Further Thoughts on The Evolutionary Basis of Teh Gay

As a coda to this post, I found this commentary by Christopher Ryan worth commenting on:

The currently dominant theory turns on self-interest, as is the case with most current evolutionary thinking. Gay men, the theory posits, will be much more nurturing of their nieces and nephews than would heterosexual men (who would, after all, have their own kids to worry about). Thus, in increasing the reproductive potential of their nieces and nephews (by helping more of them survive to adulthood), a fraction of the man's DNA is carried forward to future generations.

This strikes me as a bit of a misrepresentation. After all, it's not as though the "gay uncle" is a substitute for a father. He's an add-on -- you simply have more people caring for a particular family's children, which increases the likelihood of survival.

This, however, makes sense:

To my way of thinking, this theory seems to be bending over backward to account for something that really needs no explanation. Human sexuality in pre-agricultural societies was likely to have been more about maintaining relationships than about basic reproduction itself. Don’t believe me? E. O. Wilson, the founding thinker of what’s come to be known as evolutionary psychology, wrote that homosexuality is “above all a form of bonding,” and that, like “the greater part of heterosexual behavior,” homosexuality is “a device that cements relationships."

Men can and do form intense emotional bonds with each other. Whether those feelings are expressed sexually is another question -- that, I think, is subject to cultural taboos, and I think if you were to investigate societies not subject to the sexual restrictions of the desert religions -- classical Greece, pre-Meiji Japan, pre-colonial Africa come to mind -- you'd find that such bonds were more likely to find physical expression. As I noted in the previous post, having a male lover doesn't preclude -- or didn't, in the past -- getting married and having children. (Another mark against the "taking ourselves out of the gene pool" argument. These days, probably more likely as we establish identities as "gay," but even now, not necessarily the case, and in the past, much less likely.) Ryan actually supports this view, although not directly:

In prehistoric bands, everyone’s kids would have been familiar and very likely related to you on some level. In contemporary foragers, shared names, clan membership, and simple friendship are often more important social bonds than blood lineage – a concept to which we attach especial attention only because we’re obsessed with property rights. As we argue in our book, social bonds are different in societies not oriented toward getting and holding onto material wealth (which are more than ninety-five percent of all human societies that have existed).

I haven't thought about this connection -- the relationship idea -- very much, so I'm not going to draw any firm conclusions. It seems to me, however, that one can make a good case for same-sex bonding as a sort of social glue that extends beyond blood relatives and serves to add to the cohesiveness of the group, with benefit to all members. (And think about that in light of the "unit cohesiveness" arguments for DADT.)

Lots of possibilities here.