Do it like they do on the Discovery Channel
The New York Times has a great article on animals “doing gay stuff:”
For the last 15 years…Paul Vasey has been studying Japanese macaques, a species of two-and-a-half-foot-tall, pink-faced monkey. He has looked almost exclusively at why female macaques mount one another during the mating season. Vasey now says he is on to the answer: “It isn’t functional,” he told me; the behavior has no discernible purpose, adaptationally speaking. Instead, it’s a byproduct of a behavior that does, and the supposedly streamlining force of evolution just never flushed that byproduct from the gene pool. Female macaques regularly mount males too, Vasey explained, probably to focus their attention and reinforce their bond as mates. The females are physically capable of mounting any gender of macaque. They’ve just never developed an instinct to limit themselves to one. “Evolution doesn’t create perfect adaptations,” Vasey said. As Zuk put it, “There’s a lot of slop in the system — which,” she was sure to add, “is not the same as saying homosexuality is a mistake.”
Wouldn’t it be fun if we were heading for a paradigm shift vis a vis evolutionary biology? Alas, the writer goes far to dispel such fantasies. The wealthy/doting gay uncle figure has always seemed a bit suspect to me, but so long as we’re giving everyone a reproductive mandate, I guess it has to stand.
Besides rooting around for some argument that homosexuality is natural because the birds and the bees are doing it, I think we could also use this behavior as a platform to relaunch another exploration of/attack on monogamy: “the same-sex pairs appear to do everything male-female pairs do except have sex.” And one or both of the females in the pair goes off and has a fling with somebody else’s supposedly monogamous male partner, but they still manage to live in their bird community and raise their chicks together. They probably won’t catch chlamydia, though. There’s always a catch.
Clash and learn 
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