On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, boddi satva wrote:
> What's more interesting is that homosexuality is consistently
> expressed in both humans and our close relatives much more often than
> in most higher vertebrates. This suggests that homosexuality has
> probably been with us and our recent ancestors for hundreds of
> thousands of years. That does suggest that homosexuality may well be
> associated with something that is positively adaptive or positively
> adaptive in itself. It's clear that homosexuality COULD have a
> negative effect on reproductive success. It hasn't. In fact, at the
> time when we and our close ancestors were having phenomenal
> reproductive and survival success, we were probably expressing, as a
> population, this homosexual behavior.
This highlights the slippage that bugs me in this thread: there is a crucial difference between "homosexual behavior"--e.g., Bonobos females going at it--and our modern concept of a stable "sexual type". If by "homosexuality" or "heterosexuality" you mean that people engage in same-gender or opposite gender sexual escapades, I agree wholeheartedly, we have good evidence of homosexuality and heterosexuality in humans and related primates. However, if you mean by "homosexuality" that people everywhere at all times classify themselves into a discrete, stable sexual category, and then act exclusively on the basis of that category, then you're making a claim that is contradicted by a huge pile of historical and anthropological data.
Crucial lesson from Foucault: there is a huge conceptual gap between engaging in a sexual act and being a sexual "type". We assume that sexual acts reflect some underlying sexual "essence" or identity in a person, but that assumption is a social fact, not a biological mandate.
Miles