The Evolutionary Theory That Explains the Emergence of Gays and Lesbians
Have you ever heard of it?
From a geological timeline, mainstream evolutionary theories paint all organisms as either dead ends or temporary vehicles. Genes, on the contrary, are considered virtually immortal. That’s what
preaches in all his books, talks, and interviews.I disagree with him.
Dawkins made me completely interested in evolution. The Blind Watchmaker enthralled me more than The Selfish Gene, and it was while flipping these pages that I felt evolution had more to say than the story of genes.
The infertile are not dead ends. Mules and hinnies are not evolutionary cul-de-sacs. Reproduction is not all we have to consider in evolution.
Richard Lewontin gave three essential features necessary for evolution through Natural Selection to take place. Heritability, variability, and differential fitness. Fitness is a combination of two traits — survivability and reproduction. Thus, reproduction is still considered necessary in Natural Selection.
There’s the issue.
It is evolution according to Natural Selection. Evolution can still happen without explanatory power from the popular theory. When numbers are small, for instance, Natural Selection has little say. Genetic drift plays a stronger role, and traits can be fixed in populations.
But genetic drift also requires reproduction. How can a theory bent on reproduction explain the emergence of populations not wired to reproduce? Gay and lesbian couples can reproduce, but they often opt not to. They have existed for centuries, long before the technology of in vitro test tube babies.
Theodosius Dobzhansky, however, remarked that biology does not make sense except in the light of evolution. Well then, how does it explain the emergence of couples who will likely never consider reproduction? What’s more, this trait emerges from the people who were born through reproduction, and like prions, converts them into the same movement. How can Natural Selection gain leverage in explaining such people and their increasing prevalence?
Gay and lesbian populations are clearly a phenomenon that needs explanation. Transgenders and other groups are not, since many species are known to switch sexes and even contain two sexes in a single body. What is evolutionarily mysterious are gays and lesbians. And I think my theory can explain why we have them.
A brief intro to the theory and what it explains
I call the theory Organismal Selection. I have previously described it at length in a three-part series. The three articles, however, will never be enough to cover all the potential explanatory mysteries the theory can explain. This one is no exception.
Organismal Selection (OS) focuses on the organism. Scientific programs stress so much on the genes that they forget where they reside, inside organisms. Denis Noble, the physiologist and a friend of Richard Dawkins, sometimes appears to be mad by invoking the important role of the cell in evolution. For clarity, he isn’t. The gene is nothing without the cell, and that’s a stretch, because without going far, the gene is nothing without the genome.
A gene and a genome are different entities. A gene is the smallest unit of a genome that codes for a protein. A genome is the full set of genes of an organism. Cells such as ours contain genomes inside our mitochondria, and these too feature in our genome, although the Human Genome Project focused more on our nuclear DNA.
Thus, OS gives us a systems perspective. A necessary perspective, because it does not just use biology to explain life’s mysteries, but also borrows from classical physics. The second law of thermodynamics implicitly talks about death. The universe progresses towards death.
Entropy, in physics, is death. We all die at some point. Order tips every day into disorder. The biochemical definition of death is disorder. Or, in a word, entropy.
Organisms don’t like that. So they strive to preserve their orderly states. Order is best seen through clusters. Humpty Dumpty is an approximation of our lives. Once we’re scattered, we die. So every action we take strives to preserve some form of order.
Order is also best seen when two disparate bodies come together. A class with students all over the place does not seem ordered. One with rows does. That’s order. All of them huddled inside a class is more orderly than outside it, about their errands. And teachers like to have some semblance of control over their students. They prefer to bring and preserve order.
Our bodies operate in the same manner, down to the subcellular level. With every replication of the DNA, some disorder is anticipated. For this reason, DNAs have repair enzymes to make corrections before the cell duplicates. Checkpoints at every stage minimize these errors. With age, as with all machines and organisms, errors accumulate. Aluta continua.
Thus, OS predicts that the easiest way of avoiding death is by seeking mergers. Mergers consolidate order. A man will leave his home and be joined with a woman (or man, or dog, or cat). They will strive to preserve the relationship. However, like all efforts to prevent DNA errors, relationships are not without trials.
Above all, organisms seek mergers. It is evolutionarily evidenced from the single asexual bacteria and archaea to the complex entity writing this piece. As a novel theory, OS further underpins the relevance of particles behaving like organisms, seeking out mergers and responsible for the bonds we have always been taught since high school, such as covalent and hydrogen bonds, and even the strong subatomic forces, but that is not the basis of my argument here. The gravamen of my thesis is that mergers of various stripes are all similar from the view of OS. And by now, you should at least intuit how that is relevant in explaining the emergence of gays and lesbians.
Gays and lesbians
Mama had four kids, but she’s a lesbian
Had to pretend so long that she’s a thespian— Jay-Z
I was brought up a catholic. I’m not anymore. But I have no qualms with them. I still attend mass when at my mother’s home.
Because of my upbringing, we were shunned from various practices. Sex was supposed to be a holy consummation. I wonder what all the wild animals think about that.
Anyway, gays and lesbians were not in keeping with the catholic dictates. We were supposed to grow into adults, find a suitable spouse of the opposite sex, abstain until marriage, then have babies without any form of contraception. Hopefully, the sex is satisfying.
Gays and lesbians (here to fore called GLs) are like prions. Prionoses are protein diseases where an infected protein converts a healthy one into a diseased one. It was not there in the first place. It merely emerged. It then began converting others into versions of itself. Like a vampire, without the coercive superpowers or the thirst for blood.
GLs can have sex, but not as we have known it in biology. Well, not even as the catholic church views it. Sex, from a biological viewpoint, is more than just bumping uglies. It is the reciprocal exchange of genomes.
The female gamete completely fuses with the male gamete, and their genomes become one. There goes the word — merge. Thus, sex can be explained from the perspective of OS.
Biologists cite the importance of sex as a means of preventing the effects of the second law of thermodynamics. That is, if a genome were to self-replicate, it would continue down the road towards disorder, eventually gaining irreversible mutations it could never recover from. The phenomenon is known as Muller’s ratchet.
Sex prevents that from happening, but merging with people of different genomes, through sex, distributes the traits around the population. Typically, they have to give some caveats, like how sex within the family is a bad thing for the children. Biology thus tells us sex is good, as long as it’s outside the family. How convenient.
GLs don’t have this kind of sex. Theirs is purely pleasure. But the need to have someone with whom to share your dreams and struggles can be overpowering. One friend told me how she has never been happier than she was when she was in a lesbian relationship. What does that say about Lewontin’s three requirements?
Reproduction is out of the topic.
Mergers, however, remain. This is the message that OS underscores. Mergers are essential, regardless of how, where, and when they occur. And they have different stripes.
A stable merger is the kind where the role of one entity serves the other and vice versa. The goal, then, sensu OS, is to find stable mergers. The role of a partner serving another and vice versa. No reproduction necessary.
As a matter of fact, the role of the ovum serves the sperm, and the role of the sperm serves the ovum. This is a stable merger. It’s why it has been preserved throughout evolution from the moment sex was invented. Unstable mergers are like malignant cancers, where the cancer does not serve the individual. Or like fatal infections, where the germs don’t serve the host.
GLs exist because they are also manifestations of mergers.
Richard O. Prum gives a fantastic explanation of the evolution of these unique forms of mergers by sampling the world’s most extraordinary lovers — birds. The birds of paradise are some of the most beautiful ones you will ever encounter. They will do the utmost for love.
The club-winged manakin will reverse its bone density to get ladies. Birds typically should have their bones pneumatized for easy flight. The male club-winged manakin looks at these laws and tells them: I want me some love. They are the only known birds whose bones are solid through and through. An odd group, like the GLs.
Long-tailed manakins, too, are unlikely to get some TLC unless they cooperate. The females who notice extensive cooperation among these birds tend to give it up for the leader of the pack. Working solo doesn’t land you the ladies.
It takes extensive effort for these birds to execute their dances with near perfection. Bromance forms amid these struggles. This is usually a step closer to gay tendencies. However, it is the sure method of landing a girl. How it works is that the alpha will select some beta males and practice the dance with them. Once the female is around, they perform, and if lucky, the alpha mates with the female.
Statistics show that the bonds formed by the betas are strong, and they easily show up for the other. Once the alpha dies or grows old, one of the other betas takes over, but with a solid friend to back them. Sam to their Frodo. They spend more time together than with the females, who are usually one-off interactions.
Let’s review how this happens. The role of one male serves the other, and vice versa. A stable merger. The role of the merger serves the female, and the role of the female serves the merger between the males. Another merger.
Gayism can be explained by understanding these birds. It can apply to humans as well. Recall that the female, through mate choice, picks the cooperative males over the selfish ones. We see that among humans as well. Bros will defend their bros, but even more, will stand for the idea that women should not be harmed. A father will not get into a relationship and end the life of the woman’s child just because they are now dating. They are gentle. More cooperative than forcefully coercive. Brotherhood is also a simple step away from gayism, in the same way as it was with the long-tailed manakin.
The theory of OS has one in its bag.
What about females?
This is more intricate. Among primates, women are the ones who join the new group. It’s never the other way round. Females start from a point of disadvantage. They stand a better chance of surviving by creating mergers than by inflaming hostility.
And assuming that males are coercive, displaying forceful measures in the case the females don’t yield, females would do themselves right by teaming up. As tag teams, the females will spend more time together than with the males. It’s the whole long-tailed manakin situation, but with roles reversed.
Notably, the man does not pick the females because they cooperate. But because of his coercive tendencies, women will do right by themselves by sticking together. Sometimes it ends up inside the bed. And the two of them are stronger united than separated, in case the male turns belligerent. They can even kill. But recall that organisms are averse to death.
Death is disorder; the reverse is order. So females will seek mergers and remain in stable mergers, for their own good and survival.
As morbid as this may sound, it serves both the violent male and the subservient female to take up their roles. The male who gives the female his sperm, and the female who lives on by obeisance to get a child from the male. Of course, organisms have smart ways of subverting these coercive tactics. The merger is not ideally stable, but in a way, it is.
And the most ideal version of lesbianism is seen in a group of fish I admire — Amazon mollies. This is an all-female population. They don’t need men. They reproduce through a process known as sperm-dependent parthenogenesis. They will have sperm from their evolutionary relatives, but will not use them. Once the sperm is within the vicinity of the ova, it triggers the duplication process, beginning the formation of the embryo. The females will then dump the sperm.
Here’s yet again the power of mergers. It looks at Muller’s ratchet and says: I didn’t read your textbooks and peer-reviewed articles. It stuck it out for survival, but preserving mergers. Ideally, they should have died since replication of a single genome will, over time, incur errors. Amazon mollies have proven the exception to this rule, proving yet again that it is the exceptional groups that we should study to question what we consider the null hypothesis. And the alternative hypothesis is that organisms seek mergers, not merely to reproduce. Reproduction is simply another version of a merger.
Even more interesting are the purple-tailed salamanders. They, too, are all female, but they don’t go seeking their evolutionary relatives. They have another female mount them to begin the process of reproduction. No sperm needed. But the role of one salamander serves another and vice versa, when it too will need to be mounted to reproduce. Lesbianism, explainable through mergers.
Natural Selection cannot explain these phenomena; OS can. And as Jay-Z raps:
Cried tears of joy when you fell in love
Don’t matter to me if it’s a him or her
I just wanna see you smile through all the hate
Marie Antoinette, baby, let ’em eat cake
What I’m trying to say is…
Opposing reality is an admission of one’s incomplete set or failed updating of one’s models. The reality is that gays and lesbians exist. They don’t reproduce in the biological sense. And Natural Selection cannot explain this conundrum.
Organismal Selection can.
We need to update our paradigm, unless we are comfortable with denial.
Organismal Selection can be the entry point to understanding how GLs emerge and continue to exist among us.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube