From penguins to fruit flies to people, nature bustles with same-sex sex. Is it an evolutionary puzzle or a force for change?

Posted on Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11148 GMT at http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/sea...tory01.htm

link not working for me.

Funny, the RSS poster grabbed and posted it straight from Yahoo, odd it would find and post a bad link. I'll delete the thread in a couple of days since it's to a dead link, but wanted you to see the reply first and not think we were censoring or editing member posts.

(12-07-2009 10:17 PM)Gone with the Wind Wrote:  link not working for me.

Here is an alternative link, Gone with the Wind.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20...nline-news

Last line of the article: "More daringly, could understanding the evolutionary consequences of same-sex interactions in animals help us understand our own evolution?"

It might be even more daring for evolutionary biologists to update their knowledge base by reading recent literature. For example:

Kohl, J. V. (2007). The Mind's Eyes: Human pheromones, neuroscience, and male sexual preferences. In M. R. Kauth (Ed.), Handbook of the Evolution of Human Sexuality (pp. 313-369). Binghamton: Haworth Press.

Some people might think that the above article was too troublesome for experts (e.g., like those cited in this article) to read, but obviously some experts did read it. Here's proof!

James V. Kohl received the Ira and Harriet Reiss Theory Award for 2007 from the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (FSSS). The award is given annually for the best social science article, chapter, or book published in the previous year in which theoretical explanations of human sexual attitudes and behaviors are developed. "The Mind's Eyes: Human Pheromones, Neuroscience, and Male Sexual Preferences" was published in the Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 18(4): 313-369, and concurrently published as a book chapter in the "Handbook of the Evolution of Human Sexuality." In conjunction with the award, Kohl was an invited plenary session speaker at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) in November, 2007, which was held in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Maybe the experts mentioned in this article don't know about the experts from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) or the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (FSSS), or maybe the article's experts are really not experts. If understanding the evolutionary consequences of same-sex interactions in animals would help us understand our own evolution, my award-winning chapter on the evolutionary development of male sexual preferences might be a good place to start.

James V. Kohl
http://www.pheromones.com

Evolutionarily, same-sex sex is a dead end since no offspring can be produced from this type of "union." So, just on that fact the premise that this is some evolutionary force is nonsensical.

The exceptions here are those organisms that are asexual, which produce either without union or with union.

But for those animals that show sexual dimorphism, 2% of nearly all of these populations of animals shows same-sex preference, and 98% do not. Evolutionarily, I see this 2% as a low but consistent error rate.

Diane

Evolution favors mammalian sexual reproduction, but obviously does not force it, since the species survives despite variations on the sexual reproduction theme. Why do you think 2% is an error--as opposed to a functional variation that ensures its place in the gene pool? Is this "error" percentage increased by odor-associated non-reproductive fetishistic behaviors? I still think it may be important for people to read my article about the development of personal preferences before making a judgment call -- not that you were doing that. I think that the same model must be used for the development of all sexual preferences, and the olfactory/pheromonal model is the only biologically based model that does so.

James V. Kohl
http://www.pheromones.com

(12-10-2009 1:26 PM)Diane999 Wrote:  Evolutionarily, same-sex sex is a dead end since no offspring can be produced from this type of "union." So, just on that fact the premise that this is some evolutionary force is nonsensical.

The exceptions here are those organisms that are asexual, which produce either without union or with union.

But for those animals that show sexual dimorphism, 2% of nearly all of these populations of animals shows same-sex preference, and 98% do not. Evolutionarily, I see this 2% as a low but consistent error rate.

Diane