Taking the Bait

Methinks the Maximum Leader posted the Derbyshire piece to draw me out of my fatigue-induced silence.

First of all, perhaps Derb's admission that homosexuality is inborn will force the Maximum Leader to stop singing "la! la! la! - Science that goes against my predispoisiton doesn't exist!"

But, snarky comments about my host aside, I would like to take issue with two of the things Derbyshire says - one factual and one conceptual.

He writes:

The theories involving genetics all suffer from mathematical problems.
Homosexuality imposes such a huge "negative Darwinian load" on the affected
organism that it is hard to see how genes inclining to homosexuality could
persist for long in any population. Various ingenious theories have been cooked
up in attempts to finesse the issue, but nobody has been able to make the
evolutionary math work. Which is baffling, because there are persistent nagging
hints, in identical-twin studies for instance, that homosexuality does have some
genetic component.

Someone publishing his ideas in the NRO ought to do a bit more research. Plenty of people have been able to "make the evolutionary math work" and have done so for decades. An important corollary of natural selection is the principle of kinship selection. Even if an organism itself does not reproduce, it can still be a Darwinian winner if enough close relatives pass on their genes. Darwinian psychologists have used this principle to understand altruism and familial favoritism. One (I can't remember which) joked that he wouldn't die for a cousin, but he might die for nine. Since cousins share one eighth of their genetic material, saving the lives of nine would, mathematically speaking, be a good trade from the selfish gene's point of view. Homosexuality, whether genetic predestination or genetic inclination (there are several genes whose influence is flipped on or off based on external stimulus).

In a period of tough times, the ability to nurture a few children to adulthood would be more advantageous than producing many children, who lacking nurture, would be less likely to survive to adulthood.

One example of genes being flipped by external stimuli can be found in the reproductive behavior of bluegills. There are three identified mating patterns. Type A leads to a behavior in which males jealously guard a few nests of fertilized eggs. Type B leads to a behavior in which males establish large nest territories and breed with many females. Type C leads to sneaky behavior - these bluegills sneak into the large territories and drop their sperm onto unfertilized eggs. Since males with a large territory can't guard all of their nests all of the time, the cuckolder fish can have a successful strategy. If the big territory fish become too prevalent in the gene pool, the sneaky strategy becomes more and more successful. As the sneaky strategy starts to predominate, genetic calculus begins to shift towards the guardian fish. If the guardian fish become too numerous, the sneaks lose ground and the big territory strategy becomes valuable. Round and round we go. Genes are complex. While scientists have identified the actual genes assigning sex strategy, other genes establish chemical reactions that respond to environmental cues. Some bluegills seem to be able to adapt their strategy based on the ratio of the three main strategies in the population. This sexual fluidity is an evolutionary advantage.

A similar set of male reproductive behavior has been hypothesized - the cad vs. The dad. See Sperm Wars or The Moral Animal. The Moral Animal emphasizes the fluidity side of the argument - noting that the chemical changes causes by feelings of well-being are a good biological gauge of status and mating potential. High-status males, responding to their environmental cues, are more likely to engage in adultery or serial monogamy. Lower status males (or those with low endorphin levels) tend to focus on nurturing children within one woman. Tremendously low status males, unconsciously realizing their chances for mating are very low, may, in extreme cases, become rapists. The last bit Make Wright unpopular with feminists who claim rape is about power - Wright argues that forced sex is a natural response to powerlessness and backs up that argument with examples from several primate species.

Combine the principle of kinship selection and fluid sexual strategy. Might men who father no children of their own, but instead lavish attention on nephews and nieces have an evolutionary advantage in tough times of overcrowding? In the nomadic ancestral environment, large groups were a recipe for starvation - when the herd was going to be thinned, those who had the most parental support would be more likely to survive. If support from a mom and a dad is valuable, support from a mom, dad, uncle, and "uncle" would be even more valuable.

From the gay man's genes' point of view, this may be a good strategy - if he was straight and fathered two children, each of whom, in tough times, would have a 10% chance of survival, adding his nurture to his sibling's children (who each share one quarter of his genetic material), thus raising their chance of survival to 50%, he comes out ahead in the evolutionary math.

Setting aside the kinship discussion, Derbyshire has also overlooked the new studies that link female promiscuity to male homosexuality. Danish researchers have found that women with more children are also statistically more likely to give birth to male homosexuals. They have theorized (and yes, Mike, they have not yet isolated the culprit gene) that a gene or set of genes that triggers a strong sex drive in females can also trigger homosexuality in their male offspring. So, once again, the evolutionary math can explain homosexuality - Derbyshire's cost of the loss of one set of grandchildren is more than balanced by the prospect of gaining more grandchildren from sexually active daughters.

Derbyshire's lack of understanding of evolutionary theory is largely academic. What matters is his attempt to justify discrimination against homosexuals - regardless of whether homosexuality is a choice or is inborn.

Derbyshire writes:

Homosexual behavior is a social negative, suggesting as it does that normal
heterosexual pairing, the bedrock institution of all societies, is merely one of
a number of possible, and equally moral, "lifestyles," and thereby devaluing
that pairing — perhaps, on the evidence from Scandinavia presented by our own
Stanley Kurtz on this site, fatally.

I often see conservatives make the "protect our traditional marriage" argument without ever explaining how gay marriage affects straight marriage. What Bob and Joe do in their bedroom has ZERO influence on my love for Sally and the kids. I don't wake up in the middle of the night and say to myself, "Well, now that Bob and Joe can do the nasty with the legal blessing of the state, I'se gots to get me sum of that hot man luvin'!"

As to the Scandinavia study, much bandied by the lunatic Christian fringe: The increase of divorce rates and decline of marriage happened during the same time period in which homosexuals gained general acceptance. This does not establish causality. The burden of proof is to find the causal link. The fact that the NHL season was canceled AFTER the Red Sox won the series does not show that Bostonian triumphalism is bad for North American hockey. This study has been thoroughly debunked.

A strong link can be established between the growing economic independence of woman and an increase in the divorce rate. Children do better in two parent households. Does this mean that we ought to limit educational opportunities for women so that they will be forced to stay in heterosexual marriages?

Also particularly galling:

I don't think that the fact of a predilection being inborn should necessarily
lead us to a morally neutral view of the acts it prompts. If you could prove to
me that pyromania is inborn, I should not feel any better disposed towards
arson.

Um, arson creates victims. Consensual sex has no victim. This is as silly an analogy as KBJ's voting dogs.

This essay also demonstrates Derbyshire's blindness to America's legal protection of minority rights:

Further, homosexuality is offensive to many believers in all three of the major
Western religions, who form a large majority of the American population. I think
that while minority rights ought to be respected, civic majorities ought not be
asked to endure offense for the sake of abstract metaphysical or juridical
theories, unless dire and dramatic injustices like slavery are in play.
Majorities have rights too; and while I want to see minority rights respected, I
don't think that every minor inconvenience consequent on being a member of a
minority should be raised to the level of an intolerable injustice requiring
drastic legislative or judicial remedy. We all have to put up with some
inconveniences arising from our particular natures.

Being denied the 1000+ legal rights granted by marriage is not an inconvenience; it is Apartheid. The state may restrict minority rights under certain circumstances. Tom Chatt, who I have linked to before, does a better job than I ever could explaining the legal issues surrounding limitation of minority rights. I'll include a salient paragraph below:

It is useful at this juncture to outline the principles of American
jurisprudence on when it is appropriate to classify "unlike" situations. The law
may classify based on a variety of personal attributes, such as age,
citizenship, gender, and (as already noted) species. However, any classification
is by default suspect in the law because of the principle of equal rights,
treating likes alike. In considering whether some proposed classification is
legal, one considers three things: (1) what is being denied, (2) who is being
denied, and (3) for what purpose are some people being denied. In the first
consideration -- what is being denied -- we must consider how important is the
right that is being denied. Some rights, such as the right to vote or the right
to marry, are considered to be fundamental rights, essential to our life and
liberty, and thus we scrutinize more closely any infringements on these rights.
Other rights, such as the right to park one's car overnight on a particular
street, are not fundamental, and thus the law would reasonably tolerate some
forms of discrimination in regard to such rights (e.g., only people who live on
a street might get to park their cars overnight on that street) which would be
intolerable for fundamental rights (e.g., it would be intolerable to say that
people who lived on Elm Street could vote while people who live on Poplar Street
could not). In the second consideration -- who is being denied -- we must
consider the kind of discrimination being made. Is it based on age or gender or
race or which street you live on? Here, certain kinds of discrimination are
considered "suspect classes" (such as race or religion), or have explicit
protections in the law (such as disabilities or veteran status). Discrimination
on such characteristics has an extremely high presumption of being illegal,
while other forms of discrimination (e.g., age or marital status) are not
scrutinized quite as closely. In the third consideration -- the purpose of
classification -- we examine what a proposed law is trying to accomplish by its
classification, and how well the classification serves the purpose. Where
fundamental rights are being abridged, or where suspect classes are being
discriminated against, the principle is to apply "strict scrutiny" to see if
there is a "compelling state interest" being served and whether the
classification is required and narrowly tailored to serve that interest. In
other cases, lesser scrutiny is applied to see whether there is some "rational
basis" for the law, and whether the classification is in some way reasonably
connected to the purpose. (There is always some scrutiny to be applied, since
purely arbitrary discrimination by the law is never tolerable.)

Game. Set. Match.

I know the Maximum Leader loves Derbyshire, but this particular essay impresses me not at all.