Enemy of Entropy

Archive for 11 July 2008

Bisexual Species: Unorthodox Sex in the Animal Kingdom: Scientific American

11 July 2008, 12:14 am. 5 Comments. Filed under Links, Sex.

This could have gone in my last post, con­sid­er­ing Porter’s life ;-) Thanks to Scott Bragg for the link.

Bisex­ual Species: Unortho­dox Sex in the Ani­mal King­dom: Sci­en­tific American

… as many as 1,500 species of wild and cap­tive ani­mals that have been observed engag­ing in homo­sex­ual activ­ity. Researchers have seen such same-​​sex goings-​​on in both male and female, old and young, and social and soli­tary crea­tures and on branches of the evo­lu­tion­ary tree rang­ing from insects to mammals.

Unlike most humans, how­ever, indi­vid­ual ani­mals gen­er­ally can­not be clas­si­fied as gay or straight: an ani­mal that engages in a same-​​sex flir­ta­tion or part­ner­ship does not nec­es­sar­ily shun het­ero­sex­ual encoun­ters. Rather many species seem to have ingrained homo­sex­ual ten­den­cies that are a reg­u­lar part of their soci­ety. That is, there are prob­a­bly no strictly gay crit­ters, just bisex­ual ones. “Ani­mals don’t do sex­ual iden­tity. They just do sex,” says soci­ol­o­gist Eric Ander­son of the Uni­ver­sity of Bath in England.

 

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