Just in time to bolster the gay marriage movement in the US comes this report from the BBC about how two “gay” male Humboldt penguins in Germany incubated a fertilized egg and are rearing the offspring:
The zoo made headlines in 2005 over plans to “test” the sexual orientation of penguins with homosexual traits.
Three pairs of male penguins had been seen attempting to mate with each other and trying to hatch offspring from stones.
The zoo flew in four females in a bid to get the endangered birds to reproduce – but quickly abandoned the scheme after causing outrage among gay rights activists, who accused it of interfering in the animals’ behaviour.
The six “gay” penguins remain at the zoo, among them Z and Vielpunkt who are now rearing the chick together after being given the rejected egg.
“Z and Vielpunkt, both males, gladly accepted their ‘Easter gift’ and got straight down to raising it,” said a zoo statement.
“Since the chick arrived, they have been behaving just as you would expect a heterosexual couple to do. The two happy fathers spend their days attentively protecting, caring for and feeding their adopted offspring.”
This will undoubtedly incite all kinds of kerfuffles, but I for one am grateful that the egg and chick got proper care. One quibble: the zoo said the following
“Homosexuality is nothing unusual among animals,”
“Sex and coupling up in our world do not necessarily have anything to do with reproduction.”
Au contraire: sex and coupling in our world have everything to do with reproduction, as do all adaptations. We also have to remember that “gay” behavior in animals may have little to do with the phenomenon of homosexuality in humans. A while back I reviewed Joan Roughgarden’s attempt to analogize the two phenomena and, by so doing, to provide a natural “justification” for human homosexuality. I claimed that homosexuality needed no such rationale, especially because if human and animal “gayness” are different, the justification vanishes.
Hmmm, really interesting. What the probably meant by the last quote is that not all sex directly and immediately leads to reproduction. Maybe it’s used for pair bonding, which will eventually lead to reproduction, but that’s a more distant benefit. Or maybe they’re just trying to appease the general public, heh.
Though I agree with your final statement. I’ve always found the “It’s not natural”/”But look, yes it is!” arguments to be weak on both sides. You can find cannibalism, necrophilia, rape, polygyny, polyandry, infanticide, etc etc in nature. Does that mean those things are adaptive and/or moral for Homo sapiens? Not necessarily.
Yes, but we reject those behaviours for other moral reasons. In the case of same sex coupling, the sole moral argument is that it is against the ‘purposes of nature’.
“I claimed that homosexuality needed no such justification, especially because if human and animal “gayness” are different, the justification vanishes.”
Agreed but I think Roughgarden is right to pursue justification in nature. There are two main historical sources for Christian views on sexuality, scripture and so called ‘natural law’.
Natural law was probably the main source that has historically been used by theologians in matters of sexual ethics. However, if you make a judgement based on this tradition you do need to do it in the light of evolutionary biology. You need to abandon ‘purposes of nature’ and see the cosmos as one in which life is allowed to emerge and develop, often by modifying and even frustrating the processes of nature.
The real issue with regard to homosexuality probably lies in our genetic tendencies to encourage heterosexuality as conducive to procreation. I suspect that is where the hostility comes from and why so many arguments are based on the fact it is ‘unnatural’ or ‘against nature’; appeals to natural law. Roughgarden’s work shows both that it isn’t unnatural and that it isn’t harmful to societies. Sure, theft and infanticide occur in nature as well but we reject these for other moral reasons – the suffering they cause, the intrinsic value of human life; the sole argument against homosexuality was that it was ‘against nature’ and that doesn’t wash.
All you have then is a selective use of the bizarre laws of Leviticus, some vague references by St Paul and a problematic interpretation of the Sodom and Gomorrah legend.
I find any argument about ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ to be foolish. Life has all kinds of struggles and all kinds of adaptations.
As pointed out at least since Charles Darwin, all life attempts (I do NOT mean the intentional stance) to multiply geometrically, so what is ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ is irrelevant. On the other hand, most species become extinct so the classification of naturalness is irrelevant in this case also.
“Gay penguins rear adopted chick”. Don’t you think it would be a better choice of words if you used the word raise instead of rear?
“Au contraire: sex and coupling in our world have everything to do with reproduction, as do all adaptations.”
Are you saying that all human behavior is governed by the instinct to survive and reproduce? If so, how is it that people can choose not to reproduce?
All “adaptations” have everything to do with reproduction, but that is not to say that all human behavior is adaptive.
Animal behavior and even physical mutation do not serve any evolutionary purpose. They are not deliberate adaptations. This his how evolution works: A RANDOM mutation in mice for example, which gives them a highly acute sense of hearing appears in a population, it so happens that in that period this quality is advantageous. Let’s say that it allows them to hear those pussy cats creep up on them. So this mutation spreads in the population because more mice with this mutation survive and pass on the mutation. Idiots (basically all science writers) then postulate, “the acute hearing in mice is an adaptation to allow them to hear those sneaky cats.” Mutations are TOTALLY RANDOM, and might carry more than one characteristic. Let’s say that those mice with good hearing also inherit a taste for S&M with the mutation. The hearing and the penchant for a little rough action just randomly happen to be carried with the same mutation. So the hearing thing which just happens to confer a selective advantage for this group of mice that live on an island with a lot of very quiet cats, also enjoy a bit of the rough stuff (which in this case does not happen to confer any survival dividend). Now a bunch of overly determinitive science writers try to come up with some purpose for the S&M trait. You know how they would do it in the Science Times: “Studies suggest that the sexual predilection among the Bornean elf-mouse for bondage gives him an evolutionary advantage over his competitors as his mates are tied up and he can impregnate them with more sperm.” Let’s all repeat: Evolution has no purpose, no intention, it is the result of random mutations meeting particular geographical, environmental, and bio-historical circumstances.