In reply to Stuart Williams:
> why can't same sex relationships be beneficial to the species? ...Thus bisexuality could, certainly in smaller communities, be the ideal for strong bonds within the community which would promote the interests of the species in that people are more likely to work closely together to achieve the best results for everyone.
Yes I agree it could - a perfectly compelling explanation along evolutionary lines could indeed be conjured for societies where bisexuality and polygamy were the norm. When you look at the human race though, that's not how it has turned out, and so it doesn't really require an explanation.
If there or were societies where there was a whole lot more 'bonding' going on, then yes, this could be perfectly great for everyone including the selfish genes.
> Moreover I think you massively downplay the effects of social conditioning. You can't just keep taking your own experience as a the only source of evidence for things since you live in a certain culture with certain conditioned beliefs and values which may not be representative of true human nature.
Fair point, but it's not something I *keep* doing. Seems to me that if you wanted to sum up the history of human homosexuality in a few glib words, you'd say that it's always been present in small numbers of individuals, and those individuals have generally been loathed and shunned. It just keeps cropping up, no matter the social conditions.
This is what needs an explanation, and a sensible one is that homosexuality is just something that occurs in humans, pretty randomly, with a prevalence of about 1-2%. Exactly how heritable the trait is is unknown at present, what environmental factors influence it are also unknown. But just like hunger isn't a social construct, it's physiological, sex drive isn't a social construct, it's physiological. How it's expressed however may vary greatly according to social conditions.
In tolerant societies you get more of it self-reported, in certain circumstances (oil rigs, prisons) you might get more behaviour that looks like it, but in general it just seems to always be there against the wishes of wider society. If we want to find examples of where it's not like this, we have to go to ancient greece (where we actually have very little idea of what society was like) or perhaps some tribe that might or might not exist in amazon. Not Africa, nor India, nor China...
> At the risk of being antagonistic it is also worth asking that if you only follow the rigid view that evolution = procreation = same sex relationships and ignore any other factors then aren't you arguing that homosexuality is a genetic disorder of some kind?
Not really. For something to be pathological, it has to be doing some harm. The harm caused by other people's attitudes doesn't count to make the condition itself pathological!
> On a slightly separate note, but following the evolution strand of all this, studies of genital formation indicate that humans are naturally polygamous and our current belief that monogamy is the ideal is a social construct we have created over time.
Well as I said before, social constructs aren't random. I would have thought that we're "naturally" quite monogamous and a bit polygamous - because that's what we are! The evidence is all around. The institution of marriage is an attempt to big up one side of our nature and suppress the other - being totally monogamous in this way has many advantages for society and the running of things and so we hold it as an ideal.
I don't really know what evidence you're using to say that we "should" be "naturally" all bumming each other and sleeping with each others' wives, and that our monogamous ideals are somehow "unnatural". The social constructs merely reflect that we do well to raise our offspring in pairs, but there are urges outside of that (evolution wants us to hedge our bets a little?) that could lead us astray in ways which aren't good for society at large (they cause fights).
Post edited at 20:34