Can natural selection select for genes based on their utility at a group level?

[DGuller]

Yet strangely 95% of all statistics posted on the internet are.

Don't confuse tabulating numbers with doing statistics.  Being able to calculate a percentage of something is not a sufficient qualification to be a statistician.

[Viking]

X woman and Y man have 6 children, 3 boys, 3 girls.  1 boy is gay.  When X and Y are devoured by sabre tooth tigers, the gay boy can help take care of his siblings and eventually his nieces and nephews, therefore the rest of his family thrives.

What does that have to do with anything?  It is not like the nuclear family was around during the Sabre Tooth tiger days.  I am pretty sure everybody in the group would have helped out.

I was not even denying it might not be somehow advantageous to have gay men (and women....) around I just didn't get the correlation between ferility and gayness thing.

This is an altered menopause argument. Women live beyond menopause because grandmothers can help raise their grandchildren. This is something we know from all cultures. Is there any similar tradition for childless men helping their nieces and nephews? Not that I know of. 

[dps]

How would that work?  Homosexuality gets carried on through straight women?

X woman and Y man have 6 children, 3 boys, 3 girls.  1 boy is gay.  When X and Y are devoured by sabre tooth tigers, the gay boy can help take care of his siblings and eventually his nieces and nephews, therefore the rest of his family thrives. 

And the straight boys couldn't help take care of their siblings and their nieces and nephews?  I don't see your point.

[swallow]

And yet another option could be that a gay man would only make babies early on , so being able to pour all his resources into ensuring the survival of said kid into a healthy, robust and reproductively sound adult

[alfred russel]

And yet another option could be that a gay man would only make babies early on , so being able to pour all his resources into ensuring the survival of said kid into a healthy, robust and reproductively sound adult

Doesn't make sense--why wouldn't that type of person have a hyper heterosexual drive early in life, followed by the absence of a drive later in life?

[swallow]

And yet another option could be that a gay man would only make babies early on , so being able to pour all his resources into ensuring the survival of said kid into a healthy, robust and reproductively sound adult

Doesn't make sense--why wouldn't that type of person have a hyper heterosexual drive early in life, followed by the absence of a drive later in life?

I just thought they might make a couple of babies by accident, early on, before they worked out what they liked best

[garbon]

I just thought they might make a couple of babies by accident, early on, before they worked out what they liked best

Does homosexuality work like that?

[swallow]

I just thought they might make a couple of babies by accident, early on, before they worked out what they liked best

Does homosexuality work like that?

I don't know actually.  I think in some ways hetero does - as it becomes more relationship based, it becomes more fixed maybe?

[Malthus]

My guess is that complex behaviours like human sexuality are not "created" by any simple genetic process, but rather the interaction of numerous genes with social and environmental factors - the fact that gays will, on average, have less children than non-gays may be meaningless in terms of the ability of the genes involved to propigate, as they may not always be associated with gayness ...

[Eddie Teach]

My guess is that complex behaviours like human sexuality are not "created" by any simple genetic process, but rather the interaction of numerous genes with social and environmental factors - the fact that gays will, on average, have less children than non-gays may be meaningless in terms of the ability of the genes involved to propigate, as they may not always be associated with gayness ...

I think Marty's constant stream of threads has caused us all to put far too much thought into this. 

[Faeelin]

Anyway Marti, if you're actually curious about this, here are some articles to look into from a presentation I did for a seminar on sexual selection a while ago.

Blount B. 1990. Issues in bonobo (pan paniscus) sexual behavior. American Anthropologist 92 (3): 702-714.

Braithwate L. 1981. Ecological studies of the black swan III: Behaviour and social organization. Australian Wildlife Research 8:135-146.

Camperio-Ciani A., F. Corna, C. Capiluppi. 2004. Evidence for maternally inherited factors favouring male homosexuality and promoting female fecundity. Proceedings of the Royal Society 271(1554): 2217-21.

Field K., T. Waite. 2004. Absence of female conspecifics induces homosexual behaviour in male guppies. Animal Behavior 68 (6): 1381-1389.

Mann, J. Establishing trust: socio-sexual behaviour and the development of male-male bonds among the Indian Ocean bottlenose dolphins. In Summer V., P. Vasey, editors. Homosexuality in animals. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2006 p. 107-130.

Meek L., K. Schulz, C. Keith. 2006. Effects of prenatal stress on sexual partner preference in mice. Physiology & Behavior 30 (2):133-138.

Shearer M., L. Katz. 2006. Female-female mounting performance among goats stimulates sexual performance in males. Hormones and Behavior 50:33-37.

Smuts B., J. Watanabe. 1990. Social relationships and ritualized greetings in adult male baboons (papio cynocephalus anubis).

Vasey P., B. Chapais, C. Gauthier. 1998. Mounting interactions between female macaques: testing the influence of dominance and aggression. Ethology 104: 387-398.

[Ideologue]

Blount B. 1990. Issues in bonobo (pan paniscus) sexual behavior. American Anthropologist 92 (3): 702-714.

What is with biologists' hard-on for bonobos?

[Queequeg]

Shearer M., L. Katz. 2006. Female-female mounting performance among goats stimulates sexual performance in males. Hormones and Behavior 50:33-37.

I suppose I should have guessed that humanity didn't invent lesbian porn.

[Martinus]

I would imagine that reverse would be true if what you were saying is possible.

It is only recently in human history that over-population has become an issue. So, if what you are saying is true than it would be more likely that the "homosexual" gene would be turned-off so that off-spring would multiple better to insure survival of the species.

I am not saying it is there to deal with overpopulation but to provide a different hands-to-work-to-mouths-to-feed ration than in a group where everybody has several offspring. There is a reason why many societies had a celibate caste of priests that goes beyond simple overpopulation concerns, for example.

[Martinus]

So what if instead of the "gay gene" there is a gene that "procs" (for non-WoWtards, to "proc", in the context of an ability, is to occasionally produce an effect of some kind, instead of providing this effect on a permanent/constant basis) so that each fetus has some chance (let's say 10%) of being gay, due to some hormonal anomaly during pregnancy.

Never, ever make a WoW analogy when trying to discuss a serious topic.

The genetic term your looking for is a recessive gene, that only expresses when two such recessive genes are present.  The gene for sickle cell anemia is  the classic example.

See, this is NOT what I meant. I meant a gene that triggers "at random" (and has a certain percentage chance of triggering in each offspring), not a gene that triggers only if another gene is present.