Same-sex behaviour is well-documented in more than 500 species of animals and birds. For as long as humans have lived, homosexuality has occurred in every culture. If the point of sex is procreation, why has evolution not weeded out non-productive sex?
The Laysan albatross is the epitome of monogamy, with the pair committed to each other for the long haul. But biologists discovered that about 60 per cent of the population in Oahu, Hawaii, is female, and during the breeding season, about 30 per cent of the pairs are female-female.
Much to the concern of sheep farmers, about eight per cent of all rams are homosexual, refusing to mate with ewes. These ram-preferring rams have a smaller hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls reproductive functions, than heterosexual rams.
Although same-sex behaviour appears to be genetic in fruit flies, no gene for gayness has been found in mammals. Intriguingly, identical human twins share the same genetic material, but they don’t always share the same sexual orientation.
In December 2012, a team led by William Rice, an evolutionary biologist at University of California, Santa Barbara, theorised that epigenetic marks may hold the answer. Residing beside DNA, they direct how, when, and which genes switch on in response to the environment throughout one’s life. In the womb, epi-marks protect boys from underexposure and girls from overexposure to testosterone.
These switches are not typically hereditary, but sometimes, they get passed on. In such cases, girls inherit the marks from their fathers and become masculine, while boys receive from their mothers and become feminine.
Homosexuality may indirectly benefit other members of the family like increased fertility in women and appropriate hormonal controls in parents.
Other scientists wonder if homosexuality serves any purpose at all. Perhaps it rides piggyback on another beneficial adaptation that gets selected again and again, and homosexuality gets inadvertently chosen too.
There probably is no single explanation for a behaviour found in so many different creatures. Perhaps it is a result of gender shortage for some, male bonding, and genetic side-effect in others. Among dogs, not all same-sex mountings are sexual, but a show of dominance.