| March 2004
Far out from the in-crowd
Here are some musings springing from her article. Look where we go. One of the salient points Roughgarden made was that the simple binary model of male and female is not the standard pattern in nature. The most common model for multicellular organisms is one where the organism is both male and female either at the same time or at different periods of the organism's life. With animals we commonly find different kinds of males or different kinds of females within the same species. Each of these types, she called a gender. So while a species may have two sexes, it can have more than two genders. Actually every schoolchild knows this. They learn about queen bees, worker bees and drones. Both the queen and worker bees are female. So there you have it - a species with 2 sexes and 3 genders. That being the case, you really wonder how true to life, or not, parents get when they start telling their kids about the birds and the bees! But of course, no sex-ed teacher will relate the 3 genders of bees to idea that humans too have more than 2 genders. In any case, the biology teacher would have told the class that has the worker bees are sterile females, suggesting that they are little more than automatons or negro maidservants [1], ranking way below the royal queen.
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And this is where we are trapped by language. The moment we named the queen bee a queen bee, we immediately elevated her above the worker bees. But if we had called them the breeder bee and the citizen bees, then the tables are turned around quite a bit, aren't they? Are the sterile worker (oops, citizen) bees redundant? Far from it; they are essential. No bee colony can survive without them. Aren't homosexual humans sterile, in the sense of not breeding? Perhaps. But does that mean they are redundant? They serve no purpose? Of course, I don't actually think that sex-ed teachers would even care about the true facts of birds and bees. They can't afford to, because if they did draw too close a parallel, they'd have to point out not only that the "lesbians" rule bee-dom, but also that all the males - the drone bees - serve only one role: as toyboys for the breeder bee. That would be too subversive an idea! Even when the species is appearance-wise binary - male and female - homosexual behaviour is very common. In some species, homosexual encounters make up 1 in 10 sexual encounters observed in any group of aniimals. Among the bonobo chimpanzees, it is one in two. Among humans, however much homophobes wish to paint homosexual behaviour as extremely marginal, the objective fact is that it is not. Roughgarden made the point that while most people think of homosexuality as some kind of aberration that leads to an evolutionary dead-end, yet in terms of its frequency, it bears no resemblance to true dead-end aberrations. It is many orders of magnitude more frequent than the latter. She used the example of Huntingdon's Disease, which is a strictly genetic disease. Now, we know that homosexual orientation is not purely genetic in its origins, but very likely, given the latest research, a complex interplay of genes and foetal development. Wouldn't this explain why it hasn't died out, why it has persisted? In other words, would it mean that it is valid to say it is a dead-end aberration and yet one that does not die out? No, it wouldn't. The two cannot both hold. If indeed homosexuality -- whatever its origins -- is a handicap to reproduction (which is what people normally mean by 'dead-end aberration'), then all it would take is a situation where different communities had different rates of homosexuality, for its effect to show. Different rates of homosexuality would result in different survival rates. By this theory, the community with the lowest or nil incidence of homosexuality would outbreed the others and eventually dominate the species. How would a community have a different incidence of homosexuality? By mutation. Even if the trait was not entirely due to genes, a group of individuals who happened to get a mutation that reduced the likelihood of the foetal events that lead to homosexual orientation would end up having fewer homosexual persons in their midst. Over a hundred generations - and that's very little compared to how long humans have been on the earth -- the cumulative advantage in breeding rates would make a huge difference, with the mutation that lowered the chance of homosexuality predominating. Homosexuality should have vanished. But it hasn't, and there is no evidence that it is less common than say, 3,000 years (or 100 generations) ago. This suggests, as Roughgarden said, there there is something wrong with the initial assumption that homosexuality is an evolutionary dead-end or reproductive disadvantage. Singapore, like many countries, has too low a birth rate. Currently it is coming down to just half of the necessary rate to replace ourselves in the next generation. Most people agree what the problem is: not a matter of not getting partners or not getting sex, but the unaffordable cost of raising children, both time-wise and money-wise. I don't mean to over-simplify a truly complex issue here, but merely to take one aspect of it: the economic. In two-parent families nowadays we are faced with an impossible contradiction. Given our cost of living, few couples can afford to have one partner staying at home fulltime. Yet fulltime care is what is needed to raise psychologically healthy children, at least for the first 5 years. If we desire 2 children per couple (100% replacement rate), one partner has to be a fulltime homemaker for 7 or 8 years. Getting back into a career after such a long a break may be difficult, so he or she has to assume the risk of remaining a homemaker for life.. How can a couple sacrifice 40 - 50% of their income by having one partner stay off work, and yet bear the cost of raising children? Is it any wonder that birth rates are plummeting? Now imagine another scenario. In another community, gay or transgendered brothers and sisters are fully integrated into families. Typically, each heterosexual couple also lives with a non-heterosexual sibling, making a typical household of 3 adults. If one of them stays home fulltime to raise kids and 2 go out to work, the income sacrifice is 33%, not 50%. The "breeder" woman can have 3 children sequentially (which by historical standards is still a small family). It may mean she's out of work for a longer period, say 10 years, or like the above example, for life. Yet, such a culture is able to achieve 100% replacement rate - 3 kids for 3 adults - with each family suffering only a 33% loss in income.
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It gets even better if each breeding couple has 2 gay siblings, and if the fertile woman has 4 kids, which is still low by historical standards. Then the family unit suffers just a 25% reduction in income when one of them stays home fulltime. No doubt this is extremely theoretical, and certainly doesn't take into account other variables like the modern desire for self-fulfillment which in our present time is often equated with careers. Nor can we realistically compel families to abide by prescribed structures (though some readers will think: but don't we do that already?). However, what I want to show through the various models is how it is possible to get the demographic result we want by quite a few other means. And the more unconventional model may be more cost-effective. It suggests that a strong heterosexism, with its tendency to cast out homosexual persons, may be incompatible with demographic continuity. To have every man and woman breed may mean there's no "economy of scale". On the other hand, to have too few women each trying to have too many children may create other drawbacks as well. There may be a kind of optimum in between the two extremes. Where that optimum is, I don't claim to know. But this kind of modeling does show that a society that welcomes homosexual members into the family unit, where the homosexual member contributes income and love to growing children, may have an evolutionary advantage, even in our modern, industrial and post-industrial age.How can homosexual people be trusted to raise children? some may still ask. Why not? is the objective response, for there is no evidence, none at all, that they make poorer parents or surrogate parents. All the objections that may come to mind are really constructs of dogma and misapprehension. And here, even if a little
facetiously, we come back to the bees. Conception - the
easy part - comes from the breeder female having a fling with
her toyboys, but it is the lesbian aunties who raise the kids. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda None
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This essay takes off from a feature article
in the New Scientist (17 Jan 2004 issue), by Joan Roughgarden, titled '
