Monday 20 April 2015

Homosexuality in the Lower Animals?

     By popular demand. Well, not exactly, but a correspondent has suggested it is about time I made good on the promise made in my essay on the sex life of koalas:
Obviously, I am going to have to write another article in due course about the phenomenon, because non-zoologists do not understand that many species of animals use sex in manners not easily referable to human sexuality - or, indeed, to that of other non-human species. Homosexuality as we know it is extremely rare outside of humans.
     There seems to be a lot of interest in this lately. The Wikipedia article on the subject, for example, is accurate as far as it goes, but misses the big picture entirely. The natural temptation is always to equate it with human homosexuality. Indeed, it is clear that many people cite it in order to validate the human activity. One wonders how many examples they need to validate it: a hundred, or just one? And how the same method would not validate monogamy, harems, promiscuity, infanticide, and cannibalism, all of which can be found in the lower animals. In point of fact, every species, including the human species, possesses a social system adapted to its way of life. The presence of a specific behaviour in some other species does not validate it for human beings, and its absence does not invalidate it. Whether homosexual practices are a legitimate activity for human beings is a legitimate subject for debate, but you won't find the arguments in this essay.