![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly(Oddly enough, reading comment sections can distract me when I'm feeling depressed, and I think we can all agree that I was feeling more or less depressed a few weeks ago.)
This poster was insistent that we shouldn't legalize gay marriage on evolutionary grounds. After all, gays can't reproduce, and that makes them an evolutionary dead end, and we shouldn't encourage evolutionary dead ends. There is so very much wrong with that "logic" that it's hard to see where to start untangling the knot, but what particularly irked me is that everybody who was trying failed to see that his central premise was wrong. (My pointing that out earned me the dubious distinction of being, as near as I can tell, the only person he didn't reply to.)
It seems counter-intuitive, but for a social species - and as a rule, humans are about as social as it gets - failing to reproduce can actually be part of an excellent reproductive strategy. Your mission, after all, is to see that your genes get passed on. That means you want your offspring and that of your siblings to have the best possible chance in life. And for some species, that means limiting competition and maximizing the adult to offspring ratio - which means that only one or two members of the group reproduce, and the others all join together to raise the young. The young get way more caregiver attention, they get more food (because they have more adults to provide it and also because Mom and Dad can get away while the other family members babysit), the death of the parents is not necessarily a death sentence for them (because they have lots of caregivers), and when they are grown they aren't competing with all their cousins for a bite to eat.
It's not the only successful reproductive strategy, but it's not that uncommon. I can think of several species that do that, starting with wolves and moving from there. (Okay, I know I've read of others, wolves are the only ones I can consistently name.)
This poster was insistent that we shouldn't legalize gay marriage on evolutionary grounds. After all, gays can't reproduce, and that makes them an evolutionary dead end, and we shouldn't encourage evolutionary dead ends. There is so very much wrong with that "logic" that it's hard to see where to start untangling the knot, but what particularly irked me is that everybody who was trying failed to see that his central premise was wrong. (My pointing that out earned me the dubious distinction of being, as near as I can tell, the only person he didn't reply to.)
It seems counter-intuitive, but for a social species - and as a rule, humans are about as social as it gets - failing to reproduce can actually be part of an excellent reproductive strategy. Your mission, after all, is to see that your genes get passed on. That means you want your offspring and that of your siblings to have the best possible chance in life. And for some species, that means limiting competition and maximizing the adult to offspring ratio - which means that only one or two members of the group reproduce, and the others all join together to raise the young. The young get way more caregiver attention, they get more food (because they have more adults to provide it and also because Mom and Dad can get away while the other family members babysit), the death of the parents is not necessarily a death sentence for them (because they have lots of caregivers), and when they are grown they aren't competing with all their cousins for a bite to eat.
It's not the only successful reproductive strategy, but it's not that uncommon. I can think of several species that do that, starting with wolves and moving from there. (Okay, I know I've read of others, wolves are the only ones I can consistently name.)
