The non-reproductive individual
Jan. 8th, 2009 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleThere is a myth about biology that is so wildly wrong, yet so commonly assumed to be true, that it really needs to be squashed. Decisively killing it would do quite a lot for the gay rights movement. It came to mind because of a quote from the asshole Orson Scott Card that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ogam linked to earlier:
...I'm speaking of the fundamental need of all members of all species to reproduce...
As I said there: FAIL. This is just plain flat-out wrong and if you understand ANYTHING about evolutionary biology you need to understand this: procreation is not the only strategy for reproduction.
First of all, people do not quite "reproduce". They breed. You don't reproduce a car by copying half its parts, and half the parts of some other car, and putting them together to make some sort of chimera. But that's more or less how children arise. The conventional use of this word to describe breeding introduces a certain rhetorical sleight of hand that ignores the tremendous compromise you're making by allowing nasty filthy DNA from some other person to intermingle with your own in the production of a child.
I have little doubt that people who make a big deal about "reproduction" secretly wish to clone themselves. Their impulse is basically narcissistic. Taken to its logical conclusion, cloning - true reproduction, without compromise - is the highest expression of that drive. It is for that reason I suspect human clones will some day take over the world.
No, in conventional breeding you only get to pass on some of your genes. Some of them just aren't going to make it. But, as Dawkins pointed out, "your" genes are not limited to your own body. Your family members have them, too. If you have a bunch of relatives, there may not be any chromosomes at all that are uniquely yours in that group. At least one of your relatives will have a near-perfect copy of any DNA you might consider "yours". Similarly, even if you have quite a few children, you aren't going to get all of your chromosomes into their bodies anyway - chances are, some will die with you. So let me ask you this: if breeding already compromises reproduction, and the rest of your family is breeding with the same chromosomes you are, it's entirely possible that you could reproduce more, and with greater fidelity, if you opted out of breeding yourself and instead put your energy into encouraging your relatives to do it for you.
Just hypothetically, suppose you offered all your siblings and cousins free childcare for life, and they knew you meant it, and that since you were effectively sterile you would never have to put your own children ahead of theirs. How many of them would tip their breeding plans from "not yet" to "yeah sure"? If you started with a big family, and made it even bigger through your actions, would you be reproducing more, or less? A couple generations down the road, a geneticist studying your indirect offspring might conclude that you were, in fact, unusually fecund, because your genes ended up all over the place. The results of having many of your own children versus simply helping others along might well be, in the long run, statistically indistinguishable.
Maybe this is a little far-fetched in human spheres, but this is just what happens in many species. The details vary, of course, ranging from very little nonreproductive behavior in relatively asocial species, to nearly all individuals being non-reproductive in certain social insects. But in general, I cannot say this strongly enough: non-breeding individuals are a normal part of most species because breeding isn't the only way to spread your genes.
A quick search on the phrase "nonreproductive members" reveals a diversity of examples. One of my favorites is this abstract speculating about the strategies of "non-reproducing" women in Medieval noble lineages. I'm in no position to argue that the author is right, I merely point it out by way of illustrating the tremendous diversity of ways in which individuals might profitably (from the evolutionary perspective) decline to breed. And pointing out that, contrary to its conventional meaning, "reproduction" might in fact be a good word to describe what they're doing.
I have been interested in evolutionary psychology for a long time because its premises are so obviously true, and the hypotheses they generate are so provocative. It is clear that our behavior has been shaped by natural selection, and it is clear that humans (along with all the primates) exhibit what is almost certainly a set of evolutionary equilibria that maintain a whole range of genetically determined behavioral types. The problem is that the history of our behavior is known only in the vaguest terms, and very few specific, testable hypotheses have emerged from these premises. In their place, various people pour their prejudices into a shapeless field of speculation, framing them in a way that suggests authority and arouses scientific curiosity without the risk of embarrassing falsification. In short: it's a dead end, with some opportunity for fruitful research, but for the most part, it's been taken over by axe-grinders and bigots.
It is for that reason that it's so hard to figure out exactly why particular individuals don't breed. Science, in general, doesn't tell you the "why" about anything - it only tells you how. And in this case, even the "how" is lost to history, because behavior doesn't leave much in the way of evidence. What science does tell us is to expect this behavior, and to expect it to show up in a whole lot of different forms.
Homosexuality may or may not be one of those forms. Maybe homosexuality is only recently non-reproductive; perhaps it is only the persecution of homosexuality that makes it incompatible with breeding.
There are a lot of "maybes". The problem isn't that it's incompatible with evolutionary theory; the problem is that there are so many ways to explain it from that perspective, and so little evidence to help choose between possible explanations, that no progress can be made.
I find the term "biological mistake" particularly funny when applied to homosexuality. If you believe in evolution by natural selection, that is a high compliment; every single distinction in the lineage between a flatworm and a human is the result of a mistake of that sort. That's why the term "mistake" makes no sense to a biologist; there is no judgment of what nature should do, and no standard of "correctness" to compare it with. There is merely the task of understanding what actually happens. So instead of "errors", biologists call them "mutations". As for the fate of the organism that inherits them, we can say two things about mutations: they are usually harmful to the individual, and collectively essential for the species. Even if one accepts the highly dubious notion that contemporary homosexuality corresponds to some sort of genetic dead-end, the appropriate philosophical response would be "thanks for trying".
The creationist perspective on this statement is even more curious. Since creationism rejects nearly all of modern biology, it's sort of like a modern psychiatrist calling schizophrenia a "phrenological error". Why would he give credence to phrenology when he believes himself to have a superior theory at hand? And what would a phrenological error be, exactly? I would suggest that a better term for creationists to use would be "theological error". Because it is only in their theology that we represent an error at all.
Before Kinsey studied homosexuality, he performed what I consider to be much more interesting research on bees. What he found, in short, was that every single bee is different. Every one is an individual, with some unique characteristic shared by no other bee. And that it is this ever-present diversity, not adherence to a single standard of form, that underlies the robustness and adaptive power of every species on the planet. All species generate, in the next generation, uncountable variations on the previous one, many of them dramatic and surprising. This is the raw material of natural selection, and nobody, not even God, could possibly know which of these countless variations represents the start of the next new species.
Some of us might well miss out on the pleasure of having children. But Card, in his quote, shows a deeper, more existential loneliness. He does not recognize that he is part of a species; he acts as if it is his genes, and his alone, that can grant him the immortality he craves. He is wrong. Without even knowing it, he is embedded in a whole biological tapestry in which his own thread is but a small part. And that isn't even touching on that other, most human aspect of reproduction, which is cultural - really, he should just leave that to us homos, we do it so much better.
I wish gay men could better understand how biology gives them a place in the grand scheme of things. We are anything but irrelevant. And I wish they would pay more attention to the intellectual scourge of creationism, because it is the foundation on which all of our most odious political vices rest. Failure to recognize the continuity between all species on Earth - that we are not descended from apes, we are apes - is the basis for bad policies ranging from persecution of minorities to the abuse of the environment.
ogam linked to earlier:...I'm speaking of the fundamental need of all members of all species to reproduce...
As I said there: FAIL. This is just plain flat-out wrong and if you understand ANYTHING about evolutionary biology you need to understand this: procreation is not the only strategy for reproduction.
First of all, people do not quite "reproduce". They breed. You don't reproduce a car by copying half its parts, and half the parts of some other car, and putting them together to make some sort of chimera. But that's more or less how children arise. The conventional use of this word to describe breeding introduces a certain rhetorical sleight of hand that ignores the tremendous compromise you're making by allowing nasty filthy DNA from some other person to intermingle with your own in the production of a child.
I have little doubt that people who make a big deal about "reproduction" secretly wish to clone themselves. Their impulse is basically narcissistic. Taken to its logical conclusion, cloning - true reproduction, without compromise - is the highest expression of that drive. It is for that reason I suspect human clones will some day take over the world.
No, in conventional breeding you only get to pass on some of your genes. Some of them just aren't going to make it. But, as Dawkins pointed out, "your" genes are not limited to your own body. Your family members have them, too. If you have a bunch of relatives, there may not be any chromosomes at all that are uniquely yours in that group. At least one of your relatives will have a near-perfect copy of any DNA you might consider "yours". Similarly, even if you have quite a few children, you aren't going to get all of your chromosomes into their bodies anyway - chances are, some will die with you. So let me ask you this: if breeding already compromises reproduction, and the rest of your family is breeding with the same chromosomes you are, it's entirely possible that you could reproduce more, and with greater fidelity, if you opted out of breeding yourself and instead put your energy into encouraging your relatives to do it for you.
Just hypothetically, suppose you offered all your siblings and cousins free childcare for life, and they knew you meant it, and that since you were effectively sterile you would never have to put your own children ahead of theirs. How many of them would tip their breeding plans from "not yet" to "yeah sure"? If you started with a big family, and made it even bigger through your actions, would you be reproducing more, or less? A couple generations down the road, a geneticist studying your indirect offspring might conclude that you were, in fact, unusually fecund, because your genes ended up all over the place. The results of having many of your own children versus simply helping others along might well be, in the long run, statistically indistinguishable.
Maybe this is a little far-fetched in human spheres, but this is just what happens in many species. The details vary, of course, ranging from very little nonreproductive behavior in relatively asocial species, to nearly all individuals being non-reproductive in certain social insects. But in general, I cannot say this strongly enough: non-breeding individuals are a normal part of most species because breeding isn't the only way to spread your genes.
A quick search on the phrase "nonreproductive members" reveals a diversity of examples. One of my favorites is this abstract speculating about the strategies of "non-reproducing" women in Medieval noble lineages. I'm in no position to argue that the author is right, I merely point it out by way of illustrating the tremendous diversity of ways in which individuals might profitably (from the evolutionary perspective) decline to breed. And pointing out that, contrary to its conventional meaning, "reproduction" might in fact be a good word to describe what they're doing.
I have been interested in evolutionary psychology for a long time because its premises are so obviously true, and the hypotheses they generate are so provocative. It is clear that our behavior has been shaped by natural selection, and it is clear that humans (along with all the primates) exhibit what is almost certainly a set of evolutionary equilibria that maintain a whole range of genetically determined behavioral types. The problem is that the history of our behavior is known only in the vaguest terms, and very few specific, testable hypotheses have emerged from these premises. In their place, various people pour their prejudices into a shapeless field of speculation, framing them in a way that suggests authority and arouses scientific curiosity without the risk of embarrassing falsification. In short: it's a dead end, with some opportunity for fruitful research, but for the most part, it's been taken over by axe-grinders and bigots.
It is for that reason that it's so hard to figure out exactly why particular individuals don't breed. Science, in general, doesn't tell you the "why" about anything - it only tells you how. And in this case, even the "how" is lost to history, because behavior doesn't leave much in the way of evidence. What science does tell us is to expect this behavior, and to expect it to show up in a whole lot of different forms.
Homosexuality may or may not be one of those forms. Maybe homosexuality is only recently non-reproductive; perhaps it is only the persecution of homosexuality that makes it incompatible with breeding.
There are a lot of "maybes". The problem isn't that it's incompatible with evolutionary theory; the problem is that there are so many ways to explain it from that perspective, and so little evidence to help choose between possible explanations, that no progress can be made.
I find the term "biological mistake" particularly funny when applied to homosexuality. If you believe in evolution by natural selection, that is a high compliment; every single distinction in the lineage between a flatworm and a human is the result of a mistake of that sort. That's why the term "mistake" makes no sense to a biologist; there is no judgment of what nature should do, and no standard of "correctness" to compare it with. There is merely the task of understanding what actually happens. So instead of "errors", biologists call them "mutations". As for the fate of the organism that inherits them, we can say two things about mutations: they are usually harmful to the individual, and collectively essential for the species. Even if one accepts the highly dubious notion that contemporary homosexuality corresponds to some sort of genetic dead-end, the appropriate philosophical response would be "thanks for trying".
The creationist perspective on this statement is even more curious. Since creationism rejects nearly all of modern biology, it's sort of like a modern psychiatrist calling schizophrenia a "phrenological error". Why would he give credence to phrenology when he believes himself to have a superior theory at hand? And what would a phrenological error be, exactly? I would suggest that a better term for creationists to use would be "theological error". Because it is only in their theology that we represent an error at all.
Before Kinsey studied homosexuality, he performed what I consider to be much more interesting research on bees. What he found, in short, was that every single bee is different. Every one is an individual, with some unique characteristic shared by no other bee. And that it is this ever-present diversity, not adherence to a single standard of form, that underlies the robustness and adaptive power of every species on the planet. All species generate, in the next generation, uncountable variations on the previous one, many of them dramatic and surprising. This is the raw material of natural selection, and nobody, not even God, could possibly know which of these countless variations represents the start of the next new species.
Some of us might well miss out on the pleasure of having children. But Card, in his quote, shows a deeper, more existential loneliness. He does not recognize that he is part of a species; he acts as if it is his genes, and his alone, that can grant him the immortality he craves. He is wrong. Without even knowing it, he is embedded in a whole biological tapestry in which his own thread is but a small part. And that isn't even touching on that other, most human aspect of reproduction, which is cultural - really, he should just leave that to us homos, we do it so much better.
I wish gay men could better understand how biology gives them a place in the grand scheme of things. We are anything but irrelevant. And I wish they would pay more attention to the intellectual scourge of creationism, because it is the foundation on which all of our most odious political vices rest. Failure to recognize the continuity between all species on Earth - that we are not descended from apes, we are apes - is the basis for bad policies ranging from persecution of minorities to the abuse of the environment.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 10:17 pm (UTC)There is something in my psyche that is like a big flashing neon sign saying "DO NOT BREED". All issues of sexuality, economics, and practicality aside, the idea of having a child makes me feel vaguely ill. Um, scratch that, on reflection the ill feeling is not vague at all.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 11:01 pm (UTC)My childhood had its stresses, but I honestly don't think that's the issue. My childhood stresses were largely the result of having Aspie tendencies and getting bullied for them. I think about the only way I would be a good parent is that I'd be up in the face of anyone and EVERYONE involved if a child I was responsible for were being bullied.
So yes - we seem to have much the same reaction to the idea of breeding. All other issues aside, as you say - even if it was to be an in-vitro fertilization - I would not consent to being a biological parent, much less a practical one.