Same-sex attraction isn't an evolutionary paradox – here's why | Hacker News Reader

Same-sex attraction isn't an evolutionary paradox – here's why

newscientist.com

7 pointssahin6 comments

The abstract from the author's paper on the subject:

> Human same-sex sexual attraction (SSSA) has long been considered to be an evolutionary puzzle. The trait is clearly biological: it is widespread and has a strong additive genetic basis, but how SSSA has evolved remains a subject of debate. Of itself, homosexual sexual behavior will not yield offspring, and consequently individuals expressing strong SSSA that are mostly or exclusively homosexual are presumed to have lower fitness and reproductive success. How then did the trait evolve, and how is it maintained in populations? Here we develop a novel argument for the evolution of SSSA that focuses on the likely adaptive social consequences of SSSA. We argue that same sex sexual attraction evolved as just one of a suite of traits responding to strong selection for ease of social integration or prosocial behavior. A strong driver of recent human behavioral evolution has been selection for reduced reactive aggression, increased social affiliation, social communication, and ease of social integration. In many prosocial mammals sex has adopted new social functions in contexts of social bonding, social reinforcement, appeasement, and play. We argue that for humans the social functions and benefits of sex apply to same-sex sexual behavior as well as heterosexual behavior. As a consequence we propose a degree of SSSA, was selected for in recent human evolution for its non-conceptive social benefits. We discuss how this hypothesis provides a better explanation for human sexual attractions and behavior than theories that invoke sexual inversion or single-locus genetic models.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6976918/

Not sure it's the same angle, as I can't open the paywall. But the book Sperm Wars, published 1996, covers the topic quite well. It puts forwards a mechanism where a spectrum of sexuality is genertically inhereited via selection.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_Wars

Is there a workaround for this paywall?

You don't really want one, honestly. New Scientist is the Daily Mail of science publications. For anything they might publish, if you can find another source, then that other source is likely to be more accurate and less sensationalized and anything you might have learned in the NS article would be more profitably learned at the other source; and if you can't find another source, it's almost certainly not true.

There’s this article on the bbc’s website which I believe covers the same research https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26089486

Trying too hard. It suffices to observe same-sex attraction across the animal kingdom, and to conclude that same-sex attraction isn't unnatural. The author is here tackling and failing to clear a much higher bar.

Edit: To make things clearer for downvoters: Suppose I see two male ducks having sex, and I ask, "Why are two male ducks having sex?" I am suggesting that it is sufficient to answer "I don't know, but it definitely happened," and not "Because of specific benefits to duck society, such as..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com