
Same-sex attraction isn't an evolutionary paradox – here's why - sahin-boydas
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24532684-400-same-sex-attraction-isnt-an-evolutionary-paradox-heres-why/
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defertoreptar
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/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6976918/)

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diroussel
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_Wars)

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lol768
Is there a workaround for this paywall?

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MrEldritch
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.

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lidHanteyk
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..."

