Homosexuality Blog – True Nature Theory

In a section of  ’True Nature – A Theory Of Human Sexual Evolution’ ( http://humansexualevolution.com/instinct-and-intelligence.htm) it was stated that humans lost their sexual instinct in the course of evoltution owing to increases in intelligence, and thus gained complete control over reproduction. After the human line had finally figured out why reproducing was beneficial to individual survival, and had also deduced what made reproduction possible, the stage was set for a quick loss of sexual instinct to occur. At this juncture I propose that a nasal plug mutation arose during fetal development which completely eliminated the sexual instinct, and gave humans an unprecedented reproductive freedom. 

A nasal plug appears in human fetal development for roughly 8 weeks, beginning at around the 7th week after conception and lasting until about the 15th week. The nasal plug is a mass of epithelial cells that completely seals the nostril openings for this period of time, and thereafter disappears. Its purpose has been a mystery for decades, but curiously, no real hypotheses have been put forth. Most significantly, such a nasal plug is not found during fetal development in chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relative, not in any of the other great apes, and hence it must have evolved for some very important reason after we split off from an ancestor common to chimps and hominids around 5-7 million years ago.

A clue to its function is its location, right within the area of olfaction and pheromone detection. In mammals, most often a sexual instinct is dependent on detecting pheromones, and this is typically accomplished by specialized pheromone receptors that detect pheromones and pass signals onto the brain areas responsible for initiating the appropriate instinctive behavioural responses.  The functional significance of this nasal plug may be that it isolated the developing chemosensory area within the nasal cavity, and perhaps the developing fetal brain, from the amniotic environment, thus blocking certain signalling molecules that are presumably present there during this period from triggering either the setting up of the chemosensory receptors responsible for detecting and relaying pheromonal signals to the sexual instinct networks of the brain, or the development of the sexual instinct network itself.

Not so coincidentally I suggest, the appearance and presence of the short-lived nasal plug is coincident with the onset of important changes in sexual differentiation of the fetus, which also begins at week 7. The ovavies appear in the embryo by week 7, while is males, the testes begin to differentiate. Until the 9th week both males and females have a creased bump that is the phallus. In the 9th week of development in boys, the testis releases hormones that induces the crease to fuse and disappear, leaving the phallus. In girls, nothing of great significance genitally happens in week 9, but over the next few weeks the crease stays and the phallus retracts to become a clitoris. It is my hypothesis that the differentiating sex organs were the origin of the chemical messengers in the amniotic fluid the nasal plug mutation once served to block. More specifically, a sexual instinct requires that the correct gender-specific form of the sexual instinct be set up at a receptor/neural level in any individual, and this would presumably require instructions from chemical signals denoting gender (arising from sexual differentiation of the foetus) to be delivered to the developing pheromonal receptors, and perhaps the developing fetus’s brain.

It is most probable that the nasal plug is an evolutonary artefact presently in humans, no longer serving the function it once did. Its absence today would be inconsequential because for thousands of years the sexual instinct has not operated in humans, leaving its associated receptor cells and neural programs outside the controls of natural selection, thus allowing random mutions to accumulate over time and render the  sexual instinct permanently destroyed and irrecoverable.  Prolonged disuse of receptors and neural programs would have resulted in atrophying of pheromonal receptor areas in the nose.  Also, the brain would likely have recruited neural cells from a non-functional sexual instinct network for use in other brain functions.   It is therefore very improbable that the nasal plug currently has any functional value.  However, I believe it is the veritable ’smoking gun’ of human sexual evolution, a mutation that completely elimnated the sexual instinct in the human line and which gave humans an unprecented reproductive freedom.

***   True Nature Theory does on critically depend on using the nasal plug to explain the loss of human sexual instinct; once the necessary knowledge of reproduction, and its benefits, was known the sexual instinct networks could have also disappeared by being overtaken and silenced by the increasing size and strength of  intelligence-based networks as the human brain evolved to modern proportions.   However,  the short-lived nasal plug provides a mechanism by which the loss of sexual instinct could have occured quickly, all-at-once.

It is hard not to let one’s personal views come in the way of objectively accessing someone else’s ideas on a controversial topic, much more so when the reader himself/herself becomes the subject being written about. Such is the case when confronted with the provocative hypotheses in True Nature – A Theory Of Human Sexual Evolution. The subject of sexual orientation is admittedly a polarizing one, each of us having our own personal favourite scientific or unscientific explanations, often supported by our own life experiences.

Yet, in fairness to the writer one must dispel all prior notions and open one’s mind to the author’s point of view. The validity and explanatory power of the paper must be assessed only after reading it carefully and understanding the paper fully. A useful exercise is to try to summarize the paper in an appropriately detailed fashion, fleshing out the key points and their supporting arguments. Doing so will give you the author’s reference frame, momentarily allowing you to suspend disbelief and umbrage, and will then hopefully enable you to challenge the paper more objectively.

It was Sigmund Freud who first recognized the hidden sexuality of young children – those under the age of 5. Until then, young children were regarded as being essentially asexual. How astonishing this fact is, when one considers that virtually all of us go through similar stages of sexual exploration and fantasizing beginning from the very first years of childhood. Freud correctly saw the most secretive part of a child’s world as being filled with sexual curiosity, sexual indulgence, and sexual fantasy.

What is the nature of childhood sexuality, and how does it arise? Childhood sexuality most often begins with ‘self-love’, and only later transcends the self to include others. But why? From the very first moments of life we are faced with the task of becoming acquainted with all aspects of our physical being. As children, we do this by using our hands to explore the boundaries of our bodies, and in the process, we quickly discover that the highly innervated genital area is very sensitive and pleasurable to touch. Being pleasure seeking beings at the core, we repetitively stimulate our sex organs to derive physical pleasure from them.

But the sex organs are also a source of olfactory pleasure – smegma – a combination of shed cells, skin oils, and moisture that is produced under the foreskin in males, and around the clitoris and between the labia minora in females. Though never scientifically researched or written about in academic literature – because it evidently represents one of the bigger societal taboos – the smell of smegma is intrinsically pleasurable to all of us, yet is something generally never acknowledged openly for fear of social rejection. And so, children will deliberately contaminate their fingers with smegma in the process of stimulating the genital area, so that they can then smell their fingers and derive olfactory pleasure from doing so.

Though society strongly discourages both behaviours, all children tend to do it, and in great secret. If one ascribes to the belief that most of us are born inherently heterosexual, there would be no reason to believe that the childhood sexual behavioural tendencies described might have any repercussions for sexual orientation development. However, in a published paper ‘ True Nature – A Theory Of Human Sexual Evolution’ found at www.humansexualevolution.com , it is shown using various lines of argument that humans, as a species, no longer possess a sexual instinct due to our higher intelligence, thus making such behaviours capable of influencing sexual orientation development. But how, exactly?

If we are not born with a pre-determined sexual orientation, we acquire it through our life experiences and environmental influences. So what then, is the potential effect of childhood sexual exploration behaviours? In Chapter 3 (http://www.humansexualevolution.com/sexual-orientation-development.htm) we learn that because of the pleasurable tactile stimulation of the genital, and the addictive odour of smegma, there is the greatest potential – in the absence of all societal influences – to view others of our own perceived gender as sexually attractive because they possess sex organs identical to the our own – to which we have become so dependent upon for tactile and olfactory pleasure. In this same light, the sexual attraction to others of the opposite sex is much less likely to occur, because we cannot similarly associate with them – unless we are immersed in a heterosexual environment where the conditioning elements are sufficiently strong and effective enough to steer our sexual orientation development in a heterosexual path instead. Evidently, this is what societies are able to do successfully most of the time. Being born into a family with a mother and father certainly most strongly impresses upon a developing child what is expected in terms of sexual orientation. It is only when a child, through personal experience, does not respond to the vast array for heterosexually conditioning elements around it, that a homosexual orientation development (or a bixexual one,) is likely to occur.

The tendency for self-love, and its potential for homosexual orientation development, can offer us an explanation for the origin of circumcision, which has always remained a mystery. Both male and female circumcision were actually attempts by various societies across the globe to discourage homosexuality by reducing the tendency for children to fall in love with their own bodies, thereby also reducing the tendency for same-sex attraction. In the case of male circumcision, the removal of the foreskin reduces the formation of smegma, and also reduces the sensitivity of the glans penis to touch. In the case of female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris eliminates their ability to feel pleasure from tactile stimulation. In cases where the labia is also removed in female circumcision, it can be viewed as an attempt to reduce the accumulation of smega and keep the area clean.

Like bipedalism, relative hairlessness is one the defining and conspicuous characteristics of human beings. Explanations for why hairlessness arose are numerous, and include sexual selection (which Darwin favoured), the Savannah/Thermoregulatory Hypothesis, the Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT / AAH), as well as ectoparasites. Of these, only sexual selection offers true insight into why the loss of hair occurred, but another element to the story of human evolution needs consideration – in particular, the role of increased intelligence – to derive a fully consistent and credible account of denudation in the human line. Here, I will outline an explanation for human hairlessness based on sexual selection, derived from a paper on human sexuality entitled ‘True Nature’ which was published in the JGLMA, and which can be found at www.humansexualevolution.com.

But first, let us examine the shortcomings of the competing explanations.

The Savannah/Thermoregulatory Hypothesis says that when humans ventured out into the more open savannah environment from their arboreal habitats (shared with chimpanzees), they experienced considerable heat stress and consequently evolved the ability to sweat, whereby body heat is dissipated through sweat evaporation from skin surface. Such evaporation becomes enhanced when skin is more bare, and thus it is argued that the evolution of sweating concurrently favoured an accompanying thinning/loss of hair in humans. Here’s the death blow to this hypothesis – why were humans unique in their response to this heat stress? No other furred species of animals on the savannah have responded to the savannah heat stress in this way, and in fact, if you examine all those furred animals, you’ll find they have longer hair on the top surface – which is most exposed to the sun – appearing to invalidate the argument that humans lost their body hair due to the action of the sun.

The Aquatic Ape Theory essentially says that the human line went through an aquatic or semi-aquatic stage during evolution that required adaptation via various changes in anatomy and physiology, chief among them, the loss of hair and the development of a subcutaneous fat layer, claimed to have decreased resistance in the water, and increased streamlining and insulation, respectively. Several damning objections can be raised. First, it appears odd that if humans had indeed passed through an aquatic stage they did not retain some innate swimming ability. Secondly, the benefits of losing body hair were presumably to gain added speed through the water, or increased ability for long distance swimming. But why would increased speed have been needed? Certainly not for catching prey, because humans have no specialized adaptations for doing so – i.e. no large jaws, and no claws, etc. As for the swimming speed of humans, it is very unimpressive when compared to even a non-aquatic mammal like a dog. So, any purported increased speed could not have been of much use in escaping predation either. With respect to long distance swimming, the proboscis monkey provides ample proof that a primate can be fully furred, yet still be a proficient swimmer capable of swimming for miles – in the proboscis’s case, from island to island. Anyway, it is a fact that only trained athletes can swim long distances, and this ability is therefore not a species-wide characteristic. Lastly human beings, despite their subcutaneous fat layer would have been ill-equipped to spending most of their time in the water as the theory proposes, because the insulation it provides is not substantial, and humans would have been ever in danger of hypothermia in even relatively warm waters, which would have still been significantly cooler than their body temperature.

The ectoparasite hypothesis says that hairlessness was favoured as an evolutionary strategy to combat fleas, ticks, lice and other biting insects that commonly plague furred animals. Once again, we see a theory calling for humans to have employed a strategy that no other species has used when confronted with the same challenges, for reasons that are never specified. Additionally, this strategy itself is arguably not very effective, since leaving hair on the head, armpits, and genital areas still subject human beings to considerable infestation with ectoparasites.

So now to the sexual selection hypothesis. In a nutshell, it proposes that hairlessness was selected for because humans found it sexier. It might seem absurd to ask why hairlessness might have been considered more appealing, given that most people would tell you that the thought of a fully furred human would be repulsive. But this is preference based merely on hairlessness being ubiquitous today. This question is important to ask, because the answer is not obvious. Darwin, an early proponent of sexual selection as an explanation for human hairlessness, did not offer this needed insight.

A more reasonable hypothesis is that hairlessness in humans forced them to clothe themselves, and in the process it heightened sexual curiosity by obscuring the sex organs. The retention of hair in the armpits and genital area is indirect proof that when this change occurred humans still had a sexual instinct, since these areas develop hair beginning at puberty, and are known to produce chemicals that might have served as pheromones at one time. True Nature Theory says that humans lost the sexual instinct at some point during their evolution because their increased intelligence level made it both expendable, and advantageous to do so. But it was in the transition period – when we still possessed a sexual instinct, albeit a diminished one – that a mutation for hairlessness arose and was favoured so that the adoption of clothing could trigger increased sexual desire, and work in unison with the declining sexual instinct to still trigger heterosexual intercourse. Ironically then, nudity, which before then had never been considered sexually stimulating because it was everywhere, now became more titillating only because it became more scarce. Hence, it was not hairlessness in itself that was initially considered more attractive, but instead, it was more likely that hairlessness was selected for because of the response to use clothing it necessitated, and the consequent triggering of sexual curiosity and desire that was born from concealing the sex organs.

Is homosexuality caused by nature, or nurture, or a combination of both? I will show by rational arguments that homosexuality can only be a function of nurture (more specifically, individual experience), and not nature, nor a combination of nature and nurture.
Let us first consider the possibility that homosexuality is caused by nature, or genes, in other words. This proposition basically says that that there is an actively expressed gene in homosexuals that is not found (or not expressed) in heterosexuals, which irresistibly causes the development of a homosexual orientation.
No such gene has ever been found, despite innumerable scientific investigations. Even the American Psychiatric Association reversed their position on this in 2008, stating that there is no compelling scientific evidence that would allow scientists to conclude that genes are responsible for homosexuality. To be fair, not finding such a gene does not, on its own, rule out it nonetheless might exist. However, there is a damning argument against the existence of such a gene: it could never survive in the gene pool because homosexuals would not pass on this gay gene to a subsequent generation.
But then, what about the recent suggestion that kin selection might allow a homosexual gene to survive, despite its reproductive shortcomings? Kin selection basically says that evolution can sometimes favour the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, even at the cost of its own survival. Because close relatives often share some genes, a gene that would otherwise be weeded out by natural selection can survive if it is carried by an organism’s relatives. In the case of homosexuality, it has been suggested that homosexuals, by virtue of them not marrying, have more time and resources to devote in the rearing of their relative’s children, thereby increasing their chances of survival.
However seductive this argument might appear, it is completely invalid. The reason is that if homosexuals did indeed have the tendency to contribute to increasing the survival chances of their relative’s offspring in any significant way, then natural selection would have increased the presence of the homosexual gene to the extent that heterosexuals everywhere would have access to such additional familial care and resources from a homosexual relative. Yet all the statistics on homosexuality show that at most, 10% of human beings are homosexual, a number too small to service the familial needs of the remaining 90% of the population. Evolution relentessly maximizes reproductive fitness, and given that it has not optimized the prevalence of homosexuality in humans to this end, it can only be interpreted as proving that kin selection for the homosexual gene is non-existent. Besides, if homosexuals in society had served this beneficial role since time immemorial, one would think it would long ago have become part of humanity’s collective knowledge and defined universally favourable attitudes toward them. We would not have needed a scientist to come up with such a theory.
If a homosexual gene does not exist, then it follows that a combination of nature and nurture can also be ruled out as causing homosexuality. Why? Because if any gene existed that could be acted upon by the environment in such a way as to produce homosexuality, then that gene would be eliminated by natural selection for the same aforesaid reasons. Therefore, the only conclusion one can draw is that homosexuality must have a completely non-genetic basis: if it’s not due to nature, and it’s not due to a combination of nature and nurture, then it must be due totally to nurture.  The same reasoning must apply to other animal species as well:  homosexual activity everywhere in the animal kingdom must be due only to environment, and cannot have a genetic basis.

A sexual instinct exists in animals to ensure that they reproduce and thus perpetuate the species. It is an observed fact that animals in natural settings are INCAPABLE of resisting the urge to reproduce when sexual pheromones trigger their sexual instinct into action. They are in this sense slaves to their sexual instinct, and this is what faithfully keeps their species going.

The question of whether humans possess a sexual instinct is easily answered by noting that human beings as a species are uniquely capable of choosing not to reproduce. This is an amazing fact and is proof that we do not possess a sexual instinct like that seen in all other animals. As I will show in future blogs there are reasons why this control over our reproductive abilites exists, and why we continue to reproduce despite not being compelled to do so by any internal, genetically programmed drive.

There is further dramatic proof that human beings lack a sexual instinct – the capability within out species for exclusively homosexual individuals to exist, and the supreme lack of it in all other species. It is true that homosexual activity has been routinely observed in over 450 species of animals (and counting), but there have been no exclusively homosexual animals ever observed in natural settings. Any animal that has been observed to engage in homosexual activity has as a rule also been observed to mate with an individual of the opposite sex when its sexual instinct was called into action.

So humans are the only species where exclusively homosexual subgroups can exist – where individuals can be truly homosexual. This is indirect proof that the sexual pheromones which trigger a heterosexual mating response in all other species of animals must clearly not exist in human beings. The grand conclusion here is that we humans have risen above animal sexuality, having lost our sexual instinct sometime in the course of human evolution. We thus as a species don’t have an instinct to reproduce, or to engage in heterosexual intercourse, and have the ultimate reproductive freedom.

A recent New York Times newspaper article entitled ‘Can Animals Be Gay?’ ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-t.html) generated a lot of buzz when it revealed that 39 of 125 nesting pairs of Laysan albatrosses at Kaena Point in Oahu, Hawaii were comprised of female/female pairs. This colony had been observed and studied for decades but it was always assumed that the pairs were male-female. That is, until a keen researcher decided to sex the birds genetically to explain why many of the nests had 2 eggs – when it was known that female Laysan albatrosses are capable of laying only one egg per cycle (owing to their extra large size). It turned out that the nests containing 2 eggs were those belonging to female-female pairs. Further observation revealed that both females of a female-female pair were going out and having sex with an already-committed male, and then returning to their nests to each lay their egg.

The world had a much politicized reaction to this paper than surprised even the lead researcher, who was not trying to explain homosexual behavior, merely the albatross. Some gay rights advocates welcomed the news of same-sex families in the albatross world, interpreting it as further justification of their rights and lifestyle, while detractors were quick to point out that parallels in the animal world were meaningless as reflections of what society should embrace or permit, given that in many animal species there is infanticide and rape as well.

While the head researchers making the observations were quick to opine that they do not consider such same-sex pairs to be examples of lesbianism, they are also not sure what conclusions to draw from their observations, noting that while same-sex pairs appear to do everything male-female pairs do (preen each others feathers, nuzzle together, take turns nest-sitting while the other goes fishing, etc.), they do not have sex.

Why is this happening, and what can explain this abundance of female-female pairings within this colony of Laysan albatrosses? The researchers gave the following explanation: there are fewer male than female albatrosses in the colony and the ‘excess’ females – needing a partner to share parenting duties to enhance a hatchling’s survival chances – opt to each mate with an already paired male, but incubate their egg with another unpaired female. This way, paired females have a better chance of passing on their genes.

Even though in the case of the Laysan albatrosses there is no homosexual activity (viz. actual sex) going on within female-female pairs, it is noteworthy that homosexual activity is sometimes observed when there’s a shortage of one type of gender – in the wild but more often in zoos (known as the prison effect). In fact, the article points out that ‘same-sex sexual activity has been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals, from flamingos to bison to beetles to warthogs’ – but not exclusive homosexual sex! So, to answer the central question of this blog entry – No, animals can’t be gay. Humans are the only species where exclusively homosexual individuals and subgroups exist. We are unique in all of nature in this respect, and I will show in a future blog how it is our vastly superior intelligence relative to all other animals that makes it possible.

The many researchers in the article admit being incapable of making sense of homosexual activity seen in so many diverse species of animals, and speculate that a single unifying theory might not ever exist. I believe a good overall unifying explanation can only be arrived at when we examine the relationship between 2 biological variables – instinct and intelligence – and how they interact with environment. That will be the topic of my next blog.