Is homosexuality unnatural?

[InfiniteNow]

Please read my post again, Hasan. This time more carefully.

[Hasanuddin]

My apologies, my eyes must have been playing tricks because I totally misread post 179. It turns out I'm in 100% agreement with you.

What'd Gilda Radner say as SNL character Emily LaTilla, "Oh, that's different, never mind."

[Cedars]

This topic has been appearing in many forums across the net, most often linked to a short news article. So I have spent a bit of time trying to verify some of the claims.

Bonobos (clearly bi-sexual) and some Dolphins (again bi-sexual) aside, an oft used example is the Black Swan and it is connected to a higher survival rate for acquired eggs. This is only true when there are environmental factors, limited territory availability in suitable habitat. If the environmental stress factor is lifted, the success rates of hetero/homo Black swans is virtually equal.

From Wiki on black swans:
"Having access to more food the brood have up to ten times the survival rate of a brood with a heterosexual swan couple." What is often left out of the quote is the following first line from the next paragraph:

"This situation only holds true as long as a nest and/or a territory is in short supply."

What I have not been able to discover is whether these MM swan couplings are also based on female availability in that territory, during the time when these males are looking (being driven to) find a partner.

Another set of birds is being tossed about as examples of homosexuality are a couple of types of gull. This one I found particularly amusing:

"They found that on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, almost a third of the Laysan albatross population is raised by pairs of two females because of the shortage of males. Through these 'lesbian' unions, Laysan albatross are flourishing. Their existence had been dwindling before the adaptation was noticed."

Homosexual behaviour widespread in animals according to new study - Telegraph

So I googled Laysan albatross:

"This species is classified as Vulnerable owing to a projected rapid decline over three generations (84 years) based on declines in populations at Midway Atoll, French Frigate Shoals and Laysan Island in the late 1990s and early 2000s. More recent data indicate that the breeding population may have rebounded (perhaps because apparent changes in the breeding populations reflected large scale environmental conditions that affected the number of birds that returned to the colonies to nest rather than actual declines in the population). If so, this species would warrant downlisting to Near Threatened."

Laysan Albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) - BirdLife species factsheet

How did it become vulnerable?

The Laysan Albatross, while a common species, has not yet recovered from the wide-scale hunting that happened in the early 1900s,[4] with feather hunters killing many hundreds of thousands, and wiping them out from Wake Island and Johnston Atoll.

Laysan Albatross - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Now to the point:
"The population on Oahu has 59% females, probably as a result of female-biased recruitment to this relatively recently formed colony, and Young et al. suggest that the skewed sex ratio has driven the same-sex behavior, with a tendency toward social monogamy fostering its persistence."

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~mzuk/Zuk...one%20wild.pdf

Without looking beyond the telegraph article, one could come to the assumption that FF partnering is the cause of population rebound, rather than the FF partnering is a result of environmental stress (low male to female ratio)

Has low male to female ratios been tested? Well, yes, kinda. Several studies removed male chicks from populations and the results recorded higher FF pairings than in colonies which did not have this environmental factor (page 9):

http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/cgi...nt/18/1/21.pdf

So with an environmental stress, we can increase the occurances of FF pairings. Do we consider an environmental stress factor a natural condition?

Another interesting snippet from a full article (rather than a snippet produced by a news site):

"In the dung fly Hydromyza livens, for example, males have been hypothesized to mount other males to deny them the opportunity to mate, thereby increasing the likelihood that the mounting male obtains more mating opportunities [24]. By contrast, in the viviparous Goodeid fish Girardinichthys multiradiatus, males sometimes display a dark, female-like ‘pregnancy’ spot around their vent. Subordinate males with dark spots attract fewer aggressive maneuvers by dominant males, who appear to mistake them for females and consequently court them [25]."

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~mzuk/Bai...0behaviour.pdf

Now is the above homosexual behavior? I think the dung fly example indicates a method to increase its own genetic survival (and further study is needed) before assigning 'homosexual', and the fish example seems clearly a heterosexual male being fooled by a female mimic (which seems to be a heterosexual), but this is not unlike some men who are aghast when they find out the female prostitute they picked up is really a transvestite. But often, these kinds of examples are used as 'evidence homosexuality is normal' in various news clippings.

Another mentioned insect (though maybe not in this thread) is the Dragonfly/damselfly (several species). What is often used as a 'possible' indication of homosexual behavior is markings on the males neck, which indicate it has been grasped during courtship.

Interesting tidbit of info I learned attending the Bug Festival in June was dragonflies have the ability to scoop out the sperm that has been deposited in the female and then cause the female to seek out this males sperm. This is why the males grab the females around the neck and hold on tightly, to prevent other males from scooping out their sperm. The other part of this is males have two locations for sperm. One in their tail, and the other in their thorax. The male transfers the sperm to the thorax area, and this is where the female reaches up to grab the sperm for herself. Watching this summer as the dragonflies roamed crex, I saw multiple examples of second males just waiting for the first male to lose grip on the female. In the past, I have seen examples of three dragonflies gripped, and now that I know about the sperm scooping/thorax sperm holding area, it makes perfect sense, that the 2nd male (in a trio of three) is hoping the female connects with his thorax in her reaching, rather than the assumption the marks on male dragonfly necks is homosexual dragonfly activity.

[lemit]

The description of dragonfly behavior is fascinating, because I've seen it hundreds of times without knowing what I was seeing.

Thanks, Cedars, for an amazing post. I can also imagine a lot of knees starting to jerk but realizing you've left them very little wiggle room--if that works as a mtaphor.

--lemit

[Larv]

I know of no one who says that homosexuality is unnatural. Of course, it can also be said that incest, polygamy, bestiality, and cannibalism are just as natural.

[lemit]

Originally Posted by Larv

I know of no one who says that homosexuality is unnatural. Of course, it can also be said that incest, polygamy, bestiality, and cannibalism are just as natural.

I can't speak for other people, but I'm just trying to respond to the thread title, which asks that question. My answer is, probably not. You are right in pointing out that, having passed that barrier, we have not gone anywhere, but that's still the barrier in front of us at the moment.

--lemit

p.s. If you'd like to meet some of the people who say it is unnatural, I could start a partial list for you. There really are quite a few of them.

[Larv]

I suspect some people confuse "unnatural" with "ungodly." For me personally, homosexuality would be unnatural, because I am naturally heterosexual. And for a homosexual, I suppose heterosexuality would seem unnatural to him or her.

[Cedars]

Originally Posted by lemit

The description of dragonfly behavior is fascinating, because I've seen it hundreds of times without knowing what I was seeing.

--lemit

One of the things I noticed in one of the pdf links was how many of these observations were in captivity or lab settings (with some lab settings seeming to be experiments to increase the chances via scent triggers or populaton triggers). There is some validity that some of these species are not easily identified (ie male/female) in the wild, so we wouldnt know if these behaviors are occurring in a natural setting.

I didnt post my findings on penguins because the post was getting too long. But we have examples of ss pairings in zoos, and it seems to be a sex ratio pairing. Some examples:

Roy and Silo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Widow a wedge between zoo's male penguin pair

The above are two examples of MM pairings which were broken up when one partner was attracted to a female (either new or recently single). Now these are both examples of captive penguins outside of their natural environment (and I dont know how close to a natural environment their captivity is). Close enough that other couples are reproducing.

But the next example bothers me. And this is why:

"Gay rights advocates were outraged when the zoo brought four new female penguins into the colony in a bid to encourage the penguins to reproduce, and the zoo later nixed the idea. (In the zoo's defense, Humboldt penguins are classified as vulnerable to extinction, so it does make a certain amount of sense to be concerned about them reproducing. And since Z and Vielpunkt have done just that, everyone wins!)"

Gay penguin dads in German zoo hatch their first chick | L.A. Unleashed | Los Angeles Times

First, if the actions of the MM coupling is not their natural choice, advocates are forcing them to stay coupled that way.

Second (and similar to above) If the penguins are homosexual, the introduction of females shouldnt change the coupling.

Third, everyone does not win. Both of the genetics of the MM partnering are being deprived of the chance of being selected for, by what appears to be needless human intervention, when the zoo personal were trying to balance the male/female sex ratio.

Now because we really cant compare animal and human behaviors absolutely, but then again, we have male prisoners forming couples in a population where they are female deprived, so are these men homosexuals? or are they homosocial (a word I picked up in a different forum). Because most male prisoners who couple up with someone while in captivity (forced sex is excluded in this concept) return to their heterosexual ways upon release (for the most part because I cant say for sure all of them do). And this doesnt need to be exclusive to male prisoners because the reality is women form lesbian couplings in prison also.

So can we really use the captive penguin example as homosexual when its obvious at least 2 of 3 couples were broken up by the introduction of a single/available female. And do we really know if the german MM couple is homosexual/ homosocial or forced by captivity to remain in this partnership?

[Turtle]

gay bugs!? really? good grief. well i wonder then if there are homophobic bugs?

Prejudice & Attitudes to Gay Men & Lesbians - Homophobia

What causes people to be prejudiced against gay and lesbian people?
There are many factors that can cause a person to be homophobic. Research has shown that prejudice against gay people and homosexuality can be influenced by the person:

Having strong religious beliefs that disapprove of sex and/or homosexuality
Having little/no social contact with lesbian and gay people
Reporting no homosexual experiences or feelings
'When you're scared, especially of something you actually know nothing about, hatred is a natural reaction.' Robert, 25
Prejudice among young

frontline: assault on gay america: how 'homophobic' are you?

... For much of this century, homosexuality was defined by the medical and scientific community as a psychiatric disorder. In the last several decades, however, "homosexuality" has been removed from the diagnostic manual of disorders, and research emphasis has shifted to the other side of the problem: the study of the negative, sometimes pathological, reactions to homosexuals by heterosexuals. ...

[lemit]

While nature or the lack thereof as it relates to sexual orientation is the text of the title, the subtext of the thread is certainly discrimination. With all the permutations of nature, nurture, and a few forces we don't quite understand, it would seem that the best course would be a certain legal and moral modesty.

So, a parallel question: Is discrimination based on homosexuality unnatural?

--lemit