“Why am I gay?” The question reverberates through every homosexual at least once in his or her life. While potentially confounding as a personal question, when one applies a little science, this question becomes an intriguing evolutionary puzzle. Homosexual behavior has been observed in more than 1,500 species. If the point of life, from an evolutionary standpoint, is to pass on useful genes, why is anyone gay?
Humans have been trying to answer that question since we began applying scientific principles to human sexuality. Unfortunately the first of those humans were Victorians who considered the “nameless offense of great enormity” so dangerous to society that they regularly sent gay men to the gallows or locked them away forever. The Victorians passed their prejudices on to later generations. As late as 1971 — 16 years before homosexuality would be struck from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) — a study titled “Behavioral Changes Due to Overpopulation in Mice” included homosexuality in a list of “catastrophic events” alongside increased mortality among the young, lack of maternal functions, and cannibalism.
Others questioned whether homosexuality had a genetic component and even (gasp!) evolutionary benefits. In charting the variations between hetero and homo development and physiology, we’ve learned that gay men show significant variation in the size and structure of INAH3 (a part of the brain involved in regulating sexual behavior); gays tend to produce higher levels of the “social” hormone progesterone; and curiously, the likelihood that one of her sons will be gay increases by 33% with each male child a woman gives birth to. Full story here via the Advocate!
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