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.

Good_Burning_Plastic 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: V_V 12 June 2015 04:51:55PM 2 points [-]

For obvious political and social reasons, it's hard to be sure how many people are homosexual. Note that we are interested only in obligate homosexuality - bisexuals presumably don't have strongly reduced fitness. The Wikipedia article doesn't really distinguish obligate homosexuality from bi-, pan- and even trans-sexuals. The discussion in the SSC comments used an (unsourced?) range of 1%-3%, which seems at least consistent with other sources, so let's run with that.

Was obligate homosexuality common in the ancestral environment, anyway? If I understand correctly "gays" exist as a recognized social identity only in modern Western societies.
People engaging in homosexual intercourse and relationships probably always existed everywhere, and typically societies with significant influence of Abrahamic religions considered such behavior as a sin and/or a crime while non-Western or pre-Abrahamic Western societies tolerated or even encouraged it, but the general expectation was that people entered heterosexual marriage and had children.

Maybe there is a genetic predisposition to homosexuality but it is unlikely to result in obligate homosexuality, and therefore infertility, outside the specific environment of modern Western societies.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 12 June 2015 09:29:06PM 0 points [-]

but the general expectation was that people entered heterosexual marriage and had children.

With exceptions such as Catholic priests.