Myers on Sexual Selection

I read Seed's interview with Joan Roughgarden on homosexuality and sexual selection last week and found it fascinating. It seemed to me, as it did to many others I discussed it with, that she was caricaturing Darwin's views on the subject, but there was still some important points made in the interview about whether homosexuality was an adaptive trait, a maladaptive trait, or neither. I'm glad to see that PZ Myers has taken the time to write up a fairly thorough review of the subject and I agree with most of what he says. Well worth reading for those interested in evolutionary biology and the place of homosexuality within it.

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Seed has an interview with Joan Roughgarden, somewhat controversial evolutionary biologist and author of Evolution's Rainbow : Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Here's the short summary of her basic thesis: Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a…
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I wrote this book review back on February 18, 2006. Under the fold... I see that Joan Roughgarden has a new paper in Science this week: Reproductive Social Behavior: Cooperative Games to Replace Sexual Selection Theories about sexual selection can be traced back to Darwin in 1871. He proposed that…
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