Do you believe it? An obligate homosexual sibling would need to help their siblings have an additional 4 children who survive to reproduction in order to break even. That is a significant burden — especially given infant mortality rates in the ancestral environment, we’re potentially talking about 8 additional pregnancies, at which point it seems implausible.
Ockham’s razor might tell us that LG, where the individual has a mind which motivates against reproduction, are simply the consequence of some developmental failure?
We do not live in the ancient environment we evolved for. I agree that today in developed countries, each homosexual person having 4 extra nieces/nephews sounds very unlikely—most people don’t have 4 kids.
But in the ancient jungle… okay, I am not sure what exactly was the most likely reason for death, but I would guess war for men, childbirth for women, and dying as a child from malnutrition or disease or accident for both. Women having maybe 15 kids on average, of whom maybe 3 reach adulthood… and especially if you have matriarchy, that is kids belong to their mother, fatherhood is an unknown concept, men naturally take care of their nieces/nephews… especially considering that most men did not reproduce anyway… it sounds possible.
(It would make even more sense from the evolutionary perspective as a conditional response: a gene which, if you are male, makes you gay if you are below-average masculine compared to the rest of your tribe. You were most likely not going to reproduce anyway, don’t risk your life fighting the local alpha male, focus on feeding and protecting your relatives instead.)
Makes me wonder… in societies without homophobia, do gays live longer than heterosexual men on average?
Ok so I did some reading and my sense is that obligate homosexuality is not very common in the type of matriarchal hunter-gatherer societies you mention (and is not found in wild animals), but is found in domesticated humans and animals. There does appear to be some genetic component as there is a bit of heritability. The obvious question is if there is some selection effect present in domestic environments not present in the wild.
There are two hypotheses which seem somewhat plausible; in both, the gene persists largely due to low mate choice on behalf of domesticated females. In the first, (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40750-016-0056-6), domesticated females are coercively mated with males without regard to sexual preferences (by parents who arrange marriages in the human case, and human breeders in the animal case), and so the defect is not subject to much selection pressure and gains prominence through drift. At first glance, this seems more convincing for the animal case and less so for the human case — I imagine that in many arranged marriages where there is an obligate homosexual male partner, many of the children are not his. In the second, females have to compete for high-status mates in a highly stratified society (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4534200/), and the gay gene makes them especially seductive. This seems somewhat just-so to me (is a wealthier husband worth a gay brother when it comes to fitness?), but the preliminary regressions at least don’t count against it.
I like the logic of a conditional response gene, but it doesn’t seem to bear out, at least in our society. Many homosexuals manifest gender-atypical behavior well before puberty, which seems to be evidence against the hypothesis.
Also (and this is really just from-the-seat-of-pants-musing), coalitions seem to be very important for tribal social dynamics. In my anecdotal experience, homosexuals seem to have higher coalition-building skills than heterosexuals on average. If anything, they might be more threatening to the “alpha” male (to the extent one would even exist) — again, anecdotally, macho types seem to be pretty bad at playing that sort of soft-power coalition-building game.
“Societies without homophobia” — let me know if you find one! I don’t say this gleefully.
“Societies without homophobia” — let me know if you find one!
Ancient Greece? Maybe Japan? Dunno, never cared about this topic deeply, but I assume the obvious candidates would be countries without Christianity or Islam.
Do you believe it? An obligate homosexual sibling would need to help their siblings have an additional 4 children who survive to reproduction in order to break even. That is a significant burden — especially given infant mortality rates in the ancestral environment, we’re potentially talking about 8 additional pregnancies, at which point it seems implausible.
Ockham’s razor might tell us that LG, where the individual has a mind which motivates against reproduction, are simply the consequence of some developmental failure?
We do not live in the ancient environment we evolved for. I agree that today in developed countries, each homosexual person having 4 extra nieces/nephews sounds very unlikely—most people don’t have 4 kids.
But in the ancient jungle… okay, I am not sure what exactly was the most likely reason for death, but I would guess war for men, childbirth for women, and dying as a child from malnutrition or disease or accident for both. Women having maybe 15 kids on average, of whom maybe 3 reach adulthood… and especially if you have matriarchy, that is kids belong to their mother, fatherhood is an unknown concept, men naturally take care of their nieces/nephews… especially considering that most men did not reproduce anyway… it sounds possible.
(It would make even more sense from the evolutionary perspective as a conditional response: a gene which, if you are male, makes you gay if you are below-average masculine compared to the rest of your tribe. You were most likely not going to reproduce anyway, don’t risk your life fighting the local alpha male, focus on feeding and protecting your relatives instead.)
Makes me wonder… in societies without homophobia, do gays live longer than heterosexual men on average?
Ok so I did some reading and my sense is that obligate homosexuality is not very common in the type of matriarchal hunter-gatherer societies you mention (and is not found in wild animals), but is found in domesticated humans and animals. There does appear to be some genetic component as there is a bit of heritability. The obvious question is if there is some selection effect present in domestic environments not present in the wild.
There are two hypotheses which seem somewhat plausible; in both, the gene persists largely due to low mate choice on behalf of domesticated females. In the first, (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40750-016-0056-6), domesticated females are coercively mated with males without regard to sexual preferences (by parents who arrange marriages in the human case, and human breeders in the animal case), and so the defect is not subject to much selection pressure and gains prominence through drift. At first glance, this seems more convincing for the animal case and less so for the human case — I imagine that in many arranged marriages where there is an obligate homosexual male partner, many of the children are not his. In the second, females have to compete for high-status mates in a highly stratified society (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4534200/), and the gay gene makes them especially seductive. This seems somewhat just-so to me (is a wealthier husband worth a gay brother when it comes to fitness?), but the preliminary regressions at least don’t count against it.
I like the logic of a conditional response gene, but it doesn’t seem to bear out, at least in our society. Many homosexuals manifest gender-atypical behavior well before puberty, which seems to be evidence against the hypothesis.
Also (and this is really just from-the-seat-of-pants-musing), coalitions seem to be very important for tribal social dynamics. In my anecdotal experience, homosexuals seem to have higher coalition-building skills than heterosexuals on average. If anything, they might be more threatening to the “alpha” male (to the extent one would even exist) — again, anecdotally, macho types seem to be pretty bad at playing that sort of soft-power coalition-building game.
“Societies without homophobia” — let me know if you find one! I don’t say this gleefully.
Ancient Greece? Maybe Japan? Dunno, never cared about this topic deeply, but I assume the obvious candidates would be countries without Christianity or Islam.