I love many homosexuals because they are so gay!
To me they are among the most fun, grounded, and least angsty individuals to be with. I call them issue-less individuals.
I’m sure they have issues – but generally, they are very good at not projecting these on to others in their personal or professional interactions. Unlike many ego-sensitive straight men and women who can be difficult to deal with most of the time (argh!).
But there is one thing that has been puzzling me about them: Why do they exist in the first place?
Survival of the fittest
Survival of the fittest means fighting or coping with elements not only to ensure your life but also to ensure that your children live and so would their future children. This means your genes will be passed on and you will not become a genetic dead-end. This is the forward looking view.
The backward-looking view means that the people you see now carry the traits that ensured the survival of their ancestors through the centuries, millennia. Whatever traits you see are those that survived through wars, famine, colonization, genocide and natural disasters.
Any physical strength, intelligence, virility, beauty or behavior in men and women that ensured successful mating (i.e. producing viable children who can give birth to offspring and therefore ensure the passing of genes) is a product of this Darwinian thought called evolution.
Hence I understand why men and women exist.
What I do not understand is why homosexuals exist. How can the gay gene exist today when it cannot be passed on in matings that will definitely not produce offspring. Homosexuals should have died out a long time ago, shouldn’t they?
What is the reason for homosexuality?
This question has been puzzling me for some time and, finally, I have come to a couple of Eureka moments on this:
First one concludes that many men (and women) before were gay but because of the dictates of society, they had to be married with children. Thus, whatever gay gene they had, has been passed on to the offspring of today. Ok check.
Still, why is there a NEED to have the gay gene? Surely, if you look at the population proportions, the homosexual population today must be disproportionately larger than before, taboos or not.
(And there has to be a gay-ness gene because, my dears, if it is not in your genetic makeup, there is no way you can act or respond in a certain manner, no matter what or how strong the external stimulus is.)
Population-regulation
Over a midnight snack of delicious Angus beef tapa and raspberry-oreo pancakes a few nights ago, my best friend Blue Soon explained it to me: Homosexuality is a population-regulation mechanism.
Apparently, the trait for homosexual behavior has various levels of “penetrance” (ok guys, this is a respectable technical term in the field of genetics, alright?). That means the gene is expressed in varying degrees of strength or expressed by varying numbers of individuals within a population.
I guess, it also means that, potentially, many of us carry this gene (hey humans carry both female and male hormones! And there are sex reversals in the natural world e.g. fishes but that is a topic for another day). And the manifestation of this gay trait is dependent on external influences.
He quotes a landmark experiment by John B. Calhoun (published in 1962) on rat and mice populations mimicking overcrowding conditions in inner cities. When resources became scarce, the rodents exhibited ‘strange’ behaviors. Among these are: increased aggression against females and the young, females forgot to care for their babies properly, and the males engaged in exclusive homosexual behavior.
Yup, it appears, homosexual behavior is our way of naturally regulating our population. It is our way of saying, enough is enough. Either we, all of us die now or we act to ensure the survival of the remaining – and future – humankind.
Cool.
Linked:
Nice.
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