>
> kelley wrote:
> >
> > why shouldn't sexual preference be almost entirely
> > culturally determined?
>
> There is a good sociobiological reason for this.
> Although homosexuals can and do reproduce, their
> favored sexual practices mean they do so at a lower
> rate than heterosexuals. (I"m not buying into a
> bipolarlity here -- this holds the more homiosexual
> you are.)
Adult humans can bear young at a maximum rate of about once a year, but humans in a state of nature would be naturally inclined to copulate at least once a day - at least I would. Or let's not say humans, who complicate modeling the slow mechanism of evolution with their tricky conscious intent, but instead bonobos, who are also notoriously horny, but don't think about it in words all day long like we humans do...
It seems to me that, thanks to the superabundance of the primate sex drive, a pack of bonobos who copulated homosexually ninety percent of the time and heterosexually ten percent of the time would end up with birth rates 99.99% as high as a pack of bonobos who copulate heterosexually one hundred percent of the time. Plus the important number in terms of evolution isn't birth rates but survival rates to the age of reproduction, and lower birth rates might mean proportionally more individual care for the infants, so k percent lower birth rate would lead to less-than-k percent lower rate of survival until the age of reproduction. Finally the limiting factor for the population of both packs of bonobos would be Malthus's ceiling, not their respective birth rates.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net