Drift happens, and it’s fabulous. Photo by jby.After the big gay post came out Tuesday, there was really only one shirt I could wear to the Twin Cities Pride parade. You, too, can have the thrill of explaining the Wright-Fisher model of drift and mutation in front of a gay bar—this design is available for purchase, with your choice of American Apparel shirt colors.
A rough-skinned newt. Photo by matt knoth.Don’t forget—Diversity in Science carnival contributions are due Monday!
And finally, a video sent to me by Dave Giordano, describing field studies of nesting behavior in tropical birds.
This is a cross-posting of my latest contribution to the Scientific American guest blog. Since the original went up at SciAm, P.Z. Myers has pointed out a few more complicating factors. If you read one paper to follow up on what I’ve written here, I’d suggest Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk’s excellent 2009 review [PDF], which is posted in PDF format by none other than The Stranger.
June is Pride Month in the United States, and in communities across the country, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Americans are celebrating with carnivals, parades, and marches. Pride is a rebuke to the shame and marginalization many LGBT people face growing up, and a celebration of the freedoms we’ve won since the days when our sexual orientations were considered psychological diseases and grounds for harrassment and arrest. It’s also a chance to acknowledge how far we still have to go, and to organize our efforts for a better future.
And, of course, it’s a great big party.
I’m looking forward to celebrating Pride for the first time in my new hometown of Minneapolis this weekend–but as an evolutionary biologist, I suspect I have a perspective on the life and history of sexual minorities that many of my fellow partiers don’t. In spite of the progress that LGBT folks have made, and seem likely to continue to make, towards legal equality, there’s a popular perception that we can never really achieve biological equality. This is because same-sex sexual activity is inherently not reproductive sex. To put it baldly, as the idea is usually expressed, natural selection should be against men who want to have sex with other men–because we aren’t interested in the kind of sex that makes babies. An oft-cited estimate from 1981 is that gay men have about 80 percent fewer children than straight men.
Focusing on the selective benefit or detriment associated with particular human traits and behaviors gets my scientific dander up, because it’s so easy for the discussion to slip from what is “selectively beneficial” to what is “right.” A superficial understanding of what natural selection favors or doesn’t favor is a horrible standard for making moral judgements. A man could leave behind a lot of children by being a thief, a rapist, and a murderer–but only a sociopath would consider that such behavior was justified by high reproductive fitness.
And yet, as an evolutionary biologist, I have to admit that my sexual orientation is a puzzle.
Continue readingIf you’ve just arrived here on account of my contribution to the Scientific American guest blog, welcome! I hope you’ll have a look through the archives, and consider adding me to your regular online reading. Allow me to suggest a few posts that should give you an idea about what’s going on here:
I’ve contributed another post to the Scientific American guest blog, this time on a topic appropriate for Pride month: how natural selection might (or might not) act on same-sex orientation in humans. Be advised that there is some math.
There’s just a week left to send in your posts for the Pride edition of the Diversity in Science Blog Carnival. The carnival will be right here at Denim and Tweed on 30 June, so I need submissions by the 27th so as to have time to put it all together.
Let me add a point I don’t think I’ve made before: blog carnivals are traditionally about aggregating links to blog posts, but you don’t have to write a thousand-word essay to contribute. You can send in photos, videos, even favorite songs—or send links to other folks’ work (credited appropriately!) that you think the DiS audience would appreciate. Carnivals celebrate by aggregating, and we’re interested in all kinds of media.
You can submit posts and other material directly to me by e-mailing a link, or use the handy online form Alberto Roca has set up at MinorityPostdoc.
Thanks to all the folks who have contributed so far!
Whitetail deer: adorable forces of ecological destruction. Photo by HerpShots.There’s just a few days left to submit your posts for the Pride Month 2011 edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival.
White-throated sparrow Photo by hjhipster.No new science post this week, because I’m taking my time to put together a (hopefully) particularly good, detailed article for the near future. In the meantime, let me suggest something from the D&T archives for Pride month, in advance of the Diversity in Science carnival in a couple weeks. Specifically, my review of Joan Roughgarden’s survey of sexuality across the animal kingdom, Evolution’s Rainbow:
This interest in the evolutionary context of diversity would eventually become much more personal. In 1998, [Roughgarden] came out as transgendered, taking the name Joan after decades spent establishing her scientific reputation under the name she was given at birth, Jonathan. In addition to the challenges inherent to gender transition, Roughgarden’s expertise intersects with her identity in one awkward question: in a biological world shaped by natural selection, how can we explain the evolution of lesbians, gay men, and transgendered people—individuals who are not interested in sexual activity that passes on their genes?
Roughgarden’s answer was to begin a program of research questioning the dominant way of thinking about sex in an evolutionary context. In 2004, she presented her conclusions comprehensively in the book Evolution’s Rainbow, calling for biologists to re-think they way they understood and described sexual behavior throughout the animal kingdom. As another biologist with an admitted personal interest in the question, I’ve found Evolution’s Rainbow to be a great starting point for thinking about sexuality in an evolutionary context.
For in-depth looks at three examples of “alternative” animal lifestyles and the reception Roughgarden’s ideas met in the broader evolutionary biology community, go read the whole post.
Minneapolis skyline. Photo by jby.And at least once a day, I still stop and think to myself holy crap, I’m living in a city. It’s a nice feeling.
There’s a reason you have to make small talk with your barber. Photo by Dave Fayram.If you’re gay, lesbian, bi, trans, or straight and supportive, and you have an even slightly science-related blog, why haven’t you submitted a post for the Diversity in Science Carnival? Go, do it now—you can read these great science articles afterward.
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* I do not, in fact, wear a lab coat.