexuality is selected for. Similarly how ant queens have many non-producing drones whose existence is not a superflous extra, if you have some non-reproducing members in your family they can be an asset rather than a drag. You can be a fulltime uncle which is less possible if you need to be a full time father too. The non-reproductive sex can be a force to have social relations more strongly in place like how that role is more pronouced in bonobos.
if you are the 7th sibling then that is only 1/3rd of child per sibling parent. The effect of “33% more likely per sibling” which I didn’t previously know about fits in. If you end up having only very few families, risk that all of them do not reproduce by chance gets more significant. Upkeep of a “dubiously useful” extra person gets amortized better the more families there are.
Brothers doing wars tend to be somewhat even and thus continue for a long time. With 4 children, starting 4 lineages with 2 parents leads to more factions than 2 lineages with 3 parents. Or any other effect where increasing the number of families becomes blocked it then makes sense to make the “allowed families” to be more robust. Maybe on hitting starvation shanking the uncle leads to less infigting (sacrificial hierachy instead of lottery) and does not produce orphans.
But I don’t actually know. But seems there are things that actually need checking.
Main morals I got out of that was to check and think through the issue rather than just extend the out-of-distribution human social reality ito everything.
Indeed, but insofar as this bonding function enhances IGF then this actually makes it an even more impressive example of alignment to evolution’s true goal. I know that there are a bunch of potential evolutionary rationales proposed for homosexuality but I personally haven’t studied it in depth nor are any super convincing to me so I’m just assuming the worst-case scenario for evolution here.
i.e. if evolution has precisely titrated the percentage of homosexuality etc so as to maximise IGF taking into account benefits of bonding, additional childcare, group selection etc, then this is actually evidence for evolution achieving a much greater level of alignment than otherwise!
What is evolution’s true goal? If it’s genetic fitness, then I don’t see how this demonstrates alignment. Human sexuality is still just an imperfect proxy, and doesn’t point at the base objective at all.
I agree that it’s very interesting how robust this is to the environment we grow up in, and I would expect there to be valuable lessons here for how value formation happens (and how we can control this process in machines).
I don’t think this is a safe assumption. Sex also serves a social bonding function beyond procreation, and there are many theories about the potential advantages of non-heterosexual sex from an evolutionary perspective.
A couple things you might find interesting:
-Men are 33% more likely to be gay for every older brother they have: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11534970/
-Women are more likely to be bisexual than men, which may have been advantageous for raising children: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23563096/
- Homosexuality is extremely common in the animal kingdom (in fact the majority of giraffe sex is homosexual): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammals_displaying_homosexual_behavior
I think you need to distinguish between homosexuality/asexuality, which compromise on heterosexual interest and thus surely cannot be adaptive, and bisexuality, which doesn’t.
I have seen multiple accounts how homosexuality is selected for. Similarly how ant queens have many non-producing drones whose existence is not a superflous extra, if you have some non-reproducing members in your family they can be an asset rather than a drag. You can be a fulltime uncle which is less possible if you need to be a full time father too. The non-reproductive sex can be a force to have social relations more strongly in place like how that role is more pronouced in bonobos.
Each child given up by being homosexual would have to be compensated for by two children had by one’s siblings. This doesn’t sound plausible to me.
if you are the 7th sibling then that is only 1/3rd of child per sibling parent. The effect of “33% more likely per sibling” which I didn’t previously know about fits in. If you end up having only very few families, risk that all of them do not reproduce by chance gets more significant. Upkeep of a “dubiously useful” extra person gets amortized better the more families there are.
Brothers doing wars tend to be somewhat even and thus continue for a long time. With 4 children, starting 4 lineages with 2 parents leads to more factions than 2 lineages with 3 parents. Or any other effect where increasing the number of families becomes blocked it then makes sense to make the “allowed families” to be more robust. Maybe on hitting starvation shanking the uncle leads to less infigting (sacrificial hierachy instead of lottery) and does not produce orphans.
But I don’t actually know. But seems there are things that actually need checking.
I agree that this is an important difference, but I think that “surely cannot be adaptive” ignores the power of group selection effects.
Group selection effects aren’t that strong.
Main morals I got out of that was to check and think through the issue rather than just extend the out-of-distribution human social reality ito everything.
Perhaps sometimes they are
Indeed, but insofar as this bonding function enhances IGF then this actually makes it an even more impressive example of alignment to evolution’s true goal. I know that there are a bunch of potential evolutionary rationales proposed for homosexuality but I personally haven’t studied it in depth nor are any super convincing to me so I’m just assuming the worst-case scenario for evolution here.
i.e. if evolution has precisely titrated the percentage of homosexuality etc so as to maximise IGF taking into account benefits of bonding, additional childcare, group selection etc, then this is actually evidence for evolution achieving a much greater level of alignment than otherwise!
What is evolution’s true goal? If it’s genetic fitness, then I don’t see how this demonstrates alignment. Human sexuality is still just an imperfect proxy, and doesn’t point at the base objective at all.
I agree that it’s very interesting how robust this is to the environment we grow up in, and I would expect there to be valuable lessons here for how value formation happens (and how we can control this process in machines).