The truth about sexual attraction
2003-09-09 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
archershipsThe truth about sexual attraction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4732308-111397,00.html
Joan Roughgarden, who was once a man, thinks Darwin got it wrong about
sex. By Laura Spinney
Laura Spinney
Thursday August 14, 2003
The Guardian
On a sweltering day in June 1997, a gay pride parade passed down
Market Street, San Francisco. Among the thousands marching was Joan -
then Jonathan - Roughgarden, a theoretical ecologist and marine
biologist of some repute. A few months later, at 52, she underwent a
sex change to become a transgendered woman. But that day was a turning
point of a different sort. "I was looking at all these people and
realising that my discipline said they weren't possible," she recalls.
"Homosexuality is not supposed to exist, according to biology."
She did not know what the future held for her, but she resolved that
if she managed to keep her job as a biology professor at Stanford
University she would explore how widespread variation in gender and
sexuality was in the animal kingdom. In the event she was forced to
give up some administrative responsibilities and started to catalogue
homosexuality in other species.
What she found astounded her. Studies document same-sex courtship
rituals and mating in more than 300 species. Still more species have
multiple genders, or exhibit gender reversal and hermaphroditism. Yet
no one had collated them, no one had sought to explain this
phenomenon. "Biologists know there is a problem there, they know there
is a lot of same-sex sexuality, and it is in the back of everyone's
mind that we are going to have to deal with it at some point," she
says.
The problem is that dealing with it means challenging the master text
in biology: Darwin's theory of evolution. Or more precisely, the part
on the selection of sexual characteristics. In her book Evolution's
Rainbow, due out next March, Roughgarden asserts that Darwin's theory
is "false and inadequate" and that there is no patching it up.
Her main point of contention is over Darwin's notion that females
select males for show, because their showy secondary sexual
characteristics - the peacock's tail, for instance - reflect good
genes. Because eggs are supposed to be costly to produce and sperm
cheap, this in turn has led to the stereotypical - and, she believes,
erroneous - depiction of males as promiscuous and females as coy and
discerning. That false message has been picked up by evolutionary
biologists, says Roughgarden, but you only have to look at animal
societies to see that it is not true.
Take Japanese macaques, whose females are promiscuously gay. During
the breeding season, they form lesbian consortships as well as
heterosexual pairings. Among bonobos - the only primates apart from us
to mate face-to-face - most females indulge in lesbian behaviour,
rubbing their vulvas together, because, says Roughgarden, "If you did
not do it, then you would not have any sisters. You would not have any
buddies. It is absolutely necessary."
Bonobos perfectly illustrate the theory she offers up to replace
Darwin's: social selection. According to this, much of the sexual
behaviour observed in animals is not designed to propagate genes, at
least not directly, but to make the protagonist socially acceptable to
a powerful clique, thus ensuring him or her access to potential mates
and a safe environment.
The penis of the female spotted hyena is very similar to the male's,
although it contains the urethra and birth canal. This she erects and
flashes about to other females, says Roughgarden, to advertise her
eligibility to join their gang. "The party line is that genitals are
used for the exchange of sperm," she says. "But the fact is that among
mammals, they are often coloured very brightly and are bigger than
they need to be." She believes oversized genitalia, the peacock's tail
and perhaps even the enormous human brain evolved as a medium of
communication, of body language between members of the same sex,
because of this need for social inclusion.
The second part of her theory is that females do not choose males for
their genes, as Darwin taught, but to avoid "deadbeat dads". She says
females manage male power by selecting for good fathers rather than
good sperm. This, she believes, creates a marketplace for reproductive
opportunity.
Dominant males have a lot on their plate, maintaining their physical
condition, controlling large territories and seeing off challengers.
So it is in their interest to sub-contract out the task of finding a
mate. The example she gives is the bluegill sunfish of North America,
where a dominant male will recruit a smaller, feminine male -
so-called because he sports female colours - in what looks like a
homosexual courtship. They mate with a female in a menage ¿ trois. The
conventional view is that the feminine male mimics the female to steal
copulations. But Roughgarden says no one has proved the dominant male
does not know the feminine male is male. She argues that he is
negotiating a reproductive opportunity for both himself and the
dominant male, that he may have been "schooled" with the females and
therefore brings to the deal his prior rapport with them. Data show
females prefer to enter territories containing dominant and feminine
males.
She admits there is no direct evidence to support her hypothesis and
has a get-out clause, arguing that as a theoretical ecologist it is
her job to explain diversity and the job of experimentalists to gather
the proof. Paul Vasey, a behavioural neurobiologist at the University
of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, studies Japanese macaques in their
habitat of Mount Fuji. He says their lesbian pairings in the breeding
season do not promote social cohesion, because '- just as in
heterosexual pairs - the females avoid incest. Dominant females will
often also protect their subordinate lesbian partners against
higher-ranking aggressors. In his opinion, their motivation is pure
sensual pleasure.
Perhaps, in taking on Darwin, Roughgarden only wants to set the ball
rolling. In the book she makes clear her personal and political
standpoint, warding off criticism with the argument that throughout
history those who have upheld Darwinian theory have had an axe to
grind - whether it be to defend male philandering or to propagate the
notion of a genetic elite.
She is also careful not to extrapolate her findings to humans,
pointing out that patterns of homosexuality vary between species. "One
can't draw parallels with humans other than to say that homosexuality
is a regular part of nature and not some pathology," she says. In
passing, however, she mentions the hijra, an ancient, caste-like group
of transgendered people in India, and traces gender-crossing in
European history from the Cybelean priestesses of the Roman Empire,
through the transvestite saints of the middle ages right back to Joan
of Arc.
Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and
People, by Joan Roughgarden, will be published by University of
California Press.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4732308-111397,00.html
Joan Roughgarden, who was once a man, thinks Darwin got it wrong about
sex. By Laura Spinney
Laura Spinney
Thursday August 14, 2003
The Guardian
On a sweltering day in June 1997, a gay pride parade passed down
Market Street, San Francisco. Among the thousands marching was Joan -
then Jonathan - Roughgarden, a theoretical ecologist and marine
biologist of some repute. A few months later, at 52, she underwent a
sex change to become a transgendered woman. But that day was a turning
point of a different sort. "I was looking at all these people and
realising that my discipline said they weren't possible," she recalls.
"Homosexuality is not supposed to exist, according to biology."
She did not know what the future held for her, but she resolved that
if she managed to keep her job as a biology professor at Stanford
University she would explore how widespread variation in gender and
sexuality was in the animal kingdom. In the event she was forced to
give up some administrative responsibilities and started to catalogue
homosexuality in other species.
What she found astounded her. Studies document same-sex courtship
rituals and mating in more than 300 species. Still more species have
multiple genders, or exhibit gender reversal and hermaphroditism. Yet
no one had collated them, no one had sought to explain this
phenomenon. "Biologists know there is a problem there, they know there
is a lot of same-sex sexuality, and it is in the back of everyone's
mind that we are going to have to deal with it at some point," she
says.
The problem is that dealing with it means challenging the master text
in biology: Darwin's theory of evolution. Or more precisely, the part
on the selection of sexual characteristics. In her book Evolution's
Rainbow, due out next March, Roughgarden asserts that Darwin's theory
is "false and inadequate" and that there is no patching it up.
Her main point of contention is over Darwin's notion that females
select males for show, because their showy secondary sexual
characteristics - the peacock's tail, for instance - reflect good
genes. Because eggs are supposed to be costly to produce and sperm
cheap, this in turn has led to the stereotypical - and, she believes,
erroneous - depiction of males as promiscuous and females as coy and
discerning. That false message has been picked up by evolutionary
biologists, says Roughgarden, but you only have to look at animal
societies to see that it is not true.
Take Japanese macaques, whose females are promiscuously gay. During
the breeding season, they form lesbian consortships as well as
heterosexual pairings. Among bonobos - the only primates apart from us
to mate face-to-face - most females indulge in lesbian behaviour,
rubbing their vulvas together, because, says Roughgarden, "If you did
not do it, then you would not have any sisters. You would not have any
buddies. It is absolutely necessary."
Bonobos perfectly illustrate the theory she offers up to replace
Darwin's: social selection. According to this, much of the sexual
behaviour observed in animals is not designed to propagate genes, at
least not directly, but to make the protagonist socially acceptable to
a powerful clique, thus ensuring him or her access to potential mates
and a safe environment.
The penis of the female spotted hyena is very similar to the male's,
although it contains the urethra and birth canal. This she erects and
flashes about to other females, says Roughgarden, to advertise her
eligibility to join their gang. "The party line is that genitals are
used for the exchange of sperm," she says. "But the fact is that among
mammals, they are often coloured very brightly and are bigger than
they need to be." She believes oversized genitalia, the peacock's tail
and perhaps even the enormous human brain evolved as a medium of
communication, of body language between members of the same sex,
because of this need for social inclusion.
The second part of her theory is that females do not choose males for
their genes, as Darwin taught, but to avoid "deadbeat dads". She says
females manage male power by selecting for good fathers rather than
good sperm. This, she believes, creates a marketplace for reproductive
opportunity.
Dominant males have a lot on their plate, maintaining their physical
condition, controlling large territories and seeing off challengers.
So it is in their interest to sub-contract out the task of finding a
mate. The example she gives is the bluegill sunfish of North America,
where a dominant male will recruit a smaller, feminine male -
so-called because he sports female colours - in what looks like a
homosexual courtship. They mate with a female in a menage ¿ trois. The
conventional view is that the feminine male mimics the female to steal
copulations. But Roughgarden says no one has proved the dominant male
does not know the feminine male is male. She argues that he is
negotiating a reproductive opportunity for both himself and the
dominant male, that he may have been "schooled" with the females and
therefore brings to the deal his prior rapport with them. Data show
females prefer to enter territories containing dominant and feminine
males.
She admits there is no direct evidence to support her hypothesis and
has a get-out clause, arguing that as a theoretical ecologist it is
her job to explain diversity and the job of experimentalists to gather
the proof. Paul Vasey, a behavioural neurobiologist at the University
of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, studies Japanese macaques in their
habitat of Mount Fuji. He says their lesbian pairings in the breeding
season do not promote social cohesion, because '- just as in
heterosexual pairs - the females avoid incest. Dominant females will
often also protect their subordinate lesbian partners against
higher-ranking aggressors. In his opinion, their motivation is pure
sensual pleasure.
Perhaps, in taking on Darwin, Roughgarden only wants to set the ball
rolling. In the book she makes clear her personal and political
standpoint, warding off criticism with the argument that throughout
history those who have upheld Darwinian theory have had an axe to
grind - whether it be to defend male philandering or to propagate the
notion of a genetic elite.
She is also careful not to extrapolate her findings to humans,
pointing out that patterns of homosexuality vary between species. "One
can't draw parallels with humans other than to say that homosexuality
is a regular part of nature and not some pathology," she says. In
passing, however, she mentions the hijra, an ancient, caste-like group
of transgendered people in India, and traces gender-crossing in
European history from the Cybelean priestesses of the Roman Empire,
through the transvestite saints of the middle ages right back to Joan
of Arc.
Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and
People, by Joan Roughgarden, will be published by University of
California Press.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 11:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 11:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 11:24 am (UTC)* straw-man Darwinism can't explain homosexuality
* homosexuality exists
therefore
* Darwinism is wrong.
This argument manages to offend both my inner philosopher and my inner evolutionary biologist, no small achievement.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 01:08 pm (UTC)I would answer that evolution produces creatures who have traits which led their ancestors to do well at survival and procreation.
For instance, (uncontroversially) "sex is fun." So, like everyone else, I enjoy masturbating, even though masturbation doesn't help spread my genes.
Additionally, although there are some commonalities, I am sexually attracted to different people than my neighbor is. (Currently I happen to like women who remind me of my ex-girlfriend Nancy Drew.) In short "who I am attracted to" is not something I was born with, instead it's a combination of my genetic inclinations, my hormonal history, and my life experience.
So, to recap, humans like sex, and their sexual preferences are somewhat fluid. It is not hard to tell a Darwinistic story of why both of these are (on the whole) useful (in the evolutionary sense) traits. It's also not hard to imagine that the combination of these two traits would in some instances (homosexuality, masturbation, etc...) lead people to engage in "widespread non-reproductive sexual behavior."
Nonetheless, as long as these two traits are effective (compared to the alternatives) in producing reproductive sexual behavior, they'll persist.
--
Now, all of this is a "just so story." But I find it a plausible (and reasonably compelling) high-level explanation of homosexuality, which (as a bonus) doesn't necessitate throwing out 200 years of good science.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 01:31 pm (UTC)And yes, I agree with you that who you're attracted to is not entirely biological. Personally, I'm more inclined to believe that sexual selection is more socially based, but that's beside the point.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 01:47 pm (UTC)No, what I'm saying is that evolution "favors" beings that find sex enjoyable because beings who like sex have more sex (and therefore more offspring) than beings who don't like sex. It's almost a tautology, since "evolution favors X" means "beings with X outreproduce/outcompete beings without X."
And that non-procreative acts are just an expression of a root motivation, one that -also- motivates people to procreate?
But this is true in many contexts -- that behavior that was for most of human history evolutionarily smart is in the modern world useless or even harmful.
For instance, people have an evolutionarily-smart gluttony for sweet foods and fatty foods, even though in the modern world such an urge is probably net unhealthy.
Mean Genes is a cute little book on the subject.
It seems almost too simple.
Simple is beautiful.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 02:19 pm (UTC)i'm willing to take you up on that statement. have you considered the fundamental idea underlying darwinian evolution (and thus, all of biology)? genes, or rather alleles, that are associated with increased reproductive success will be passed on at a relatively greater rate than genes (alleles) which are associated with traits leading to (relatively) decreased reproductive success. if your genetic makeup says: this individual is, taking his/her environment into account, likely to have a relatively large number of offspring, it follows that that individual's alleles/genes/what have you will occur somewhat more frequently in the next generation's gene pool, and so forth. this is the accepted view on how species evolve and new species emerge.
in a strictly darwinian and strictly literal sense, then, homosexuality is a lethal condition. if one accepts that an individual chooses to have sex exclusively with other members of its own sex on a purely hereditary basis, any variant of a gene that results in such is an evolutionary dead-end. don't want to engage in sexually fruitful mating behavior? fine, there's nothing morally wrong with it, i concede. but as far as your genes are concerned, the buck stops there. any true "gay gene" would be completely maladaptive in terms of reproduction, and therefore, in the *most* literal sense, there is no reason why homosexuality should exist.
of course i'm not taking bisexuality or polysexuality or any reproductive "fringe benefits" such a gene could offer to sibs, environmental effects, yada yada yada, into account. but you made a statement and i went in for a rebuttal. cheers!
yours,
holly - student of evolutionary biology and theory, radical darwinist, bisexual adult, and a damn good biologist
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 02:39 pm (UTC)Saying "a gene for homosexuality doesn't make evolutionary sense" is very different from saying "homosexuality doesn't make evolutionary sense."
And, to the best of my knowledge, there's no evidence that homosexuality is genetic.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/DailyNews/gaygene990422.html
See also all of my comments with
no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 01:54 pm (UTC)Um...that "accepted view" completely fails to account for things like the various species of hymenoptera, which produce huge numbers of individuals who have zero chance of reproduction.
if one accepts that an individual chooses to have sex exclusively with other members of its own sex on a purely hereditary basis, any variant of a gene that results in such is an evolutionary dead-end.
Bullshit.
of course i'm not taking bisexuality or polysexuality or any reproductive "fringe benefits" such a gene could offer to sibs, environmental effects, yada yada yada, into account.
Oh, well, there you go. If you ignore all sorts of things, then your argument makes sense.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 11:41 am (UTC)Evolution does not in any way explicitly exclude homosexuality. Darwinian theory doesn't apply to individuals, it applies to populations. Individual variation drives population diversity, so on an individual level, pretty much any strategy or mechanism is valid.
An individual specimen engaging in a homosexual act does not preclude them ever engaging in heterosexual acts.
And the "It's my job to come up with ideas and someone else's to prove them right or wrong" bit sounds... well... like bullshit.
I may check the library for the book, but I probably won't buy it.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 01:56 pm (UTC)Actually, it applies to genes. Populations don't replicate, so selection can't operate on them.
And genes only care about their own reproductive success, not that of the guy who has to haul them around.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 12:38 pm (UTC)Dr. Tatiana's sex advice to all creation
which basically deals with all sorts of sexual behavior in nature, both reproductive and recreational, and why biology allows for both.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 02:36 pm (UTC)I also think there's going to be a difference between the book and the article about the book. Should be an interesting read. Thanks.