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THE GAY ANIMAL KINGDOM
The effeminate sheep & other problems with Darwinian sexual selection.
by Jonah Lehrer . Posted June 7, 2006 12:14 AM
From the JUN/JUL 2006 issue of Seed:
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?

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.

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."

Credit: Catherine Ledner

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.


Credit: Catherine Ledner

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.



--
"Science is the record of dead religions." -- Oscar Wilde

"There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to
whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is
impossible." -- Jack Vance

"Civilization is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" -- Ambrose Bierce

"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant

Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net

Interesting, but if homosexual were natural, why are there different sexes
at all? It would eliminate sexual competition completely, which is more
efficient. If all species should be homo-sexual, i.e. same sex, then there
would be no genders. Because there are different genders, there is a
natural preference for heterosexuality, homosexuality being the anomoly.

The other flaw in her argument (that because it is nature humans should
emulate it) is that in nature all sorts of behaviors occur that humans
should not emulate, e.g. eating children, fighting and killing rivals,
multiple wives, etc. Humans are "civilized" and our social behavior is not
"wild" like nature.