"A horse is a horse, of course, of course."
---attributed to Catherine the Great

My point being, just because the animals do it doesn't mean civilized societies should do it.

I'm not making a judgement on homosexual humans - just pointing out that any comparison betweens humans and animals is misguided.  Humans have the ability to make more thoughtful decisions regarding our behaviors.  Animals may just be doing it out of neccessity (anyone seen the inside of a prison lately?).

In short, I don't think we should rely on animal behavior to determine our own behavior when it comes to our own sexuality.  That goes both ways - I don't think you should use homosexual behavior among animals to argue for OR against homosexual behaviors among humans.  It is a red-herring arument either way you use it.

I'm not qualified to comment as a scientist on the overall issue; I'd love to hear what biologists think about the prevalence of same-sex behavior throughout the animal kingdom;  and I'd love to hear a scientific discussion of how same-sex pairing advances the interests of the species; I see so many gay people that are unusually talented that I suspect there's something that the species may be doing to advance itself through same-sex pairing -- perhaps not having the burden of raising a family allows a subset of the species to concentrate efforts on intellectual planes, e.g., many of the great American classical music composers of the last 100 years have been gay 

Animals do lots of nasty things, don't they?  Some species eat their young.

I would just hate to see smart people use the same red-herring argument to support their argument. 

I wonder if red-herrings exhibit homosexual tendencies ;-)  OK, let's not go there ;-) 

OK, as a follow up here is some useful trivia.  A red herring cannot be homosexual because for it to become a red herring it must be first smoked.  I wonder how this turned into a metaphorical phrase.

"A red herring, also referred to as a kipper, is a dried, smoked, herring. The curing process turns the fish red. This sense of the phrase can be dated to the mid seventeenth century, and is used by Samuel Pepys in his diary for the entry of 28 February 1660 "Up in the morning, and had some red herrings to our breakfast, while my boot-heel was a-mending, by the same token the boy left the hole as big as it was before.""

stop trying to act like humans came from a pile of dirt and perhaps we wouldn't view human sexuality as something to avoid.

I believe human homosexual behavior (consensual of course) is no less or more moral than heterosexual behavior; whether it is male-male, male-female, female-female, is irrelevant to me.  I do think that sexual behavior can be immoral if there is no "contract", e.g., there is coercion or deceit involved (example--saying I want to have your children and I will financially suppport them, when in fact that is a lie).

Sex between unmarried people purely for pleasure has no moral connotations for me, and I agree that many organized religions have used sexuality very badly as part of a fear mongering process.

The fact that homosexuality and bisexuality is prevalent across the animal kingdom is informative because it indicates there may be a positive biological/evolutionary reason for it, for the reasons discussed in the P.Z. Myers reference below, or in the highly interesting thought from Laura Lib.

Then add to that the low fat craze which directly affects hormones and nervous systems.  Return to traditions.

http://www.westonapr...

I am saying that using animal behavior as a model for human behavior is flawed logic.  By animal I mean species without the capability of making complex judgements such as humans.

The anti-gays using that logic to support their views that "if animals don't do it, it's not natural" is based on flawed logic.

However, anyone trying to make an argument that "animals exhibit a certain behavior, so it is OK for humans to exhibit that behavior" is also basing their logic on flawed logic.

I'm not telling you which position to support.  I'm simply pointing out flawed logic that you would learn in any critical thinking course.

I have to reread Myers' piece a couple of times to see if I fully understand it -- he mostly avoids using professional jargon but it's still a bit heavy going.

I wondered when I read this what possible adaptive value this could have, but after reading Richard Dawkins' _The Selfish Gene_, I came up with a hypothesis.

Dawkins argues that any "genetic" characteristic which tends to be more successful in reproducing itself will be favored.  He uses this argument to great effect, concluding that protection/assistance to siblings (or other family members) is favored because of the shared genetic inheritance - if my brother survives, (approximately) half of my genes will also survive.  I looked at this analysis and wondered if children with more adult resources devoted to them were more likely to survive - especially in the context of perhaps 1,000 or more years ago - obviously, a child with two parents was more likely to prosper than a child with one.  Similarly, a child with a larger extended family might be expected to do better.  What if some genetic trait, likely in the female and in pregnancy, changed the hormone balance of the fetus towards homosexuality for subsequent children?  What does the childless person do with his/her resources?  Mightn't this result in more adults caring for the children of the oldest (or older) siblings and therefore positively influence survival and/or reproductive success of those children?

I have absolutely no evidence relating to this hypothesis, it was just something I thought of because otherwise I cannot account for the persistence of homosexuality in a population.  While I know many gay people with children, on average they have (many) fewer than heterosexual people - so how does the trait persist?  It must somehow positively influence the survival of others with the shared gene(s).

This is a testable hypothesis, given the evidence above.  I hope somebody does the research to indicate whether particular family lines with higher than average numbers of homosexuals are more successful (in any species)!

"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." - Mark Twain

Elephants pay homage to the bones of their dead, gently touching the skulls and tusks with their trunks and feet, according to the first systematic study of elephant empathy for the dead.

The finding provides the first hard evidence to support stories of elephant mourning, in which the pachyderms are said to congregate at elephant cemeteries, drawn by the bones of their kin.

It also shows that these animals display a trait once thought to be unique to humans, says Dr Karen McComb, a UK expert on animal communication and cognition at the University of Sussex.

"Most mammals show only passing interest in the dead remains of their own or other species," McComb and colleagues write in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

Lions are typical in this respect: they briefly sniff or lick a dead of their own species before starting to devour the body.

Chimpanzees show more prolonged and complex interactions with dead social partners, but leave them once the carcass starts decomposing.

"In comparison, African elephants are reported not only to exhibit unusual behaviours on encountering the bodies of dead con-specifics, becoming highly agitated and investigating them with the trunk and feet, but also to pay considerable attention to the skulls, ivory and associated bones of elephants that are long dead," say the researchers.

And this:

http://news.bbc.co.u...

Elephants are known to bury their own dead under foliage and often stay with the body, apparently in mourning.

A cow whose calf has died will often stay with the dead baby for days, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service.

We could learn a lot from Africa (and reject some things too).  Anyway, in some tribes when someone does a "crime" they take the person and put him/her into the center of the group and then they tell her/him how important he is and what is good about him.  They restore him rather than punish.  How could you want to do bad when you remember who you are.  Their society is dependent on fully functioning people, not on full prisons.  What a concept.

If you watch the Japanese when they discipline their children they are also patting and rubbing the back so the child doesn't forget how important he is.

I may be radical, but I don't believe zoos are moral and should be phased out as those animals now in captivity die off.  I suppose I would make an exception for zoos like North Carolina Central, where at least the African animals have huge fields to run around in -- not those 100 x 100 pens you see in city zoos, but fields that are golf course sized.  People can view the animals from platforms.

A baby who was intersexed was admitted and the name was changed from "Baby Boy Smith" to "Baby Girl Smith" and back again (or vice versa, I don't remember).

Of course, everyone was curious and s/he was the talk of the hospital and I went down with one of the blood drawers.

I was shocked, mainly because this was the healthiest looking baby there, hands down.  It was a normal sized, absolutely beautiful infant compared to all the others that looked more like fetuses. 

And its genitals did not seem all that unusual.  Newborns always have very puffy gear, so imagine starting with a girl's anatomy and the labia majora are puffed out into little testicles.  Then the clitoris is enlarged into a little penis. 

Externally, that was the only difference.  But wow, the parents were devastated and in shock.  And everyone - including myself - expected this little baby to be some kind of "freak."  No.

There aren't very many babies like this.  And the very first thing we always ask when we hear that someone had - or now is going to have - a baby, is "boy or girl?" The Discovery Channel even did a program on intersexed people called "Is it a boy or a girl?"  which was pretty good.

Yes, this is a longish comment, but intersexed people really do help us rethink ideas about sex, gender, identity and where people fit into the larger scheme of things.

I don't think society (or parents) should choose the sex of these children.  My guess is that roughly 50% of the time we will be wrong, and then you have someone with an identity complex when they get older. 

Of course you have a 50% chance of being right and having a child that won't need to deal with the issue (if you don't tell them).  But that would be rolling the dice with our children - which is a bad idea when the odds are that poor.

Plastic surgery is advanced enough that when the child becomes older he or she can decide what, if any, organs should be removed.  I think that after puberty it will become clear if a person is a man or woman if the doctors don't tinker with the process when they are babies.

A baby boy goes through a bath of testerone soon after birth, the amount he will have when a man. He is being programmed for puberty.  During this bath his testicles drop and his penis grows.  One big reason pregnant women shouldn't eat soy is because of the estogen.  It can interfer with this process which can affect the boy for a lifetime.  A partial medicinal correction would be to feed him rocky mountain osyters.  For real. 

I wonder how homophobes regard the androgynous look.  Does it make them nervous?  Repulse them?  (My selection bias in friends -- they all seems to like that look.)

I think cancer trumps identity crises.  So if that were the medical oppinion I would go for removing the organ which may cause cancer.