Biological Exuberance (was Re: I told you it was Eve's fault...)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Apr 25 21:11:05 PDT 2001



>http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns9999667
>Sex, lies and monogamy
>
>At the heart of all long-term relationships lies a fundamental
>deception - disguised fertility
>
>Exclusive from New Scientist magazine
>
>Women only stay with men for security, and men only stay with women
>for sex. It's a cynical view of human relationships, but researchers
>now say it is the driving force behind the evolution of monogamy -
>and women started it. By offering sex all the time, females in
>monogamous species disguise whether they are fertile and trick males
>into sticking around.
>
>In most species, females only have sex when they are fertile. This
>is because sex takes energy, and carries the risk of disease. But it
>also means males can easily tell which females are fertile, so they
>don't waste time on mates that won't get pregnant.
>[snip]

***** The FABULOUS kingdom of GAY animals <http://www.salon.com/it/feature/1999/03/cov_15featurea.html> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A BIOLOGIST OFFERS THE FIRST VISION OF A TANTALIZINGLY DIVERSE NATURAL WORLD: NOT ALL ANIMALS ARE STRAIGHT ARROWS.

BY SUSAN McCARTHY | The scientist gasps and drops the binoculars. A notebook falls from astonished hands. Graduate students mutter in alarm. Nobody wants to be the one to tell the granting agency what they're seeing.

A female ape wraps her legs around another female, "rubbing her own clitoris against her partner's while emitting screams of enjoyment." The researcher explains: It's a form of greeting behavior. Or reconciliation. Possibly food-exchange behavior. It's certainly not sex. Not lesbian sex. Not hot lesbian sex.

Six bighorn rams cluster, rubbing, nuzzling and mounting each other. "Aggressosexual behavior," the biologist explains. A way of establishing dominance.

A zoo penguin approaches another, bowing winsomely. The birds look identical and a zoogoer asks how to tell males and females apart. "We can tell by their behavior," a researcher explains. "Eric is courting Dora." A keeper arrives with news: Eric has laid an egg.

They've been keeping it from us: There are homosexual and bisexual animals, ranging from charismatic megafauna like mountain gorillas to cats, dogs and guinea pigs. There are transgendered animals, transvestite animals (who adopt the behavior of the other gender but don't have sex with their own), and animals who live in bisexual triads and quartets.

Bruce Bagemihl spent 10 years scouring the biological literature for data on alternative sexuality in animals to write "Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity," 768 pages about exactly what goes on at "South Park's" Big Gay Al's Big Gay Animal Sanctuary. The first section discusses animal sexuality in its many forms and the ways biologists have tried to explain it away. The second section, "A Wondrous Bestiary," describes unconventional sexuality in nearly 200 mammals and birds -- orangutans, whales, warthogs, fruit bats, chaffinches.

Bagemihl's dry style is obedient to the precepts of scientific writing. He explains why animals can be called homosexual or bisexual, but not gay, lesbian or queer, and he follows the rules -- though "homosexual" frightens some who prefer terms like male-only social interactions, multifemale associations, unisexuality, isosexuality or intrasexuality. (Fortunately, as a book reviewer, I am not bound by this rule. We're talking gay animals!) Yet the book is thrillingly dense with new ideas, and with scandalous animal anecdotes. In other words, an ideal bedside read.... *****

I don't know if the book is actually good, but it sounds interesting.

Yoshie



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