It really makes my day whenever I read “scientific theories” that don’t fit the main paradigm or predictions of evolutionary theory. The evolution of homosexuality is one of my favorite paradoxes, maybe with the exception of gender evolution/sexual reproduction, that I’m going to save for another OP.
It doesn’t take Einstein to notice that the evolution of homosexuality is not only a paradox but it totally contradicts the driving force of evolution, which is supposed to be reproduction. Since homosexuals can’t reproduce, not in homosexual relations, a problem for evolutionary theory arises. Why would homosexuality evolve in the first place? But more so, why would natural selection preserve homosexuality?
However, as it is with many, many other evolutionary paradoxes the theories to explain them abound… Check out this one of the evolution of homosexuality:
The evolution of homosexuality: A new theory | Richard Prum
” …in the book I propose that human same sex attraction evolved specifically because it contributed to female sexual autonomy or to the freedom of choice…”
Besides, the recent survey among teenagers have shown that 27 Percent of California Teens Are Gender Nonconforming.
This shows that the evolution of homosexuality, or even gender disphoria, has taken a devolutionary turn… If I were a Darwinist, I would work on new evolutionary predictions, such as the evolution back to asexual reproduction or something like that…
The inability of natural selection to do what Darwinists have believed and claimed can do has proven again to be another evolutionary delusion…
Wat?
You’ve been corrected about this a thousand times. How many more times will it take before you get it?
Moderators: J-Mac posted this already. With other wording, but same crap.
J-Mac,
Since you missed the many corrections: evolution is neither expected, nor supposed, to maximize reproduction. It’s enough if reproduction is kept within a range where the population would succeed in continuing.
Also, sexual orientation and gender identity are really different. One can be cisgendered and heterosexual, cisgendered and homosexual, transgendered and heterosexual, and transgendered and homosexual. Gender transitioning can affect sexual orientation but it doesn’t have to.
In any event, I think we’d need to have much better evidence than we presently do to think that same-sex attraction is sufficiently widespread (geographically and historically) across human cultures to think that it needs an evolutionary explanation. We don’t need evolutionary explanations for culturally specific behaviors.
Boys and girls…This is not an anti-gay OP…
Cool off your engines boys and girls!
Homosexuals can reproduce. They just need some “help” but not from evolution, if you know what I mean… She failed them really bad…
Really?
I thought that philosophers agreed that gender was a social construct? You don’t like this apparently scientifically proven idea?
Some philosophers think that gender is a social construct and others don’t and some are just trying to figure out what the hell a social construction even is in the first place. The whole “social construction” business is a conceptual disaster in the strongest versions (e.g. Berger and Luckman) and in the weakest versions it’s trivially true.
Regardless of whether gender or sexual orientation are socially constructed, there’s a distinct question about the differences between behaviors (being attracted to people of the same biological sex as oneself) and identity (being categorized as homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, pansexual, etc.).
J-Mac, Evolution didn’t ‘evolve’, like eyesight. Its a natural product of variation. Just as 1853 mm tall humans didn’t ‘evolve’, they are part of the variation in height.
Now surely that’s enough to ban J-Mac.
Why do you care? Are you?
I like beer.
I can’t drink beer anymore (and I never drank nearly as much as some bellicose and horny jurists).
But I still like beer.
We couldn’t ban Byers and he’s an open White supremacist and anti-Semite. He was banned from Uncommon Descent for his anti-Semitism. Yet he’s welcome here. If someone like Byers can’t be banned from TSZ, neither can J-Mac.
Have we started banning important, paradigm-creating scientists now? Is that how low we’ve sunk????!!??
There’s plenty of space in Guano though, no?
I have always wondered how science and philosophy can be affected by sexual orientation. If it makes you feel good, I have suspected you to be a homosexual…but the one who is telling his life stories as if they were others…
I really don’t care what you suspect about me.
It’s not that. I like to be clear about people I talk to. I would like to know their standing, like Joe F and John H. I know where they stand and why they won’t move.
Capish?
You know my philosophical positions. I don’t see why my gender or sexual orientation have anything to do with this, and I will not answer your question. You can draw whatever inferences you wish based on that. I don’t respect you enough to care what you think about me.
Moved a bunch of posts to guano.
Thank you!
Walto, if they insist on prying into peoples personal life, yes, we ban them. Or should.
The posts I was referring to, now removed, were doing just that.
Why would I refrain from disclosing my sexual orientation to a complete stranger on the Internet?
It’s a baffling mystery.
What do you think this blog is all about? Your neighbour’s favorited colour?
I would like to know how many non Darwinists here support the “alternative” lifestyle and why?
I really think J-Macs last reply, to KN, should be the last straw.
Surely.
Moved some more posts to guano.
Discuss the content of the post, not the poster.
Neil … you may have removed some, but look at whats still there.
I moved another one to guano. There are still some that are borderline, but I’ll leave those for now.
it’s as simple as this: since I don’t know you, I have no reason to trust you with any personal information.
It’s just barely possible that you simply cannot see that asking strangers on the Internet very personal questions is completely inappropriate. That’s one possibility. The other is that you fully realize that it’s completely inappropriate but you just don’t care.
This thread has the stupidest comments by J-Mac ever. Homosexuals can reproduce without any help from anybody but an available sexual partner. The issue is whether they want to or not.
Evolution is not a person, it’s what happens because there’s life. So it cannot fail anybody because nobody is expecting it to do anything for anybody. Stop projecting from your beliefs in magical beings in the sky. Evolution is not one of those magical beings. It’s just stuff that happens.
Your magical being in the sky, on the other hand, would actually have a lot to explain if it wasn’t a ridiculous fantasy. It would have failed loads and loads of believers who have these homosexual inclinations and feel guilty because, they’d imagine, the magical being in the sky doesn’t like them for being exactly what “He” designed them to be.
If I were a bit cynical I’d suspect that you’re ranting homophobically because of your internal frustrations for being a closet case of what you think your imaginary friend designed you to be. So you project your frustration and exchange your god for evolution in every sentence. Just to let go some steam.
As I said, the stupidest comments ever by J-Mac. There’s plenty of alternative lifestyles J-Mac. I’m not a Darwinist, but you don’t need my permission, or my support, to be whatever you are. Nobody needs that permission. Neither from Darwinists, nor from non-Darwinists, let alone from confused god-believer bigots. So, don’t wait for it, just get out of the closet and be happy.
No.
Capisce?
I was joking, graham.
😀
Moved a comment to Guano. If the comment wasn’t meant to be insulting I apologize.
Amen. Now i hope that in the future that when I point out that evolution is “stuff happens” you won’t get upset with me. 🙂
Hi everyone,
Well, I can see I’m a bit late to the party, but I’ll throw in my two cents, for what it’s worth. Take it, or reject it, as you will. I’d like to briefly comment on three terms: “natural,” “orientation” (as in sexual orientation) and “gender.” All three are problematic, in my opinion.
Take “natural.” Some religious people use the word to mean “ordained by God” (the Author of Nature). Others, of an Aristotelian bent, use the term to mean “that which is conducive to the thriving of individuals of a certain kind.” For instance, meat-eating is natural for cats because cats thrive on meat. Still others use the term “natural” to mean “what you know how to do without being taught” – or in other words, “innate.”
Leaving aside the first sense of the word for now: I fully believe that heterosexuality is natural in the second sense: after all, if heterosexual marriage, followed by procreative sex and child-rearing, is not conducive to human thriving, then it is difficult to see what could possibly be. (At this point, someone is sure to bring up alternative parenting arrangements. All I’ll say here about other forms of parenting is that they rely either on surrogacy, which is not at all conducive to human thriving as it wrenches a child from its birth mother, or on insemination by walk-away dads, which strikes most people as socially irresponsible, or on artificial reproductive technology – a luxury which has only been available for a few decades. My intention here is not to criticize alternative parenting arrangements as such, but to simply point out that they are by definition marginal: the default mode of parenting for the species as a whole is marriage and procreation by a man and a woman.)
However, I don’t happen to think that heterosexuality is natural in the third sense of the word “natural”: I think it’s very much an acquired pattern of behavior. Failure to distinguish these two senses is what lies behind the fallacious but oft-heard argument that if heterosexuality is so natural, promotion of alternative lifestyles can’t possibly hurt anyone. But if heterosexuality is something that has to be learned, then promotion of other lifestyles is something which could, potentially, confuse and even alter the preferences of young people who would otherwise have thrived, growing up in a an environment where they were heavily steered towards marrying a person of the opposite sex. Is that actually happening in our own society? It’s hard to say, but I note for the record that the percentage of adults identifying as exclusively heterosexual is markedly lower for millennials than it is for older adults. Make of that what you will.
My own feeling, then, is that heterosexuality is not at all natural in the sense of “hardwired” or “innate”: on the contrary, it’s extremely fragile, because it’s not easily taught, and because it demands a number of social skills that take decades to acquire. In the absence of any societal pressures to conform to the heterosexual lifestyle, I suspect it would probably disappear in the space of two generations. People literally have to be brainwashed into being exclusively heterosexual, and monogamous in marriage. And I think that’s a good thing – for most of us.
To see what I mean, take a look at the lyrics to Wayne Fontana’s song, “The Game of Love.” Horribly heteronormative, ain’t it? Pure propaganda, isn’t it? Sure it is. But do we (as a species) need that kind of propaganda? Absolutely. Your parents didn’t tell you, “If you decide to get married and raise a family,…”; they said, “When you get married and raise a family,…” And they were right: if they hadn’t said that, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t have raised one.
Supposing (speaking purely hypothetically – I don’t expect to see it happen in my lifetime, in Western society) that we were to collectively and democratically opt for heteronormative “brainwashing” of children from an early age, for the good of society as a whole, we would still need to confront the question of how to treat those people who find that heterosexuality doesn’t suit them at all. On a social level, I think the only appropriate thing to do is to give them the space to be themselves, and (while they are growing up) to give them the choice to opt out of the heavy social conditioning that the rest of us require, in order to fully thrive as human beings. And we should respect that choice.
There have been attempts to treat homosexuality as if it were an alternative telos, or goal, for the minority of human beings who happen to be gay or lesbian: “what might be right for you might not be right for some.” However, I would caution against that line of argument: effectively, it turns gays and lesbians into another species, which I think is a terrible mistake.
I have no wish to discuss morality or theology in this brief comment of mine, so that’s all I’d like to say about the term “natural.”
I’d now like to discuss the term “orientation.” The problem I have with this term is twofold: first, it smacks of occult science; second, it’s a misguided metaphor.
Ever since the seventeenth century, science has forsworn nebulous talk of powers, potencies, dispositions, orientations, tendencies, and what have you – except insofar as they can be grounded in something actual. Thus we can legitimately say that salt has a tendency to dissolve in water, because of its underlying crystal structure, which is something actual and determinate. But a bare, naked, irreducible tendency? That would make no sense at all. So when I hear talk of people having basic orientations – whether heterosexual or homosexual is immaterial here – I cannot help thinking of Moliere’s old joke about opium sending people to sleep because it possesses a dormitive virtue. That kind of explanation explains nothing at all. In the absence of an objective, diagnostic tool that can measure my sexuality, or “sexual orientation,” the term means absolutely nothing.
But isn’t it a fact of life that some people prefer sex partners of the same sex, while others prefer sex partners of the opposite sex? Yes, but we need no talk of occult tendencies or orientations to account for this. The neutral term “preference” will do the trick. And once we decide to make use of this term, the temptation to regard this preference as being somehow constitutive of one’s very identity as a person completely disappears. For my preferences don’t define who I am, as a person.
I rather suspect that the whole point of introducing the term “orientation” into popular discourse was to smuggle in the notion of normativity: if James is of orientation X, then that is part of who he is, and he would be being untrue to himself if he acted in a way which was at variance with his fundamental orientation, as a human being. Let’s dispense with that nonsense. It is in any case at variance with the facts.
This brings me to my second point about the term “orientation”: it is a deeply misguided metaphor. One thinks of a compass that faithfully points north, because that is the way its needle is oriented. Are people like that? I think not. For starters, what about bisexuals? A compass needle can’t point in two directions, so what sense can be given to the term “orientation” here?
Perhaps some of you will be saying: “That couldn’t happen to me. I’m the way I am because that’s who I am. My sexual orientation is part of my identity.” With all due respect, I beg to differ. Think of ancient Sparta: an entire society of males who were socially conditioned to think of boys as being more attractive than women, and who, after a few years of being loved by older men, married and had sex with their wives for many years, for the purpose of reproduction and child-rearing – and then in their later years, went back to seeking the company of boys. Utterly bizarre – and yet, every guy in ancient Sparta felt that way. Tell me: what orientation did these men have? And what makes you so sure that you wouldn’t have done the same, had you grown up in Sparta?
The notion of sexual orientation also breaks down for the 1% or so of the population which is asexual. Which way does their compass point?
In any case, the very notion of a sexual orientation is utterly absurd. Think about it: what on earth is this orientation supposed to consist in?
Can we define heterosexuality as a tendency to seek out the company of members of the opposite sex? Surely it must be more than that: after all, there are many heterosexual males who spend most of their time in the company of other males – at the local pub, for instance. And for most women, their best friend is a female, not a male.
Can heterosexuality be defined instead as an inborn tendency to have sexual relations with members of the opposite sex? But in that case, the very idea of a newborn baby having such a tendency is risible. Babies don’t have tendencies to have sexual relations with anyone. Perhaps, you may reply, the tendency is a latent one, which surfaces during adolescence. But common observation suggests otherwise: young teenagers of both sexes tend to hang out predominantly with their own sex, and literally have to be pushed (usually by adults) to even say hello to a member of the opposite sex. And finally, sexual behavior is something which, in humans, has to be taught. So what, I ask, is left of the notion of an inborn sexual orientation? Very little, as far as I can tell.
My aim here is not to dispute the literature showing that there are (on average) biological differences between so-called “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals.” (The relative lengths of an individual’s second and fourth fingers would be one example.) But it would be a terrible abuse of science to appeal to these differences in an attempt to justify occult talk of people having a fixed and settled sexual orientation. That’s not science; that’s voodoo.
The third notion which I have trouble with is “gender.” Who gets to define it? You – and only you. But as Wittgenstein pointed out in connection with his private language argument, if you can’t (even in principle) be wrong about something because you and only you get to define it, then by the same token, you can’t be said to be right about it either. Without an external criterion of correctness, the term “gender” loses all meaning: in Humpty Dumpty fashion, it means whatever I say it means.
People seem to be equally confused about the term “gender.” One hears of “gender reveal” parties, but all they reveal is the sex of the baby. Passports in some countries indicate the gender of the bearer; in other countries, the sex. Which is it to be, and why? And if we opt for gender, then should we leave it blank when issuing passports for babies?
Gender madness seems to have infected our language as well. Children as young as five are now being taught that “you and only you can decide if you’re a boy or a girl.” Statements that were once considered truisms, such as “Boys have a penis, while girls have a vagina,” are now considered highly objectionable, as they exclude biological females who identify as male, and vice versa. But if the term “girl” now means “a child who identifies as female,” then what are we now supposed to call a biologically female child, irrespective of her gender identification? A BFC? And are we forbidden now to say things like “Patti gave birth to a ten pound baby boy,” as Rod Stewart did in his song, “Young Turks”? This, I have to say, is simply ridiculous.
There are of course individuals who are biologically intersex, and who do not fall into our neat categories of “male” and “female.” But that does not invalidate those categories; it simply means they are not exhaustive of reality. In any case, the attempt to assimilate a transgender individual to someone who is intersex is fundamentally misconceived, as an individual’s sex is something which can be objectively ascertained.
I shall stop here, as I think I’ve said enough to provoke a lively discussion.
I’m tempted to ask Vincent if he is a homosexual. 🙂
J-Mac’s latest projection, corrected:
Feeling better now that you see what you really wanted to write J-Mac? Breath J-Mac! Breath! Set yourself free! Your imaginary friend did it to you, so it’s “His” own doing. “He” shouldn’t be angry at you. “He” made you that way. Now be courageous and get out of the closet!
Why is it that its always the god botherers that are so obsessed with sex, (particularly the more exotic variations) ?
I think being “obsessed with sex” is pretty much hardwired in to the males of our species (at least) regardless of their theological tendencies.
“exotic” would imply the unfamiliar.
Folks often tend to be interested in things that are novel as apposed to the mundane.
I think a more pertinent question for a website supposedly about evolution is why doesn’t everyone spend all our time talking about things like sex and food.
peace
There are many kinds of species Vincent.
I don’t support any lifestyle. But I support a person’s decision on their lifestyle as long as it does not hurt anyone else. Why is that so hard to grasp?
Here’s one for J-Mac. Why does religion persist:
Mung,
Holy crap. Paul Nelson is an ass-hole.
Wait?! Didn’t I say that???
“..I feel that God designed me the way I am and He’s going to love me the way I am…”
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/11/12/gay-bowmanville-woman-speaking-out-after-oshawa-strips-her-membership-for-living-in-disobedience-to-the-scriptures.html
ETA: I have neither written this article nor I’m one the men in the picture, or both, just in case someone strongly believes in quantum mechanics…
I got nothin to do with that…