Laura Schlesinger once said: “If you’re gay or a lesbian, it’s a biological error that inhibits you from relating normally to the opposite sex” (Source). This created a lot of uproar, but it got me thinking about whether she could “technically” be right (despite her bigoted agenda)? Of course if something’s a biological mistake, it would say nothing about ethics or public policy. If albinism is a biological mistake it doesn’t mean albinos are evil or should have less rights than The Pigmented.
Still, is it possible to defend a position that being gay is a biological error even if this has no political consequences? Here’s a more detailed, non-bigoted version from Richard Dawkins:
Yes, yes, I know Michelangelo might not, as it happens, have been interested in impressing females. It is still entirely plausible that his brain was “designed” by natural selection for impressing females, just as — whatever his personal preferences — his penis was designed for impregnating them. (The Ancestor’s Tale, p.270)
The Gay Uncle Theory
The assumption behind Laura’s specific argument is that homosexuality renders an organism sterile and is therefore not advantageous from an evolutionary perspective. But there’s a glaring counterexample: social insects. Most ants you see on the ground are sterile females who exist only to bring food for their sisters in the nest. Ants/bees thrive because of sterile workers. The problem is ants have a mechanism to account for this. Because of their chromosome structure, a sterile worker is more closely related to her sister than her daughter (if she had one). So she actually spreads her genes faster by being sterile and taking care of her sisters than by breeding. People have no such mechanism.
There’s been an alternate idea proposed as a potential way in which homosexuality is advantageous. This is the gay uncle who’s beneficial for the whole tribe because he helps take care of his nephews and nieces thereby propagating [some of] his genes. But this isn’t too plausible. An uncle/aunt share on average 25% of their genes with their nieces/nephews. The same person shares 50% of their genes with their own child. So to make helping your sibling raise his/her kids as reproductively advantageous to you as raising kids of your own, you’d have to help your sibling have TWICE as many kids than you would have had ON TOP OF any kids they might have had if you weren’t there. Although it’s possible that this occurs in some situations, it just seems a bit far-fetched as an explanation for homosexuality.
Attraction vs Reproduction
I think the real problem is that we don’t have a good intuition of evolutionary/biological processes so we project our own ideas onto them (including ideas of teleology or purpose). We might think of some grand system like Sexual Attraction that is subservient to the purpose of Sexual Reproduction. And that’s how it’s been for millions of years, etc etc. In reality, the network of mechanisms and purposes is very complex and is changing for all species for all time. I would suspect that for insects, there probably isn’t even much of a difference between attraction and reproduction, it’s the same mechanism. But with animals that have a more complex brain structure, the mere fact that the two become distinguishable shows the purposes don’t overlap 100%.
Interestingly enough, Dr Laura’s statement reveals little more than the standard conservative conflation between sex and reproduction. Luckily for us, nature makes no such conflation. When two lions or armadillos or bats mate it’s not because of some urge to Continue the Species, it’s the physical urge to have sex. That is, it’s almost certainly the fact that having sex feels good (at least for the most intelligent species). And as soon as you have that, attraction becomes a thing of its own, and is free to go off and find other purposes, such as group cohesion, relieving stress, pair bonding, dominance of others, group politics, placating others and many more. Attraction is used for all these purposes in [say] bonobos as well as humans. [As for Dawkins, his statement still seems very solid because he wasn’t talking about Michelangelo’s attraction mechanisms.]
Evolutionary Biases
When we look at our biology as having very specific, single-minded Systems (and official, single Purposes), I think we almost co-opt a religious hangup where everything must have some formal, single purpose given from above. This does us no service, especially given how many political arguments rest on saying “human trait X is for purpose Y”. Most of these are simplistic and should be treated with caution.
The true evolutionary ins and outs of homosexuality (as opposed to bisexuality) are still being debated. But Dr Laura’s statement also reveals another common bias: talking as if the environment of times past (eg. the savannas humans evolved in) is the “true”/”natural” environment for the discussion. Even if research shows that homosexuality was harmful to an individual’s genetic success in the past, this has no bearing on today. The environment changes. IVF, test-tube babies and other reproductive technologies are as much part of our biological environment as traditional babymaking. Today, the only way being gay might be considered harmful to the organism is that it exposes the organism to persecution. In which case Dr Laura’s bigotry is merely a self-fulfilling prophecy. But by that standard, being born female in Iran would also be a gross biological error.
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