"CB: I certainly endorse Carl's main point on this issue. A couple of times I almost sent a 'right on Carl !' post to the list, but that would be wasting bandwidth."
Well, Charles, I guess you and Carl have powers of counterfactual analysis (apparently in Carl's case aided by clairvoyance) that elude liberal dupes like yours truly.
I wrote:
> However, what's good for onself (and others) needn't necessarily be good
for one's genes.
Doug responded: "Why? Gay people reproduce. My niece the daughter of lesbian moms is in town this weekend, in fact."
First, my platitude (quoted above) is undeniably true. Secondly, no, it hadn't escaped my notice that some homosexuals beget biological children. But it should be pretty uncontroversial that, in the environment of evolutionary adaptation (and probably just about every other human environment that ever existed), folks who found same-sex intercourse more appealing than opposite-sex intercourse tended to leave behind fewer sons and daughters. Justin argues that they also probably left behind more nieces and nephews, and in sufficient numbers to compensate from an evolutionary point of view. He might be right, but though I'm often a proponent of the phenotypic gambit, I don't think it pays off here (but I might well be wrong). In any event, our disagreement here is of absolutely no political or moral importance.
-- Luke