You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Vaniver comments on When does heritable low fitness need to be explained? - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: DanArmak 10 June 2015 12:05AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (146)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vaniver 10 June 2015 09:47:13PM 2 points [-]

Why would homosexual male sex be a bad thing, as long as it didn't cause men not to seek out women as well?

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.

The usual reasons given (e.g. bonding) also make sense between male pairs.

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).

This seems to apply even more strongly to women, whose fitness doesn't benefit from promiscuous heterosexual sex like male fitness does.

Interestingly, female bisexuality seem much more common than male bisexuality, and also considerably more fluid.

Comment author: DanArmak 10 June 2015 10:18:23PM 2 points [-]

disease risk

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.