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10 - A Biosocial Model for the evolution and maintenance of homosexual behaviour in birds and mammals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2014

Aldo Poiani
Affiliation:
Monash University, Victoria
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Summary

Ultimately, though…it will be necessary to reintegrate the different levels of investigation: the level of genes, synapses, and neurotransmitters, and the level of conscious and unconscious mental processes … What such a synthesis will ultimately have to say about sexual orientation is difficult to predict.

Simon LeVay Queer Science (1996: 85)

I started this book by introducing animal homosexual behaviour and orientation as an evolutionary paradox. I believe that I am in the position, in this final chapter, to end it with something somewhat more exciting than the Socratic ‘one thing only I know and that is that I know nothing’, or, as the endocrinologist Louis Gooren put it in a somewhat less dramatic way: ‘But it is probably fair to say that we are far away from an understanding of how … sexual orientation come[s] about’ (Gooren 2006: 599). My cautious optimism springs from the results of a wealth of experimental and observational research carried out on diverse taxa by many experts in various fields, from genetics, endocrinology, neurobiology and immunology to behavioural and evolutionary ecology, psychology, anthropology and sociology, that address the causation of same-sex sexuality through various mechanisms and across different levels of analysis. It also springs from the results of the comparative analyses and meta-analytical tests carried out in the various chapters.

Type
Chapter
Information
Animal Homosexuality
A Biosocial Perspective
, pp. 401 - 426
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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