The evolutionary success of male homosexuality
Congratulations to the Nobel Price, Svante Pääbo! I came into contact with Pääbo's research through David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018).
But it is mostly for another reason I came to bear Svante Pääbo in mind: Because he is a homosexual man who married a woman and had two children. Svante Pääbo thought that he was an exclusive homosexual. But then he met a woman with "boyish charms" and discovered he was actually a bi-sexual. They married and formed a family together, Wikipedia reveals.
The riddle of homosexuality has long puzzled evolutionary theory. Some people have claimed that homosexuality genes could be evolutionarily viable because homosexual men become really great uncles. However, there is little proof that homosexual men actually are any better uncles than heterosexual men.
So evolutionists have stated that the numbers simply don't add up. Greg Cochran, for example, thinks that since homosexuality genes can't be evolutionarily viable, male homosexuality is probably caused by a virus.
The numbers do add up
I think there is a fundamental flaw in those calculations: The idea that homosexual men failed to reproduce. Just because they largely fail to reproduce in current mainstream Western society doesn't mean that they failed to reproduce throughout history.
Svante Pääbo is not the first openly homosexual man who also fell for a woman. Lytton Stratchey had a fling with Dora Carrington from 1916 onwards. Diplomat Harold Nicholson married writer Vita Sackville-West in 1913 and they had two children together, although he mostly was a homosexual. Vita was exceptionally tall and what would today be called a butch lesbian who later had a relationship with the ten year older Virginia Woolf. A time after his marriage to Vita, Harold was back in his old habits of relationships with men. Still, he actually managed to procreate.
Moreover, it seems not uncommon that homosexual men are hetero-romantics. Queen singer Freddy Mercury, for example, always had a weak spot for his early girlfriend Mary Austin.
In laboratory studies, homosexual men appear very category specific. When shown sexually explicit pictures of women, they got no more of an erection than when they looked at landscape pictures. Heterosexual men were also category specific in they sexual response, although not as much as homosexual men. And heterosexual women weren't category specific at all. All this implies that homosexual men could have some problems getting an erection together with a woman.
But getting an erection is only a small part of human procreation. Making the children is the easy part. Taking care of them is the difficult part. If homosexuals were as good as heterosexuals at taking care of their children, they could have fair chances in the evolutionary game after all.
When in Rome
In current Western society, a few homosexual men marry women after all, like the above mentioned Svante Pääbo. Those men do that out of free will. For an openly homosexual man, marrying a man would be at least as a socially acceptable as marrying a woman.
In most societies in history, living an openly homosexual life was not an option. Marrying a woman was what you did. And when married you were obliged to get it up on the right occasion, somehow. The homosexual men in history had strong incentives to, if possible, find that one boyish woman to whom they could actually feel enough attraction to fulfill their marital duties.
There is a reason why more or less all human societies have traditions of men marrying women: Men, on average, desire women. But for the individual man, there are more reasons than pure attraction. Social conformity. Competition: if others compete for women, chances are many homosexuals do so too, just because that’s the competition.
Science hasn't found the homosexual gene. Among identical twins of which one is homosexual, the other twin is far from always also a homosexual: Rates vary between 20 and 66 percent of in different studies. But still, biological factors seem to be at play. Homosexuality is disproportionately common among men with several older brothers. Only biological brothers count. Homosexual men seem to have distinctive facial morphologies. They have on average higher 2D:4D ratios and longer penises. Although homosexuality is not as simply genetic as many other traits, it certainly has a biological component. I don't know what that component is. I only know that it is probably wrong to assume that phenotypic male homosexuality was a great obstacle to procreation.
It might be seen as the wrong focus to talk about Svante Pääbo's sexual partners instead of his research. But Pääbo's research is about who had sex with whom in prehistory. Is it not just fair then if some of his partner choices are saved for the future? It would indeed be interesting to know whether any of our Neanderthal ancestors was actually a homosexual. The descendants of those of us alive now will probably be just as interested in that question some tens of thousands of years into the future.
Is Homosexuality more Prevalent in Agropastoral than in Hunting and Gathering Societies? Evidence
from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample
Menelaos Apostolou, 2016
The weak selection pressures hypothesis, argues that same-sex attraction has been the result of weak selection pressures during the period of human evolution. Such pressures were predominantly the consequence of arranged marriage in which individuals, irrespectively of their attractions, are mated to opposite-sex partners. Arranged marriage is more common in societies which base their subsistence on agriculture and animal husbandry than in societies which base their subsistence on hunting and gathering. Accordingly, it is predicted that homosexuality would be more prevalent in the former than in the latter societies. Using anthropological evidence from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, the present study finds support for this hypothesis.
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What Accounts for Cross-Cultural Variation in the Expression of Homosexuality?
Rebecca Kyle, 2009
[H]omosexuality is increasingly likely to be present as population pressure increases... That none of the exclusively hunter-gatherer societies had any significant manifestations of homosexuality is particularly noteworthy, especially considering that over half of high population pressure societies have significant expressions of homosexuality in their culture... The data registers a Spearman Correlation of .276, which is a moderately positive correlation significant at p=.011.