--- "W. Kiernan" <wkiernan at ij.net> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > 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
>
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