The Future of Love. was Re: [extropy-chat] Gay marriage in Spain, a world of change, biology, last post, post, etc.

[Damien Sullivan]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 08:38:01PM -0700, The Avantguardian wrote:

> chimpanzee and the pygmy chimpanzee or bonobo. He
> brings up a very important point and that is that we
> are 98% related to chimpanzees and bonobos. The 2%
> difference is about twice as much as there is between
> chimps and bonobos who are 99% identical genetically.

Yet have strikingly different social structures and behaviors.  And humans are
more different still.

> gorillas and orangatang. Long story short, for all
> intents and purposes, we are more like a sub-species
> of chimpanzee than our own genus.

No, more like a third species of chimpanzee; sub-species implies interbreeding
and not too much difference.

As far as sex goes, all of the ape species are different, which makes
reconstructing the ancestral pattern kind of difficult.  As far as the two
chimps go, both have a particular highly visible female estrous (which lasts
much longer in bonobos (the signal, not the actual fertility)).  But it's not
obviously a matter of humans losing it, since the other apes don't have that
either, AFAIK, though they probably have other ways of signalling being in
heat, unlike humans.  Parsimoniously, the chimp red bottom evolved after the
chimp-human split (but before the chimp-bonobo split).

There are some hints in the second edition of _The Selfish Gene_ that sexual
strategies may cycle a lot, and quickly; in a lot of cases there may not be
stable strategies, and anything we see would be a snapshot of an eternally
evolving population.  Though he was just talking about coyness and looseness
and good fathers vs. philanderers, not homosexuality.

>      Thus, IMHO the key to the biological understanding of homosexuality is
>      studying the bonobos who are almost all bi-sexual trading sexual favors
>      with members of the same sex as often as with the opposite. For the

Different kind of sex, though, if I recall De Waal's book.  Lots of
brief stimulation without going to orgasm, and none or little of the dedicated
homosexuality we see in humans.

>       My suggestion is that homosexuality evolved in
> the common ancestor of humans, bonobos, and chimps. In

I'm not sure "mystery X evolved at the root, then got heavily modified 3
times" is more parsimonious than "mystery X evolved a couple of times".

> bonobos, homosexuality became the rule, with every
> member of bonobo society being homosexual (yet still
> having enough heterosexual sex to reproduce). In

You used bisexual earlier, which seems more accurate...

> humans it appears that homexuality persisted in some

It didn't just persist, it became the dominant mode for some people.  There's
a big difference between social lubricant and "I am strongly attracted to my
own sex and not to the one I could actually make babies with."

-xx- Damien X-)