Battleangel

Seed Magazine sums up the controversial theories of Joan Roughgarden, author of Evolution’s Rainbow (via Boing Boing). Roughgarden is currently engrossed in devising and alternative approach to the Darwinian view of sexual selection and its underpinnings.

Roughgarden’s first order of business was proving that homosexuality isn’t a maladaptive trait. At first glance, this seems like a futile endeavor. Being gay clearly makes individuals less likely to pass on their genes, a major biological faux pas. From the perspective of evolution, homosexual behavior has always been a genetic dead end, something that has to be explained away.

But Roughgarden believes that biologists have it backwards. Given the pervasive presence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, same-sex partnering must be an adaptive trait that’s been carefully preserved by natural selection. As Roughgarden points out, “a ‘common genetic disease’ is a contradiction in terms, and homosexuality is three to four orders of magnitude more common than true genetic diseases such as Huntington’s disease.”

While homosexuality is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a biological component, and it needs to be taken into account when building on the “Darwinian” line of thought, I wholly agree with her critics in that she builds a straw man Darwin that isn’t at all updated to reflect what has happened in the field of natural selection. In fact, Roughgarden, despite being apparently distanced from follies such as creationism and being in the field of biology, exhibits many uninformed views of evolution. Views that frankly don’t jive with what I’ve seen in the fields of evolution, ecology and social, evolutionary psychology. Sure, homosexuality isn’t front page material, but most, if pressed on an evolutionary approach, would still come to the same conclusion of a bonding mechanism that increases the overall fecundity in a group in pretty much the same indirect way that, say, kin selection influences the fitness of close relatives. Evolution after all works on a genetic level, even if its effects are felt on the individual of the group. And aside from the purely ecological advantages, reciprocal altruism etc, one could suppose that animals living in small social groups would be more closely related to each other than to members of other groups. Then of course, as Roughgarden argues, most of the species in question are in effect bisexual and would thus not default to zero fitness. The human dichotomy, which at least on paper seems sure to result in just that is explained by cultural influence, socialization and such. But what biologist would be ready to attribute that sort of influence to behavioral science?
Ironically, like the case Roughgarden makes for peacocks, she is herself the exception not the rule. It would be fair to say “she” has a bit of a fixation with sexual “selection,” though on a far more personal level. Fair criticism or ad hominem, but one cannot gloss it over. Well, at least she wont team up with the lunatic religious right anytime soon, nor are they likely to pick up Roughgarden’s arguments. Bottom line, Roughgarden is correct in her assumption about social animals having a far less rigid sexual preference than most of us realize, but she makes it into some iconoclastic crusade that threatens an already unfairly besieged scientific field.