The implications of Evolution

Homosexuality is seen as something that has to be explained by evolution because it is seen as challenge for evolutionhttp://www.carigoetz.com/...lutionary_psychology_AP_2010.pdf So what what would be seen as evidence for the evolution of homosexuality? Or what would be a meaningful prediction?I don't see how the idea that we evolved predicts anything the cause and nature of homosexuality? And I have no worker bee tendencies and do not recognise the ideas portrayed that I am essentially someone who exist to either stop overpopulation or pamper my nieces and Nephews and paint pretty pictures and gossip.

Again, that is simply nonsense.Homosexuality is not a challenge at all for evolution nor can I see anyway anything experienced at the individual level could be a challenge for evolution.There are in fact no barriers to homosexual individuals procreating. In fact, there have even been cases where one married parent with children has then announced they were attracted to members of their own sex and so left a marriage.Again, I think you are arguing matters related to morality and philosophy and theology and social dynamics which have nothing to do with either the fact of evolution or the Theory of Evolution.

You are making perhaps a common mistake here. Evolution is not just individuals, but populations.If a given population reproduces effectively then that population (or species, or genus) might probably stick around for a while. The contrary is also true.In prehistoric societies homosexuals were often seen in a far different light than in more recent societies--they tended to become shamans or other specialists within the tribe. Their contributions, which furthered the success of the tribe, increased the chances that the offspring of the tribe would live to reproduce.This is perhaps an indirect cause, but it must be considered. As must the role of grandparents. Although past the age of reproduction, grandparents can still increase the chances that their offspring, and those of the tribe, can live to reproduce. This can be as simple as babysitting while the parents are out hunting and gathering. Or more complex, such as remembering the knowledge of the tribe and passing it on to future generations, thereby increasing their chances of survival. In many primitive tribes much knowledge was no more than five generations--what was passed on from an individual's grandparents to that same individual's grandchildren.So, the reproductive success of a population is more complex than having a lot of offspring. There are many ways that members of a population can help to improve the reproductive success of those offspring.There is a vast literature within Anthropology that you might seek out and apply to this question.

It is no more a challenge than hordes of worker bees in a hive being sterile and not reproducing. Assuming for the moment that there is a direct genetic allele for homosexuality, which seems doubtful at the moment, given the rampant success of the human species it will continue to spread. Evolution is not a process that produces perfect adaptations, only adaptations that are good enough.

I don't see how that is limited to just evolution. That applies to the entire universe. The intentionless decay of isotopes can cause a mutation in an oncogene and give us cancer. The intentionless orbits of asteroids can send a 5 mile wide rock hurtling at our planet. The intentionless thundercloud can send down an unguided bolt of lightning and strike us down.The appearance that the universe simply doesn't care about our existence or plight in life is found everywhere. That's a stance that I also take. How I got here with the DNA I have and the adaptations I have has little to do with how I find meaning in life. Ultimately, the meaning of life is your worldview of how the world ought to be, not how it is. If sentience and a fledgling ability to use reason are just accidents of natural selection for survival, then so be it. Might as well take advantage of it.

I am not the person making this claim. Did you not see the big quote I put in my post with a link? (Link to a paper compiled by several evolutionary theorists I am not interested in whether or not homosexuality can be "explained" by evolution. The point is that, the evolutionary paradigm that is popular expects all behaviours to be explicable in terms of their heritability and survival value. I find this claim ridiculous. How can things that emerge from humans be unrelated to evolution?Also your assertion that homosexuality is a product of homosexuals "having no barriers to procreation" is a bit ridiculous.Lots of people gay and straight people don't have children. But I am certainly not bisexual and the idea that homosexuality can be conflated with bisexuality I find offensive. Homosexuals are usually born to straight people. Unless the insinuation your are making is that anyone who has a gay child must be a closet gay?Homosexuality could easily emerge from reproduction because giving birth to a few infertile children does not lead to species extinction. I am not the one trying to explain homosexuality in terms of evolution.You keep on saying "The *fact* of evolution. This thread is not about whether the general paradigm of evolution is a fact. As I feel I have repeatedly stated this thread is about theories emerging from evolution.However I don't think evolution (as an over arching theory) can be a fact when it fails to explain a lot of phenomena and when there is widespread disagreement within the field (such as the one that has been highlighted on the nature and origin of morality) (speculating that homosexuals are the product of closet it homosexuals is speculation not fact or explanation)The idea is that humans must have evolved therefore we must explain anything relating to humans as stemming from or compatible to evolution. This problematic because what is entailed in explaining things via evolution? As I have pointed out it involves some pernicious and offensive theories.As I also tried to highlight there are different degrees of evidence and different levels of plausibility in theories. As I have also tried to point out some theories are simply speculation, some have weak evidence and some have strong evidence.

"I think that on one portrayal of evolution it makes us victims of intentionless coercive drives in the service of mindlessly propagating our genes." The difference is that the theories of behaviour in evolution attempt to reduce behaviour to this. Such as in the case of altruism and the selfish gene that I have mentioned. The universe, in terms of the interactions of particles, microwaves, and asteroids etc does not need to be described in terms such as "altruism" or "meaning"However in the human sphere it is completely different, because for example, humans are altruistic and will help other people in need (whereas planets don't) and then this altruism is claimed to be solely in the service of our genes. It is a case reducing a lot of what humans due and making in service of a crude reductionist evolutionary paradigm. Now if these claims were actually true it would have negative ramifications but people are promoting these theories and denying the ramifications.*I am a firm antinatalist and I don't believe anyone should have children what ever world view you hold.* I think having children is cruel and unnecessary and pointless. But I think it is particularly bad to have a derogatory world view and have children, this includes religion and evolution. For example Christians often believe Billions of people are going to hell and still have children.If you believe the "reducible to survival and genes" idea of evolution then you can easily undermine all human attributes as in service of mindless reproduction (whether it is true or not) (The ease with which you can do it is suspicious)So for example someone could interrupt a romantic session between you and your girlfriend/boyfriend and cynically state that it is just your genes and Oxytocin making you do this to encourage you to reproduce. But if you really believe it is all just a ploy to make us reproduce why follow this relentless futility and promote it. Cognitive dissonance?For example Richard Dawkins says"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. "And later in his career"We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?What? We are supposed to be privileged and grateful to end up in a world full of suffering beyond decent contemplation? I child dying of starvation, a slave or someone been gassed in a concentration camp isn't supposed to whine?Hmm

I have clarified my position in my response to another poster.I can see no bar to anything evolving and persisting in a large population. The idea that everything has to service evolution is bizarre. However this a problem for deciding what has an evolutionary "function" and what doesn't, Leading to rampant speculation.There was an article talking about what the evolutionary benefits of being a good dancer might be. It had a photo of John Travolta on it. Ironically Travolta is frequently speculated to be gay and at the time of the article his son had just died. So they used a picture of a potentially gay man with only two children one of who had died from a likely inherited condition to highlight the evolutionary benefits of dancing.

My background is in science and anthropology.Most of what you are posting seems to be unrelated to either.None of my classes in graduate school included John Travolta or dancing, or many of the other topics you are introducing. What they did include was a lot of evolution, fossil man, human osteology, human races, and other solid subjects.In other words I have no idea what you are taking about.

I think that you are talking about he extremes of evolutionary psychology - perhaps made worse by reporting in the popular press. To call those implications of evolutionary theory is controversial to say the least. Both the research methods and the extreme adaptionism (assuming every trait has an evolutionary advantage) are criticised by other scientists working on evolution.

By 'implications' you mean that evolution has outcomes for people? Well I guess that must be true in the big picture and over a very long period of time, but we 'people' have a way of exagerating how anything affects us and drawing conclusions from insufficient evidence in order to explain things to ourselves.There's no reason why every trait we find is as a result of adaption to a survival situation - such things are extreem events. Other traits may be simple errors that have no significance. No one knows what homosexuality is all about, it occurrs in many species, it is what it is, attempting 'just so' stories for it is not scientific.

Wait, how do you know homosexuality is an evolved adaptation? We don't need the theory of evolution. It's way too much firepower.Humans are attracted to other humans. Humans are complex and development doesn't always go in the direction that is optimal for survival. Development includes brain development, which can develop depression, mania, a keen mathematical mind, good or bad linguistic capacity. There, we're done. That was easy.Homosexuality is the result of environmental factors in early development, possibly in some cases pre-natal development. I have a reference to a study on my Kindle (currently out of power but I can get it if you need) that show exposing pregnant mice to heightened levels of a certain hormone can result in male mice being attracted to female mice but 'presenting' during mating rather than 'mounting and penetrating'. That is, in some sense, transgender mice.We don't need evolution here except in the sense that brains are complex organs that develop in environments that vary are subject to chaos and even minor variances in inital or early conditions can result in sometimes rather profound differences (including being born dead, a very poor result for evolutionary 'goals'!).Did your mother smoke when you were pregnant? Was she exposed to certain pesticides? These can be mostly harmless things to the individual in many cases, but can result in significant outcomes for the pregnancy. Likewise, a 6 year old smoker may find their growth stunted, and their sexual development impaired.Evolutionary theory is not require, or appropriate for this.The challenge to evolution is - how do we explain the evidence that suggests familial clustering? How much is shared environment and how much is shared genes, and why are those genes still propagating in those cases genes have an influence? These are open questions that are part of continuing research. For obvious reasons (ie ethics) we can't perform experiments to be sure so we have to opportunistically rely on data that we can grab from 'the wild'. This means it is a slow and unsure process.Is this a problem? There are lots of genetic disorders than run in families that have a bigger impact on fecundity than homosexuality. Some of these are not yet entirely explained. That's why research hasn't, you know, stopped. I'm confused as to your point, here.

Lots of folk say really stupid stuff. Lots of really stupid ideas are also very popular. No scientist expects all behaviors to be explicable in terms of their heritability and survival value.The fact of evolution and the Theory of Evolution deal with populations, not individuals. I don't like puddings or yogurt or green peas. Those facts really do not threaten either the fact of evolution or the Theory of Evolution. Why. If I can point to a single example of a person who is homosexual ever fathering or being the mother of a child your position is refuted.But I think the real issue is that you are creating a false dilemma. Sure there are folk that posit ideas like you seem to be calling "theories" but that is simply a misuse of terminology.

Well, this is all a little vague, so in reply here are some general thoughts, for what they are worth.First of all, trying to find the adaptive merits of biological features is in fact a good idea. When we take such a feature and ask "what is it for?" (i.e. what benefits does it confer on the organism possessing it or the gene that produces it) we often find an answer which is not only plausible but utterly undeniable. If there wasn't a good fit between the features of an organism and its way of life, no-one would have thought of evolution --- or, if it comes to that, of ascribing life to a wise creator.This is not to say that such an adaptationist program will always succeed. Indeed, the theory of evolution itself tells us that it shouldn't, because evolutionary pathways are constrained by historicity --- one thinks here of the blind spot of the vertebrate eye, the recurrent laryngeal nerve in tetrapods, the olfactory pseudogenes of whales, and so on. In fact some of the most compelling arguments for evolution lie precisely in those cases where we can point out that adaptation is not the answer but history is, since these points distinguish it from the only rival hypothesis to attain any measure of popularity.Then there is neutral mutation. We know, I would say beyond doubt, that it is the explanation for certain characteristics of genomes (thanks to the work of Shimura and others); to what extent can it account for observable features of the phenotype?We might go on to mention sexual selection; or we might discuss "spandrels", i.e. cases in which an adaptation brings with it side-effects that are not adaptive, as a result of the non-modularity of phenotypes.The theory of evolution, then, is not strictly adaptationist, but that said, faced with any given biological phenomenon, an adaptationist hypothesis is a good place to start.

That would be analogous not homologus. Homologies are measured on several aspects, and thus are reproducible by others. It's not subjective.See previous website link for more information. Well you can either (a) use the terms as used in the science to mean what they mean in the science (thus promoting communication) or (b) you can stop using terms that you don't appear to fully understand. See Kin Selection & Altruism and Evolution of Altruism for previous discussions of altruism.IMHO it is common in social animals, because the game theory link I gave you before shows there is an advantage to the population of social organisms. Evolution is analogous to a giant computer trying solutions by iteration, so it is not surprising to me to find it fits game theory.IMHO morality in social animals would include altruism, as well as being faithful, protecting family and tribe, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, etc etc. Not a foundation, just a part of the whole. I would also expect altruism to be absent from the morality of species that don't exhibit altruism. Appeal to popularity and appeal to authority logical fallacies that have no bearing on the validity of the argument. A lot of people have tried to commandeer evolution to suit their political\philosophical\theocratic agenda ("social darwinism" for instance) but that does not mean that evolution is actually involved.So how do you think altruism fits with homosexuality?As I said in Message 12: For both (1) and (2) we could have the genes for attraction in one place and the ones for arousal in another, so it is possible to scramble the two.It could also be a combination, but none of these are tied to altruism afaics.Enjoy