This billboard in Southwest London had been put up by -- no surprise there -- the Christian Congress for Traditional Values (CCTV). It featured a family of two parents and two children with text stating "Gay aim: abolish the family", and was reported to have been intended to lead a wider campaign.

In justifying its message, CCTV argued that pro-gay campaigners who "sought same-sex marriage did not do so simply to achieve the same domestic situation that was available to heterosexuals but also because they aimed to redefine and abolish the traditional family".

The notion of a "traditional family" as depicted in the ad is terribly ahistorical (despite the claim of being "traditional"); furthermore, it is nowhere near universal. Historically, the nuclear family was never the main template. The extended family, with complex internal relationships, was. It remains true in most cultures today.

Another interesting thing to note about history is that "gays", as we understand the term today, were either unknown or a category with little significance. Much more prominent historically were male-to-female transgenders, but they did not stand apart from extended families in most traditional cultures; they were embedded in them.

Thus, the idea that non-normative sexualities were and are some kind of threat to the family unit, comes across as rather absurd.

A recent paper by Paul Vasey and colleagues at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, explored this issue. I find a couple of problems with the way they have framed the issue, problems discussed in the box on the right. In any case, this study is not quite conclusive, as the authors themselves have noted. Still, despite the tentative nature of their findings, it serves very well as a starting point for a good discussion.

The Vasey study was done in the Pacific island state of Samoa

 
But first, I need to make a long detour in order to put the study in context. It springs from this question: 

If androphilia (i.e. male-male homosexuality) is a heritable trait, and knowing that androphilic men tend not to have sex with women, how does one explain the persistence of homosexuality through thousands of human generations? Shouldn't it have died out by now?

Chances are that, if you read the above paragraph quickly and thought that, yes, it is a conundrum and that homosexuality ought to have died out, you have fallen for a fallacy.

The fallacy arises from our tendency to see the world in male-centric ways. Many readers assume that heritability, if any, of male androphilia runs down the male line. Homosexual fathers beget homosexual sons, so the idea goes. But since homosexuals are less often fathers than heterosexual men, homosexuality ought to have died out over time.

Christian anti-gay literature tend to use this fallacy -- of course, they don't tell you it is a fallacy -- to build the argument that since homosexuality has not disappeared, therefore the starting assumption that homosexuality is heritable, or even inborn, must be false.

Dean Hamer et al in 1993 and Andrea Camperio-Ciani et al, 2004, have suggested through their research that the trait may well run down the maternal line. Hamer's study found clustering of homosexual males in family trees when he looked at them from the maternal angle. He noted a section of the X chromosome (Xq28) that correlated with homosexual outcomes.

Mothers with homosexual sons had 2.7 children on average. Mothers without homosexual sons had 2.3.

Mothers' sisters display a similar difference. A homosexual man's mother's sister had an average of 2.0 children, compared to a heterosexual man's mother's sister, with an average of 1.5 children. The homosexuality trait that lurks in a maternal family line seems to help the women bear more offspring.

Natural selection appears therefore to have favoured a situation where a woman would bear more children, even if one or more of the sons turned out homosexual, over a situation where the women would bear fewer children, but all sons turn out heterosexual. Why? What advantage did homosexual sons bring to the family?

In recent years, other scientists have postulated that gay sons tend to stick around their brothers and sisters and help them raise children. This is known as the "kin selection hypothesis". By sticking around and showing bias towards their nephews and nieces, the homosexual member's family as a whole gains an evolutionary advantage.

Consider the context of a primitive society, wherein humans evolved. With an extra adult that isn't preoccupied with chasing females from another tribe, and who contributes to hunting or growing more food, or to keeping an eye on the kids, there is a distinctly better success rate in raising the extended family's kids to adulthood. This is especially important considering how adults themselves often die young. A woman cannot rely on her husband surviving the 20 years it takes to raise her kids, or for that matter, sticking around for 20 years and not run off with a younger woman. Better to have a homosexual brother on standby.

Taking this idea to its conclusion, the optimum evolutionary scheme therefore would be a species with three genders: the baby maker, the sperm-and(maybe)-nurture provider and the standby nurture provider. The sperm provider has to come from a distant tribe so as to avoid inbreeding, but this also means that his loyalty to the baby maker may not be strong. It may also be in his nature to want to spread his sperm far and wide. A social species that requires years to raise young needs that third gender -- the standby nurture provider -- as insurance.

And here's the interesting thing: If you removed the western bias from your eyes and really looked at traditional societies across the globe, you will find many of them indeed structured in three-gender ways. 

Theory's all well and good, but does the homosexual brother actually perform the role of a nurture helper? A few small studies have tried to examine this question and found no indication that gay men contributed to their nephews and nieces more than heterosexual men.

Critics, however, have pointed out that these studies had been conducted in Western societies that tended to isolate gay men away from their families (not to mention the paranoia about gay men wanting to molest children!). In such a distorted setting, it would be hard for gay uncles to participate in the lives of their nephews and nieces. Testing such evolutionary theories there must surely be problematic.

* * * * *

Vasey conducted his study in Samoa where traditional life is less disturbed by westernisation, and where there is an accepted tradition of a third gender -- the fa'afafine. They are feminised androphilic males, i.e. biological males who present themselves in somewhat feminine ways, and attracted to straight-looking males. They never have sex with fellow fa'afafine.

It is argued that in a society like Samoa, families are more tightly-knit. The homophobia that characterises Western societies and that alienate homosexual men from their families is much less, and this traditional environment is closer anthropologically to the setting in which humans evolved.

The researchers found that fa’afafines put "significantly" more effort into raising them. The child­care activities that saw stronger input from fa’afafines included babysitting, buying toys, tutoring, exposing the children to art and music, and contributing to day-care, medical and education expenses.

This is the first study to offer real evidence for the kin selection hypothesis' basic prediction, "that androphilic males should direct more altruistic behaviour toward kin than gynephilic males," the team wrote in their report.

Once again, however, I must point out that this was a study of fa'afafine, and we need to be extremely careful about generalising its findings to our modern notion of gay men. As mentioned in the yellow box above, it could well be that evolutionarily-speaking, masculinised male androphilia may have completely different origins and reasons for its presence among humans from feminised male androphilia such as the fa'afafine. 

I have my own theory about that, but it will be for another essay.

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