Behavioral Ecology Blog

I just caught wind of a semi-old post over at Pharyngula that resulted from a Seed interview with Joan Roughgarden. It just so happens that this is a topic I am very well acquainted with… And lets just say that I am not a huge fan…

A couple of general points 1^st then some specific comments.

1. Scientists pursuing their pet hypotheses usually leads to bad science, as does using science to justify your own “mode of existence”
2. People, even good scientists sometimes fall into an adaptationist trap- thinking everything has to be explained as adaptation. Yes there are some cases of non-human homosexual behavior, but the majority of these are single animals per population and can be a labeled as pathological.

These are specific points in Myers post.

Homosexuality is selectively neutral- NO! If we consider differential fitness as the measure of fitness, then it’s really easy to see that homosexuals will leave fewer offspring on average than heterosexuals. Forget inclusive fitness; it will not make up the difference.

Homosexuality promotes community bonding- So what! Without group selection type arguments, this is a trivial observation.

I am very well acquainted with Roughgarden’s Science paper, as well as the volume of comments that followed. I have never seen a paper be criticized so harshly, and not be retracted. Many people have shown that not only her premise, but also her logical reasoning is fundamentally flawed.

A few illustrative quotes as representation of the quality of this work…

“We suggest that sexual selection is always mistaken…” Didn’t they teach you in elementary school about always and never statements??

“Further, we hypothesize that a sense of friendship resides in animal bonding, a joy or synergy in the spirit of cooperation that allows animals to sense and experience the product, not merely the sum, of their individual well-being” Can you say gross anthropomorphism??

“(The model) explain(s) reproductive social behavior in developmental time” and then “The direct benefits each receives from their interactions with the others are summarized in the payoff matrix whose entries are w_ij,k, which is the fitness accumulation rate obtained by player k when player 1 plays strategy i and player 2 plays strategy j. Why again are direct fitness benefits important in developmental time???