You worte: "...the questions to be discussed should be about what mix of personality (or personality traits) and environment lead to choices of sexual behavior and orientation that are in biological opposition to natural selection." Human groups have managed to persist for long periods of time with traits that one may not suspect to be adaptive. Many cultures, for instance, produced a great many celibates for long time periods. And, on the other hand, some behaviors persist despite their apparent nonadaptive value. War, for example, is no longer regarded as adaptive in any sense but has not diminished in the least. Some researchers have argued that war was never adaptive. Heterosexual expression leading to progeny in an era of overpopulation is a trait that may have dubious adaptive value unless occuring at extremely low rates. To understand adaptation and natural selection, it is essential to ask: To what environmental conditions (which must include the human-group environment) at a particular time in history is a particular adaptation beneficial? The requirements for successful adaptation in one period of history and under one set of conditions may be quite maladaptive in another period or another set of conditions. To avoid superficial "truisms" about what is and is not adaptive one must take a truly evolutionary perspective. Darwinian theory, however, holds that RANDOM VARIATION among individuals exists first, and them some traits are selected more frequently as needed by changing environments. One can see that the Darwinian model would require that a species be able to sustain itself by maintaining a wide variety of potential traits avaialable for changing conditions. Environments never CAUSE the variation, either directly or indirectly. Changes in the physical or group environment do not produce a trait but rather are the occasions for a greater frequency of selection from among a wide variety of avaialable traits. In today's era when the next fifty years threaten to bring devastation in the form of resource depletion, pollution, and overpopulation, it seems apparent that there is adaptive value in behavioral traits favoring sexual expression (or lack thereof) that DOES not produce progeny. The fact that there is wide variation in traits favoring different sexual orientations, including those that do not conduce to overpopulation, is an expression of the effectiveness of natural selection and not an expression of opposition to natural selection.
Replies:
| Behavior OnLine Home Page | Disclaimer |
Copyright © 1996-2004 Behavior OnLine, Inc. All rights reserved.