If you are a male who thinks rape is about sex, not power

[ambushed]

I’m going to break up my response into two separate posts because there’s so much involved here that separation makes good practical sense to me. I’m also going to tackle the second question first so that there’s more of a context for replying more productively to the first question.

@AHunter3

@ambushed

Here it is extremely critical to emphasize that evolution acts only on individuals! While there has been some small amount of legitimate scientific progress towards trying to determine and measure some kind of role of evolution in groups or even entire species, to the best of my knowledge there’s not yet been any findings that could survive even a peer review committee, let alone among significant numbers of evolutionary biologists. If my knowledge is accurate (and I’d be fascinated to learn that it’s not), there is as yet no scientific basis for believing that evolution plays any role at all in group survival or adaptation or niche-efficacy.

So, yes, I think it is extremely unfair to say that “evolutionary bio — and sociobiology — tends to focus overly much” on individual evolutionary fitness and individual behavior.

I am out of my domain but I think this [i.e., that evolution acts only on individuals] is not so, or even if it is so at the raw level of the gene it is not so in practice. It has been proposed that longevity is selected for by virtue of the greater likelihood of individual A surviving to produce progeny if the grandparents of individual A are alive to provide additional childrearing / support to enhance the care provided for by the parents. Outliving one’s own reproductive years cannot directly contribute to one’s own likelihood of passing on one’s genes but in a social context, in a group environment of interactions and relationships, it can nevertheless do so indirectly.

Whether you accept that specific example as a valid explanation of longevity is beside the point: in that KIND of way I think characteristics can be selected for or against. If your GROUP does not survive because your behavioral characteristics are disruptive, your progeny will be breathing air in a world without nurture and protection and will probably not survive. Or will be far less likely to do so than a similar individual in a GROUP in which a similar parent’s behavioral characteristics are compatible with interactions and interdependencies that promote social cohesion and group survival.

I need to emphasize an absolutely essential point if you are to understand why your premise regarding longevity is correct while at the same time it demonstrates that evolution acts only on individuals, or more accurately, only on genes and collections of genes. To the very best of my knowledge, there is no scientifically valid foundation for any belief in any legitimate kind of group selection, whether biological, sociobiological, and perhaps not even sociological (but I admit that I’m not very knowledgeable in that area at all, so I recognize that my knowledge is quite limited in that regard).

Sociology / social science is absolutely a fully legitimate scientific endeavor, but it operates at a very different level of abstraction than the other two domains, and it employs a very different set of what might be called heuristics, assumptions, working strategies, logical and linguistic categories, jargon (which is essential in all sciences), and perhaps even different worldviews. Sociology must try to take into account the very foggy realm of social concepts and perceptions and attitudes and beliefs and motivations and all the rest of the bizarre menagerie of human emotions, social dynamics, and the distorting effects of human consciousness. I can only compliment those who willingly enter that morass and try to sort through it for their intellectual courage; I am reluctant to enter very deeply into all that fog, but I’ll try my best to follow you.

So, back to the central issue. What you are referring to is called the “kin-selection hypothesis” and I am a very strong advocate of that view. It also represents by far the most compelling explanation for the persistence of homosexuality as a genetic natural phenomenon widespread throughout nature, which is what I will focus on in my response.

The existence and persistence of homosexuality in many thousands of species, including homo sapiens, has actually been denied, ignored, or hidden for centuries, but once Bruce Bagemihl brought animal homosexuality to Fundamentalism-imperiling center stage with conclusive evidence in his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, that’s no longer an option.

Kin-selection posits that an individual doesn’t have to actually reproduce in order to propagate at least a portion of their genes and alleles into the future. Instead, if their genetic-based behaviors serve to increase the representation of their kin’s genes within the gene pool, that works pretty well too, and so the genes that code for for a predisposition for that behavior get carried forward along with the rest. There’s no other possible explanation for the ever-steady persistence of those behaviors that we see all around us. Thus, homosexuality must be genetic in origin.

In humans, the genetic basis for homosexuality has somewhat unexpectedly been discovered to act on the mother of the individual, rather than in the individual itself (there may still be genes that code for homosexuality in the individual’s genome, but they haven’t been as conclusively established as has the genetic role acting in the mother). The genes only create a predisposition towards homosexual behavior; a predisposition that will not produce actual homosexuality unless other conditions are met, most or all of which are likely to be environmental.

The homosexual behavior that the genes end up producing in humans is such that the presence of one or more homosexuals in a kin grouping tends to increase the genetic presence of the homosexual’s kin, and the more closely related the homosexual individual is to the beneficiaries of their actions (such as contributing the equivalent calories of what their mate would consume if they had one, contributing to physical protection of their closer kin, contributing to education of the kin, and so forth), the more direct and personal are these contributions. Thus, the closer the genetic relationship, the more direct the contributions are. and thus the closer the genetic relationship, the more the number of the homosexual’s kin-shared genes and alleles will be present in the gene pool.

But does that translate into some kind of “group” evolutionary selection? No! Absolutely not!

This is because, in the end, it is neither the group nor even the component individuals that natural selection technically operates on. It is the specific genes and alleles in the gene pool that are acted upon by evolutionary processes! Group selection is very probably impossible. I can’t say it actually is impossible because nature is nothing if not hideously complex and difficult to pin down, and the essential tentativeness of all good science must never be denied.