Thursday 7 August 2008

Evolution and homosexuality (5)

(Continued)

There is a slow gradual transition from agricultural, pastoral societies to 'civilised' (i.e. more complex and organised) societies. Organisation requires 'leaders'. Natural leadership skills aka charisma works fine in small groups, but without mass media, there has to be a hierarchy of administrators or politicians or priests (all the same thing, really, and all in it for The Greater Good as well as naked self-interest). Advance requires technology and science; an organised society needs artists and craftsmen to celebrate the achievements of The Great And Good*. A society that advances needs an army to protect itself from less successful ones.

Now, if you're an Average Joe with your own family to look after, you'll have little time or enthusiasm for all this (even though in the grander scheme of things, they benefit you). So Nature needs to have some people who don't have to worry about kids. On the one hand, Nature could have just arranged it so that more people were infertile, but this would defeat the object, and humans would die out - far better to have slightly too many children and for some of these to be gay (as covered in Part 4).

Furthermore, Nature is a kindly old soul - it would be downright cruel to have straight but infertile people. So those rôles - as warriors, administrators, artists, scientists etc - are ideally suited for gay people. They can still form happy relationships but their lives aren't bogged down with the minutiae of daily life.

Which sort of brings up to date ... but the story continues ...

* If Michaelangelo had been straight, he'd have done the Sistine Chapel matt white. With a roller.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting posts, I thought the best comment was the research on autism by Prof, Simon Baron-Cohen.

We all fall into the trap (mainly through the dynamics of our brains and mind) that there is some sort of plan be it God or Mother Nature, (or even in the greenies case, big government that can map a course out for us to utopia.)

Putting my Dawkins, blind watchmaker hat on, Gay people pose no threat to the selfish gene or the gene pool, so they just happen along with everything else.

If gay folks start getting all fundamentalist on us, and start wanting to take over the world, then its war :0)

btw, they will have there work cut out, at the last census there was not many of them, and certainly no where near the numbers claimed.

http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA3C8.htm