Asexual relationships suck

[shaggy]

Ever heard of the gay uncle theory?

People with no kids of their own would've been more able to help family with kids. Those kids also share genes with them.

That's true. But that's true only for how long? Like maybe 2000 years? And human evolution is much longer that that.

But I agree, there could be other factors that help homosexuals to still be born. If there weren't they would probably just go extinct.

[Noah_S]

???

2000 years?

Where did you get that from?

Hunter gatherers lived in bigger groups, people have been dependent on family for help for much longer than 2000 years. We have fossils of people who had broken their femur and lived long enough for it to heal. That wouldn't have been possible without people around them getting them to safety and bringing food to them.

It's in the past few generations that people in western countries have gotten individualistic.

[Dan Q]

That's true. But that's true only for how long? Like maybe 2000 years? And human evolution is much longer that that.

I can't even with this paragraph.

We're not just talking about human evolution of course, because homosexuality isn't unique to humans. Probably we're talking about the history of evolution of sexually-reproducing animals. Sexual reproduction as a whole predates animals, but even if we limit to animals we're basically talking about hundreds of millions of years of evolution, the vast majority of it before humans were around at all. Sexuality doesn't even require super-sophisticated societies or neurological systems: homosexual behaviour has been seen in e.g. fruit flies (with a genetic link identified that's solid enough to act as a predictor).

"Gay uncles", per the theory, don't require humans either. A diversity of sexualities seem to be expressed by cetaceans, primates, and elephants, for example... and I pick those three examples specifically because they all, like us, are species that have been observed to experience menopause, sometimes also considered to be a biological quirk (because it reduces the number of opportunities an individual has to pass on its genes). Nowadays, a strong candidate explanation for menopause is the "grandmother hypothesis": that an individual past breeding age provides value to the survival and reproductive success of her descendants! It's fundamentally similar to the "gay uncle" theory in that it provides an explanation for an evolutionary benefit for homosexuality.

But let's sidestep all of that for a moment because homosexuality is not (just) genetic in cause! Separated-twin studies are among the strongest evidence we have for homosexuality (in men only; separated-twin studies on women have failed to find any link)... but that a pair of biological twins raised separately both turn out to have the same sexuality does not necessarily mean that it was genetic, because it doesn't rule out other respected theories such as those involving prenatal hormones, their mother's immune response, and epigenetic causes.

And let's not forget that in some other animals we observe homosexual behaviour that is very-much environmental: some mammals, birds, fish and reptiles all exhibit an increased frequency of homosexual behaviour in an environment where there's a shortage of a particular sex. In fact: we see this in humans too e.g. in single-sex spaces such as prisons.

I guess what I'm saying is... sexuality may seem to have some genetic links, some of the time (a "gay gene", except we'd actually be talking about up to a dozen candidate genes), it's not a solid theory: it doesn't explain everybody! It's especially weak on describing women's sexuality, for a start, but even among men it's very-much not the full picture!

Maybe I should be chanting: "We're here. We're queer. Neither we nor the scientific community can fully explain it. But we're still gonna be here anyway."