When physical and social scientists try to understand humans, they often compare what our species does against other species.  They also try to explain what causes these similarities and differences with theories.  As all scientists are humans, however, they bring their own cultural lens(es) to their work even if they try to be objective not subjective.  After you finish reading the article “Can Animals be Gay?” answer the following questions in your post (please number your responses as usual):

1. What answer does the author give to the article’s title’s question and what evidence does he provide to substantiate his answer? [Hint: it’s probably a little more complicated than you think.] Accuracy
2. What does “heterosexist bias” mean and how does the article show that this bias has affected the scientific study of animals’ sexual practices? Accuracy
3.  One of the huge controversies over homosexuality in the United States (and elsewhere) is whether or not “it” results from nature (being born that way) or culture (learning “it”). Explain how reading this article affects your perspective on this nature/nurture debate.  Has it shifted your perspective or not and why? Thoughtfulness

Evaluation Criteria:  Completion,  Accuracy, Thoughtfulness

“Can Animals be Gay?” New York Times Magazine article (excerpt) by Jon Mooallem

The Laysan albatross is a downy seabird with a
seven-foot wingspan and a notched, pale yellow
beak. Every November, a small colony of
albatrosses assembles at a place called Kaena
Point, overlooking the Pacific at the foot of a
volcanic range, on the northwestern tip of Oahu,
Hawaii. Each bird has spent the past six months
in solitude, ranging over open water as far north
as Alaska, and has come back to the breeding
ground to reunite with its mate. Albatrosses can
live to be 60 or 70 years old and typically mate
with the same bird every year, for life. Their
“divorce rate,” as biologists term it, is among the
lowest of any bird.

When I visited Kaena Point in November, the first birds were just returning, and they spent a lot
of their time gliding and jackknifing in the wind a few feet overhead or plopped like cushions in
the sand. There are about 120 breeding albatrosses in the colony, and gradually, each will arrive
and feel out the crowd for the one other particular albatross it has been waiting to have sex with
again. At any given moment in the days before Thanksgiving, some birds may be just turning up
while others sit there killing time. It feels like an airport baggage-claim area.

Once together, pairs will copulate and collaboratively incubate a single egg for 65 days. They
take shifts: one bird has to sit at the nest while the other flaps off to fish and eat for weeks at a
time. Couples preen each other’s feathers and engage in elaborate mating behaviors and displays.
“Like when you’re in a couple,” Marlene Zuk, a biologist who has visited the colony, explained
to me. “All those sickening things that couples do that gross out everyone else but the two people
in the couple? . . . Birds have the same thing.” I often saw pairs sitting belly to belly, arching
their necks and nuzzling together their heads to form a kind of heart shape. Speaking on Oahu a
few years ago as first lady, Laura Bush praised Laysan albatross couples for making lifelong
commitments to one another. Lindsay C. Young, a biologist who studies the Kaena Point colony,
told me: “They were supposed to be icons of monogamy: one male and one female. But I
wouldn’t assume that what you’re looking at is a male and a female.”

Young has been researching the albatrosses on Oahu since 2003; the colony was the focus of her
doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, which she completed last spring. (She
now works on conservation projects as a biologist for hire.) In the course of her doctoral work,
Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point
actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one
of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of
the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young’s colleague studied on Kauai,
had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years — as far back as the biologists’ data went, in some

cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just
generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call “straight” couples.

Young would never use the phrase “straight couples.” And she is adamantly against calling the
other birds “lesbians” too. For one thing, the same-sex pairs appear to do everything male-female
pairs do except have sex, and Young isn’t really sure, or comfortable judging, whether that
technically qualifies them as lesbians or not. But moreover, the whole question is meaningless to
her; it has nothing to do with her research. “‘Lesbian,’ ” she told me, “is a human term,” and
Young — a diligent and cautious scientist, just beginning to make a name in her field — is
devoted to using the most aseptic language possible and resisting any tinge of
anthropomorphism. “The study is about albatross,” she told me firmly. “The study is not about
humans.” Often, she seemed to be mentally peer-reviewing her words before speaking.

A discovery like Young’s can disorient a wildlife biologist in the most thrilling way — if he or
she takes it seriously, which has traditionally not been the case. Various forms of same-sex
sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from
flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female
against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist
described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to
penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented
only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it
exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific
papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject.
Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless —
an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s
behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two
male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.

In recent years though, more biologists have been looking objectively at same-sex sexuality in
animals — approaching it as real science. For Young, the existence of so many female-female
albatross pairs disproved assumptions that she didn’t even realize she’d been making and, in the
process, raised a chain of progressively more complicated questions. One of the prickliest, it
seemed, was how a scientist is even supposed to talk about any of this, given how eager the rest
of us have been to twist the sex lives of animals into allegories of our own. “This colony is
literally the largest proportion of — I don’t know what the correct term is: ‘homosexual
animals’? — in the world,” Young told me. “Which I’m sure some people think is a great thing,
and others might think is not.”

[Segment of the original article removed for length.]

Often, biologists are forced to assign sexes to animals by watching what they do when they mate.
When one albatross or boar or cricket rears up and mounts a second, it would seem to be
advertising the genders of both. Unless, of course, that’s not the situation at all.

“There is still an overall presumption of heterosexuality,” the biologist Bruce Bagemihl told me.
“Individuals, populations or species are considered to be entirely heterosexual until proven

otherwise.” While this may sound like a reasonable starting point, Bagemihl calls it a
“heterosexist bias” and has shown it to be a significant roadblock to understanding the diversity
of what animals actually do. In 1999, Bagemihl published “Biological Exuberance,” a book that
pulled together a colossal amount of previous piecemeal research and showed how biologists’
biases had marginalized animal homosexuality for the last 150 years — sometimes innocently
enough, sometimes in an eruption of anthropomorphic disgust. Courtship behaviors between two
animals of the same sex were persistently described in the literature as “mock” or “pseudo”
courtship — or just “practice.” Homosexual sex between ostriches was interpreted by one
scientist as “a nuisance” that “goes on and on.” One man, studying Mazarine Blue butterflies in
Morocco in 1987, regretted having to report “the lurid details of declining moral standards and of
horrific sexual offenses” which are “all too often packed” into national newspapers. And a
bighorn-sheep biologist confessed in his memoir, “I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-
ram mount S-ram repeatedly.” To think, he wrote, “of those magnificent beasts as ‘queers’ —
Oh, God!”

“What Bagemihl’s book really did,” the Canadian primatologist and evolutionary psychologist
Paul Vasey says, “is raise people’s awareness around the fact that this occurs in quote-unquote
nature — in animals. And that it can be studied in a serious, scholarly way.” But studying it
seriously means resolving a conundrum. At the heart of evolutionary biology, since Darwin, has
been the idea that any genetic traits and behaviors that outfit an animal with an advantage — that
help the animal make lots of offspring — will remain in a species, while ones that don’t will
vanish. In short, evolution gradually optimizes every animal toward a single goal: passing on its
genes. The Yale ornithologist Richard Prum told me: “Our field is a lot like economics: we have
a core of theory, like free-market theory, where we have the invisible hand of the market creating
order — all commodities attain exactly the price they’re worth. Homosexuality is a tough case,
because it appears to violate that central tenet, that all of sexual behavior is about reproduction.
The question is, why would anyone invest in sexual behavior that isn’t reproductive?” –— much
less a behavior that looks to be starkly counterproductive. Moreover, if animals carrying the
genes associated with it are less likely to reproduce, how has that behavior managed to stick
around?

Given this big umbrella of theory, the very existence of homosexual behavior in animals can feel
a little like impenetrable nonsense, something a researcher could spend years banging his or her
head against the wall deliberating. The difficulty of that challenge, more than any implicit or
explicit homophobia, may be why past biologists skirted the subject.

In the last decade, however, Paul Vasey and others have begun developing new hypotheses based
on actual, prolonged observation of different animals, deciphering the ways given homosexual
behaviors may have evolved and the evolutionary role they might play within the context of
individual species. Different ideas are emerging about how these behaviors could fit within that
traditional Darwinian framework, including seeing them as conferring reproductive advantages
in roundabout ways. Male dung flies, for example, appear to mount other males to tire them out,
knocking them out of competition for available females. Researchers speculate that young male
bottlenose dolphins mount one another simply to establish trust and form bonds — but those
bonds actually turn out to be critical to reproduction, since when males mature, they work in
groups to cooperatively gain access to females.

These ideas generally aim to explain only particular behaviors in a particular species. So far, the
only real conclusion this relatively small body of literature seems to point to, collectively, is a
kind of deflating, meta-conclusion: a single explanation of homosexual behavior in animals may
not be possible, because thinking of “homosexual behavior in animals” as a single scientific
subject might not make much sense. “Biologists want to build these unified theories to explain
everything they see,” Vasey told me. So do journalists, he added — all people, really. “But none
of this lends itself to a linear story. My take on it is that homosexual behavior is not a uniform
phenomenon. Having one unifying body of theory that explains why it’s happening in all these
different species might be a chimera.”

The point of heterosexual sex, Vasey said, no matter what kind of animal is doing it, is primarily
reproduction. But that shouldn’t trick us into thinking that homosexual behavior has some
equivalent, organizing purpose — that the two are tidy opposites. “All this homosexual behavior
isn’t tied together by that sort of primary function,” Vasey said. Even what the same-sex animals
are doing varies tremendously from species to species. But we’re quick to conceive of that great
range of activities in the way it most handily tracks to our anthropomorphic point of view: put
crassly, all those different animals just seem to be doing gay sex stuff with one another. As the
biologist Marlene Zuk explains, we are hard-wired to read all animal behavior as “some version
of the way people do things” and animals as “blurred, imperfect copies of humans.”

[The rest of this article which was published on April 4, 2010 can be found at:

For a slightly different perspective on the same topic, you might enjoy reading the online article
“Are there any homosexual animals?” by the British Broadcasting Company located at
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150206-are-there-any-homosexual-animals ]