Can I start the countdown? I never got to start a countdown!
Ten . . .
Nine . . .
Eight . . .
Do you mean the gazillion generations before we were primates? Humans have always been social creatures, just like all our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom, and there is no reason to believe that our (relatively) recent ancestor species were any different. The archaeological evidence indicates that we were cooperative long before we were homo sapiens, and a philosophy of “every man for himself!” sure isn’t what got us through the Ice Age.
And another thing, gscotb: your question doesn’t take into account the frequency of observed homosexual behavior in the great apes, notably those genetically closest to us–the chimpanzee and the bonobo.
Hey, this is a neat thread! 
I’d recommend looking into a book called Bashers, Baiters and Bigots. A little dry, but an interesting read. (It also includes info on the study involving homophobes and homoeroticism.)
Esprix
So how does “hating homosexuals” enable one to procreate more or better? What advantage does it give over, say, live and let live?
Huh?
Hold it there a moment…
OK, so whatever is the cause for homosexuality is, it has an inheritable component. So far so good.
HOWEVER this does NOT necessitate that therefore there is a countervailing also favored trait of “hating homosexuals” that makes the persons with that trait successful at reproducing.
Because, y’see, the way I read it, is that the species does have a distinct tendency towards having the culture of cooperation applyonly to those who are “like one of us” and meanwhile being distrustful or hostile to the “different ones”. This may come down to us from bands of apes defending their “territory”.
In any case, though this may have resulted in much death and suffering in the last few thousand years, when we’ve been numerous enough to get in each other’s faces, back in hominid times it may have been at least “neutral” survival-wise – and a trait that is “neutral”, survival-wise, WILL get passed on. It doesn’t have to do you any good, just not kill you.
From that general xenophobic predisposition is that then homophobia (or racism) may draw nourishment. Now, in the last 10K years or so, culture has moved much faster than evolution. When you start having societies where there is a premium to increasing the numbers of the tribe to have more farmers/soldiers so as to overcome neighbors/plagues and/or to produce more grain for the chieftain’s coffers and more fat bulls for the temple, lack of reproduction will be seen as a “curse” and proclaimed so by those in Power. Those who are seen to be not even trying to reproduce even though able-bodied for it will be seen as “holding out”. Thus, religious and legal injunctions against “unnatural acts”, which get positive feedback from a predisposed “Ick Factor” towards All Those Different.
Some early societies made a bigger deal of this than others and chose different ways to deal with it. Contrast, obviously, the Greeks and the Hebrews. So apparently, while the homosexuality itself apparently combines environmental effects with some specific hereditary predisposition, how people react to homosexuality seems to depend mostly on social-cultural conditioning acting upon a very generic psychological tendency of anti-differentism.
Well, as I pontificated earlier, hating mansex may drive one to mate with women more frequently.
Um, no: “hating mansex” has been pretty well documented to mean that deep down, you want to HAVE noisy sweaty mansex. It seems to me that in a culture that doesn’t condemn homosexuality, someone who feels homosexual urges wouldn’t feel the self-loathing dictated by that society and feel the need to project a defensive stance against it, and there would be no one “hating” it; it would just be different strokes, as it were; live and let love. ( I know, I know: :rolleyes: )
No, liking womansex drives one to mate with women more frequently. A man who is repulsed by the thought of sex with other men is not forced to have sex with women instead; he could just as easily (heck, more easily) go for his right hand, a convenient sheep, or abstain altogether. What drives him to have sex with women is a desire to have sex with women. There is no reason why he cannot possess the desire to have sex with women while remaining neutral, or even positive, about the idea of sex with other men.
Besides that, a personal lack of desire for or aversion to engaging in homosexual acts is not homophobia. It’s just being heterosexual. Hating men who have mansex or women who have womansex is homophobia. And as erislover said, there is no obvious reproductive advantage to this.
It doesn’t do Grog the straight caveman or his reproductive odds a bit of harm if some of the others guys like the hunters better than the gatherers; if anything, it helps him. After all, Thad the gay caveman probably isn’t going to impregnate Grog’s wife Ena on the sly. Thad wasn’t one of the guys he had to compete with for Ena’s favor in the first place. Thad probably won’t have kids that will eat the food that Grog’s kids need to get through the winter. It would be a waste of Grog’s time and energy to give Thad trouble when he should be worried about finding food, taking care of the kids, and keeping that macho jerk Brud and his big spear away from Ena.
Lamia, I am by turns amused, enlightened, and frightened by your choice of examples. Most especially Brud and his big spear.
Thank you.
Ah, unfortunately you presumed exactly wrong. It was the assertion about homosexuality in the animal world, with the understanding that homosexuality means preferring to mate with a member of the same sex, and consciously choosing to do so even when members of the opposite sex are available. As opposed to just homosexual behavior.
Your theories about cultural programming are interesting. I’ve come up with a theory of my own, scroll down to see it if you are interested.
This actually raises a very good point. I’ve often wondered why straight men react the way they do to male homosexuality, given that for every guy that turns out to be gay, that’s one less guy to compete with any given straight guy for the available women. I’ve come up with a theory that may explain this, though.
First, consider this:
I’ve seen this idea before, and it’s always made sense to me as an explanation of how a tendency to homosexuality could be passed on genetically, as an adaptive trait. But on further reflection, I think it needs some refinement.
Consider: In order to successfully pass on your genes, it is not enough simply to have offspring; your offspring must themselves also have offspring*. If you are the parent of a sizable brood, let’s say six children, and five of those six have children themselves, then you are in pretty good shape. If your sixth child is gay, and does not breed, it doesn’t hurt you enough to sting, reproductively speaking, and may help if he or she helps the other five with their kids, as per the theory quoted by Priam.
But…if you live in an environment where you are lucky to even have one of your children live to be old enough to have children themselves, the kind of environment that was likely very common in prehistory, then the dynamic is going to be different.
Take another look at Lamia’s cavemen. Suppose Grog has just one child, say a son, who has managed to survive to near adulthood, and who will soon be old enough to have children of his own. Let’s call him Zoog. Grog very much wants Zoog to be straight. And if Zoog is gay, Grog will want him to suppress his homosexuality and settle down with a girl anyway, and breed. Now, it strikes me that this is much less likely to happen if Thad is hanging around the cave being, to use the modern parlance, a positive gay role model.
But Thad can’t be an effective gay role model if he is not openly gay. And this is where, it seems to me, homophobia might be an adaptive trait, in that it 1: Causes gay people who are not part of large families, who have no siblings, or only maybe one or two, who lived to adulthood, to suppress their homosexuality and breed anyway, and 2: Directly related to that, causes gay people who are members of large families, who aren’t under so much pressure to breed, to keep their homosexuality in the closet, or the prehistoric equivilent, so as not to encourage the children of small families to live the same way.
You can add an interesting wrinkle to this by also considering class. Going back to the cavemen again, if Thad the gay caveman is a member of a large family, and thus not under so much pressure to breed, it may be because his family has a high status. Perhaps his father is the Chief of the tribe, or the head witch doctor, or some such. The large size of Thad’s family is directly related to it’s status; Thad’s father get’s a bigger share of the kills from the hunt, so he has more food, so he can feed more children.
Grog, who is just your average working stiff caveman, already harbors the kind of resentments against Thad’s father and his family that you would expect, the kind of resentments that would occur in any class-based society. If you add to that the presence of Thad, an openly gay role model for impressionable young Zoog and others like him…well, I wouldn’t be surprised if a caveman Karl Marx popped up and convinced the cave proletariat to rise up in bloody revolution and throw off the chains of their bourgeoisie cave-oppressors.
Does this sound plausible? I would be very interested to see if any serious research has been done into 1: The possibility of a correlation between family size and attitudes towards homosexuality, within a society or across societies, or 2: The relationship between socioeconomic status and attitudes towards homosexuality, or 3: The level of people’s desire for their own children to be straight, and how well this correlates with general attitudes about homosexuality.
*[sub] Hence the familiarity of people like myself, who are over the age of 25 and still single, about being nagged by their own parents to give them grandchildren.[/sub]
The flaw in your theory though is this can’t have been very common, and certainly not predominately, or else the species wouldn’t have survived and multiplied. We’ve got more people now because for most of our history parents have had more kids than just one survive to reproduce. If each mating pair only has one child, then the population shrinks.
To be fair and honest, I would like to just point out that societies we today deem as neutral or favorable towards homosexual behavior saw things a little differently…
Either they…
-
Expected the person involved to get married and have kids anyway, but let them keep a lover on the side.
-
Had special roles (witch-doctor, shaman, etc.) designed to be filled by them.
-
Viewed it also as a power differential based on status and age (i.e. it wasn’t having sex with another man per se that mattered, but who was active and who was passive). The act of being passive, either by a woman or a man, was the shameful part.
While there is certainly evidence that many past figures were homosexual in orientation, they viewed it much differently than we do today. Trying to make a simple correlation is not so easy.
Wierd Al
Such a population would decay. Women need to average well over two children in order to keep the population stable, nevermind grow, before the advent of modern medicine. Even with it, 2.2 is the magick number.
Which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense. It takes two people to make one child, thus to keep the population stable couples need to replace themselves. Given factors like accidental death, the number averages out to be a little more than 2 children per woman.
Given the apparent distribution of homosexuality, I’m not clear on how it would affect the birthrate but it seems insignificant compared to the elimination of disease and greater understanding of prenatal care.
I really don’t see any selective pressures acting against homosexuality at all; at least, no cultural selection pressures that have any sound factual basis.
And another thing:
I think the idea that homophobia, as well as racism and other -isms, is anything other than cultural is completely debunked when you watch children. Kids who are exposed to a diverse range of people when young, typically don’t develop prejudices that their parents don’t actively foster. Young kids, when exposed to a homosexual couple react indifferently once their initial “why are those two women kissing?” question is answered with a simple “because they love each other”. They don’t react any different than they do with a opposite-sex couple unless their parents have taught them to do so.
Well, Homebrew, I’d qualify your last sentence simply as “unless they are taught to”. Peer pressure is quite great in the younger years, and I don’t mean the “C’mon all the cool kids are doing it” kind that after school specials somehow have managed to basically create out of thin air, but that very human quality of interpreting the environment and desiring to identify with it in some way. So it only takes a few parents to teach a few kids, who then could spread this idea out if they happened to be popular or bullies or something.
Parents can play a large role, I don’t disagree, but even parents who are indifferent or pro-homosexuality will butt heads with other idealogues out there with their children as proxies.
“You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” as they say in the South Pacific.
Esprix
In his excellent book “The Church and the Homosexual,” Father John J McNeill talks about this subject. He says that reproduction was very important to the Hebrews. They thought they were a chosen race and were destined to carry on their race. Men whose testicles were injured or cut off were not permitted to marry into Jewish families. Also, if a man died without having any child, his brother had to have sex with his wife and have children for him. I recall their being other examples of reproduction being highly important in the bible too, but can’t think of any other than those two.
McNeill also states that the worse curse that could ever be cast on a Jewish male in those times was for him to be made impotent.
Futhermore, in societies were women have a low place, for men to take the place of women is considered unthinkable. The Egyptians used to sodomize their captured enemies to show their power over them. J. Edgar Brun in his book “Old Testament History and the development of a Sexual Ethic” contends that the story of Noah and his sons after the flood contains some of these elements in a parallel to the Egyptian story of Seth and Horus. You’ll note that even though the bible condems women who have sex with animals, it says nothing on women who have sex with other women.
I think homophobia goes a little deeper than the cultural bias against homosexuality.
My dad is homophobic. Not for moral or religious reasons – male homosexuality just plain gives him the heebie-jeebies.
He is terribly afraid that some gay guy is going to stick his penis up his butt. It doesn’t matter that gay men wouldn’t find him terribly attractive. It doesn’t matter that gay men, generally speaking, believe in consensual sex. He knows all that. It doesn’t matter. The fear is still there at the gut-instinct level.
Some anthropologists think they may have stumbled across a reason why men might have an irrational fear of male homosexuality. In certain species of primates, such as macacques, the males engage in a domination behavior called “mounting.” The dominant male shows the lesser males he’s boss by sticking his penis in their butts, or at least threatening to do so. Perhaps the human species at one point in its ancient history engaged in this same practice, and the instinctual fear of being mounted by another male as a show of dominance is still there. (One occasionally hears stories of male Navy recruits being “violated” with blunt objects by other enlistees as a very harsh – and illegal – form of hazing.)
This doesn’t explain homophobia toward lesbians, or homophobia on the part of women, but it might partially explain homophobia toward gay men on the part of men.
True, but remember, that’s an average. That doesn’t mean every couple has to have, or will have, exactly 2.2 children. In fact that’s impossible…how do you have two tenths of a child? Consider a tribe with fifteen families. Three of those families have a high status, and hence more food, and hence large families. Say there are six children in each of those families. Each of the remaining, low status families each has one child. The tribe as a whole is replacing itself, just. But there is still plenty of room here for the sort of scenario I envisioned in my last post.
Not to mention, even in a family with two children, instead of just one, I think there would be substantial pressure on the children to be functionally straight, and breed. I am one of two siblings myself, and I can tell you, until at least one of us actually does it, my sister and I will both be nagged by our parents to give them grandchildren.