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DanArmak comments on When does heritable low fitness need to be explained? - Less Wrong Discussion
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It seems to me that any mental feature that can be explained should be explained. It makes great sense to me why there are people who feel visceral disgust at the prospect of sexual activity with their siblings, and that there are men who feel visceral disgust at the prospect of sexual activity with men. (Interestingly enough, this sort of 'homophobia' seems more heritable than homosexuality is, which makes sense--this is actually selectively positive!) So what's going on with a man who feels visceral disgust at the prospect of sexual activity with women? Is it the same sort of homophobia reflex, but miswired? Is it something else?
If you don't find explaining things interesting, well, I recommend a career in something other than science :P
How does evolution work? There are two core pieces: variation, and selection. Variation is the uninteresting bit, and selection is the interesting bit: entities that reproduce themselves become more common in later generations, because they reproduced themselves.
It's not a question of what "has" to happen. It's a question of "what happens." Similarly, explanations need to fit together with every other part of what we see. Suppose a model where gay uncles help people in their family raise children, are generous with their wealth to family members, and so on. In such a case, does it make sense for families to disown gay sons?
(Remember, we're trying to explain why 3% of men are gay. We can't accept any explanations that would make, say, half of men gay, because that doesn't fit with the facts!)
The first is clear to me, but the second isn't. Why would homosexual male sex be a bad thing, as long as it didn't cause men not to seek out women as well?
Of course some resources would be spent on it instead of on mating, but humans have a lot more sex in general than necessary for procreation, and many other 'unnecessary' social activities like games. The usual reasons given (e.g. bonding) also make sense between male pairs. Such sex could (counterfactually) also relieve some sexual tension without inviting jealousy, since another man might provide variety and quick simulation but not replace the long-term woman partner.
This seems to apply even more strongly to women, whose fitness doesn't benefit from promiscuous heterosexual sex like male fitness does.
We also need to understand why those explanations are in fact wrong, otherwise we're risking retrofitting explanations to the data by choosing explanations without fully understanding what makes them right.
Primarily, that; secondarily, disease risk. It seems to me that there are many men who put up with women only for the sex, and if they could get that satisfaction elsewhere, they would.
It looks like a number of ancient societies had sanctioned male-male sexual relationships, often but not always of the 'old mentor / young protege' variety. But it's hard for us to tell how common those were (specifically, how many of those partnerships were actually sexual, instead of just knowing that some were).
Interestingly, female bisexuality seem much more common than male bisexuality, and also considerably more fluid.
That's an excellent point I missed. If promiscuity with other men came at the expense of promiscuity with other women, it wouldn't be a problem. But male promiscuity is often limited only by the number of willing and attractive partners, so it would still increase the number of overall partners.