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Homophobia Explained 8/8

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It might simply be the case that those cutting back and silencing homosexual activity and identity of homosexual males, thereby decreasing the fecundity of the latters' maternally related females, had a slight evolutionary advantage. Even if the world of sexual orientation is a fully genetically determined affair and if there is, indeed, a common, purely genetic cause for maternal female fecundity and male homosexuality, homophobia may still have provided slight reproductive advantages to heterosexual males over non-homophobic and homosexual ones if, e.g., "gay" gene families have been stigmatized by homophobes and have thus become less attractive for heterosexual mating. This seems plausible especially, but not exclusively, in populations where fecundity, in general, is high but where resources are limited such that to have overly many births in one family is maladaptive and such that, therefore, genetic factors predisposing to both excessive fecundity and male homosexuality do not spread as well as in industrialized societies, where fecundity is rather low but where resources are plenty (cf. Camperio Ciani 2004). All this could justify the conjecture that even "truly" homosexual males are mating competitors of heterosexual males in a way significantly more direct than hitherto suspected. Any evolution-theoretic account of homosexuality will not only have to face the obvious problem of the selection of the trait but also the difficulty why homophobia persists or at least has persisted, i.e., why it has, just as avoiding the sick and out-groups, made prehistoric sense among human populations. There may very well be a mix of several explanations for homosexuality, all of which do play an important part; at least one of them must, however, also account for homophobia. Camperio Ciani et al. (2004), despite giving rise to a puzzling game-theoretic dilemma to be solved by studies clarifying the exact causal relations, might have fulfilled this explanatory desideratum. Acknowledgements I thank Helge Rückert, who brought game theory to my attention, and the German National Academic Foundation. References ADAMS, H. E., WRIGHT Jr., L. W. and LOHR, B. A. (1995): Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105, 440--45. CAMPERIO CIANI, A., CORNA, F. and CAPILUPPI, C. (2004): Evidence for maternally inherited factors favouring male homosexuality and promoting female fecundity. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 271, 2217-2221. FISHER, R. (1958): Cigarettes, cancer, and statistics. Centennial Review, 2, 151-166. HAMER, D. and COPELAND, P. (1998): Living with our genes: Why they matter more than you think. New York: Doubleday. HUTCHINSON, G. E. (1959): A speculative consideration of certain possible forms of sexual selection in man. American Naturalist, 93, 81--91. JACKSON, F. and PARGETTER, R. (1983): Where the tickle defense goes wrong. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 61, 295-299. KIRKPATRICK, R. C. (2000): The Evolution of Human Homosexual Behavior. Current Anthropology, 41(3), 385--413. LESSELLS, C. M. (1999): Sexual conflict in animals. In: Keller, L. (ed.): Levels of selection in evolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 75--99. LÖWDIN, P.-O. (1963): Proton tunneling in DNA and its biological implications. Reviews of Modern Physics, 35 (3), 724-732. MCKNIGHT, J. (1997): Straight Science? Homosexuality, Evolution, and Adaptation. London: Routledge. NAVARRETE, C.D. and FESSLER, D.M.T. (2006): Disease avoidance and ethnocentrism: The effects of disease vulnerability and disgust sensitivity on intergroup attitudes. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27(4), 270-282. RICE, W. R. (1992): Sexually antagonistic genes: Experimental evidence. Science, 256, 1436--39. ROCKE, M. (1996): Forbidden friendships: Homosexuality and male culture in Renaissance Florence. New York: Oxford University Press. ROGERS, S. M. and TURNER, C. F. (1991): Male-male sexual contact in the U.S.A.: Findings from five sample surveys, 1970--1990. Journal of Sex Research, 28, 491--519. SHARPE, J. and PINTO, S. (2006): The Sweetest Taboo: Studies of Caribbean Sexualities; A Review Essay. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32(1), 247--274. WILSON, E. O. (1978): On Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Author: Jackies1979
Keywords: homophobia homosexuality gay straight evolution Dawkins nest helper kin selection balanced polymorphism hate fag
Added: July 4, 2008

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