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Ramble on Narnia fic, Darwin, and a recent article on demolishing cherished and possibly incorrect assumptions about same-sex behaviors in animals. The article is here with a news article discussing it here.
I'll try a cut but DW doesn't like cuts when there are also indents...( AW excerpt )
I didn't know when I wrote this that it's in fact something referred to as the Darwinian Paradox -- why are same sex sexual behaviors so common and why do they persist when there is no seeming reproductive, evolutionary advantage to it. A November 2019 article is so interesting because all it does, so profound in its simplicity, is reframe a basic assumption. What if, instead of our assumption that everything was hard-wired from time immemorial as different sex sexual behavior (DSB) the default biological assumption was both DSB and same sex sexual behavior (SSB)? In other words, and to borrow from more commonly used human terms, what if bisexuality was the default of ancestral heredity? I'm not enough of a biologist to unpack the science behind this. But it was definitely an oh wow yeah moment for me.
Monk, J.D., Giglio, E., Kamath, A. et al. An alternative hypothesis for the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in animals. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 1622–1631 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41559-019-1019-7
I'll try a cut but DW doesn't like cuts when there are also indents...( AW excerpt )
I didn't know when I wrote this that it's in fact something referred to as the Darwinian Paradox -- why are same sex sexual behaviors so common and why do they persist when there is no seeming reproductive, evolutionary advantage to it. A November 2019 article is so interesting because all it does, so profound in its simplicity, is reframe a basic assumption. What if, instead of our assumption that everything was hard-wired from time immemorial as different sex sexual behavior (DSB) the default biological assumption was both DSB and same sex sexual behavior (SSB)? In other words, and to borrow from more commonly used human terms, what if bisexuality was the default of ancestral heredity? I'm not enough of a biologist to unpack the science behind this. But it was definitely an oh wow yeah moment for me.
Monk, J.D., Giglio, E., Kamath, A. et al. An alternative hypothesis for the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in animals. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 1622–1631 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41559-019-1019-7
"We question these assumptions and propose an alternative explanation for the prevalence of [same sex sexual behaviors] SSB: that the ancestral condition for sexual behaviour in animals included both [different sex sexual behaviors] DSB and SSB, and that various evolutionary processes, adaptive or otherwise, have shaped the persistence and expression of SSB in different lineages, but need not explain its origins. Indeed, when we observe a particular trait so prevalent within a clade, a reasonable hypothesis to explain such an evolutionary pattern is that the trait likely arose near the clade’s origins..."