I haven’t done a GSS analysis in a while, and since Sister Y assumed I had, that provides the angle. The initial post was about Gordon Gallup’s theory for the evolution of homophobia, but Sister Y thought I had shown surprisingly higher numbers of children among men who report male sexual partners. I linked to the Inductivist over there, but I’ll see if I can replicate his results with the GSS.
| Mean number of children by gender and sexual partners | EXCLUSIVELY MALE | BOTH MALE AND FEMALE | EXCLUSIVELY FEMALE |
|---|---|---|---|
| MALE | .83 | 1.11 | 1.73 |
| FEMALE | 1.90 | .96 | 1.20 |
Gallup theorizes that parents who kept their children away from gays were more likely to avoid having their children become gay and thus have more grandchildren. Wilkinson complains that no evidence was provided for that being the case (only that people behave as if it were), which leaves open the possibility that the behavior, while evolved (heritability should be examined), is adaptation-executing rather than fitness-maximizing. It’s not a pure physiological reflex, but something that requires some higher brain functioning (at least enough to respond to hypotheticals given by the experimenter). An idea as simple as desire that one’s children associate with role-models desirable of emulation could be at work even if in some particular case the child’s behavior is unaffected. On the other hand, if Cochran’s theory is right then orientation may be literally contagious at certain stages of development.
On an unrelated note: Frances Wooley finds an anti-feminist subtext in “dumb men” ads.
UPDATE:
George Weinberg was surprised that some of the “exlusives” managed to have children at all. So I should clarify that the above was based on partners in the previous year. There is another question for the past five years.
| Mean number of children by gender and sexual partners | EXCLUSIVELY MALE | BOTH MALE AND FEMALE | EXCLUSIVELY FEMALE |
|---|---|---|---|
| MALE | .76 | 1.08 | 1.72 |
| FEMALE | 1.90 | 1.12 | 1.22 |
March 24, 2011 at 8:36 am
Why did Wilkinson get on his high horse? I thought Bering had enough evidence to make it an interesting question. It seems like there’s room at the margins for levels of homosexuality in a society to be adjusted by childhood experiences, no?
March 24, 2011 at 10:06 am
This isn’t what I was looking for, but Joan Roughgarden (Evolution’s Rainbow, 2004) apparently found that 83% of Japanese gay and bisexual men had reproduced.
March 24, 2011 at 9:09 pm
Prior to your comment I wouldn’t have been confident that 83% of Japanese straight men reproduced! They’re known for having one of the fastest shrinking populations in the world.
I remember a while back a bunch of letters sent to a journal responding to a Roughgarden letter, along with Roughgarden’s response. I had a tough time finding it, so I’m placing the link here as a sort of bookmark. And investigating further, the full content from there requires a subscription, so a pdf is here.
March 26, 2011 at 2:12 pm
It is remarkable how free people feel to speculate without having – or sometimes, even looking for – the appropriate facts about reality.
Hey, maybe I should get in on this. I’ve read of some Native American tribes in which gays (or more precisely cross-gender people) were accepted, in some cases permitted to dress and act like the appropriate gender. In at least one tribe, cross-dressed men worked the fields with women – and raiders from other tribes would flee in terror if they were confronted with these men-living-as-women.
Therefore, gays exist because the homophobia they trigger was useful in defending against other tribes’ raiders. And homophobia? Clearly due to the negative selection effects of cooties.
March 27, 2011 at 11:54 am
These numbers smell like bullshit to me. How are men whose sex partners are “exclusively male” or women whose partners are “exclusively female” having children at all, let alone averaging one each? And if bisexual women have fewer children than even pure lesbians, why are they considered to be so sexy?
March 28, 2011 at 11:12 am
“Exclusively” male OR female sex partners may be rarer than (a) we are led to believe and/or (b) it has been prior to the past 50 years or so.
And bi women (but not bi men) are widely considered sexy because sex with women is high status and sex with men is low status.
March 28, 2011 at 8:42 pm
March 28, 2011 at 3:34 pm
There’s a difference between preference and behavior. And probably far more people identify as homosexual than are truly exclusively so – the societal belief that this is an either/or matter probably affect individual self-perception, even though the research indicates that most people (particularly most women) are bisexual to some degree.
March 28, 2011 at 3:21 pm
[...] recent post regarding Will Wilkinson’s opinions of some of Gordon Gallup’s hypotheses regarding [...]
March 28, 2011 at 8:26 pm
George Weinberg, I used the variable SEXSEX which translates to “Have your sex partners in the last 12 months been”. There’s another one for the past 5 years, I’ll try that one.
Michael Bailey finds little evidence of “true” male bisexuality from hooking up electrods to people’s genitals. Women are different though. I thought I recalled Bailey saying that they don’t have an orientation in the same sense that men do, and what they claim to find arousing shows little correlation with what’s measured by science doohickeys (I’m recalling specifically results of similar reaction to footage of animals vs humans).
April 4, 2011 at 9:21 am
Only women from poor, unhealthy, crappy countries want masculine-looking men; women from rich, healthy, egalitarian countries want more feminine-looking men.
April 4, 2011 at 7:00 pm
I heard a version that says priming women to feel less safe causes them to prefer more masculine men. agnostic has been writing a lot about how perceptions of violence & disorder cause such shifts. One can combine that with Robin Hanson’s narrative of farmers reverting to forager norms, indirectly supported by some of Jonathan Haidt’s research.
Getting a bit off topic, I’m pretty solidly of farmer inclination and glad that we have achieved the productivity available to us, but still preach eternal vigilance against the temptations of slacking off. I look forward the hardscrapple future of gritty em-people conquering the universe before finally meeting their end in heat-death.