A few days ago, Kip Esquire posted a fascinating thought experiment. Imagine that whatever biological mechanism it is that makes some people gay also produced a clear and unmistakable sign of its presence, such as a birthmark on the forehead. If you see a person with this mark, you know they’re gay. Children with the mark are sure to grow up to be gay adults.
In other words, what if there could be no “closet”?
Kip thinks this would turn out pretty well:
One could imagine either of two cultural responses:
1. Kill the infants upon birth.
2. Or not.
I can’t conceive a theory of anthropology or sociology where Option #1 would be the equilibrium outcome. If it were clear, from birth, that being gay is not a choice, if it were clear that a noticeable — even if small — minority of the population were gay, and if it were impossible to conceal one’s true identity, then how, exactly, could bigotry arise in the first place?
My first thought was that a visible mark would be similar to a racial characteristic, and we all know how much bigotry there is about race. But as Kip points out, the birthmark’s presence would track the prevalence of homosexuality, which is (mostly) not a hereditary characteristic, so there wouldn’t be pre-existing family and social groups that have the mark.
Consider that about 14% of the U.S. population has very dark skin because they have African ancestry. Suppose that instead of being inherited, dark skin was a random occurrence at birth, meaning that regardless of the skin colors of the parents, every infant had a 14% chance of having dark skin. Would we still have bigotry over skin color?
Kip basically says no, and also no bigotry over the “gay mark” either. I say maybe a little.
There are real-world examples of the kinds of phenomena Kip is imagining. The first one that comes to mind is left-handedness. The U.S. has about as many southpaws as African Americans, but left-handed people don’t face the same kinds of discrimination as African Americans. They do have problems because most tools are designed for right-handed use, as is our writing system, but they don’t face active hatred for being left-handed.
However, that hasn’t always been true here, and it’s not true all over the world. The pattern is similar for other conditions that follow Kip’s pattern, such as epilepsy, dwarfism, colorblindness, and deafness. I don’t believe these people have faced the sort of organized hatred that characterises racism, but they have certainly faced some discrimination and prejudice.
There’s a bigger problem. Kip says he “can’t conceive a theory of anthropology or sociology” that would cause people to kill gay-marked infants at birth. I don’t know enough about either discipline to tell if he’s right, but I know one applicable theory that implies the death of gay-marked infants: Evolution.
Roughly speaking, the theory of evolution causes organisms to try to increase their genetic representation in future generations.
I’m no expert on evolution, so take what follows with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that a perfectly gay organism would have no future generations, so the forces of natural selection neither favor it nor disfavor it. A gay organism is no longer playing the game of evolution.
However, the gay organism’s parents do have future generations, so they are still in the game. If the parents are involved in raising their children at all, as is certainly the case for humans, then from an evolutionary standpoint it is wasteful to spend time and energy raising the gay child. They would be better off lavishing more care on their other children, or having more children. One way to accomplish this is for organisms to evolve an instinct to kill their gay children.
Evolution is an unplanned process, so it would simultaneously follow other paths to try to eliminate the waste of resources. It’s not hard to imagine that the species would evolve a way for parents to have fewer gay children, or a way to have children that are less than perfectly gay. Either of these might be accomplished by changing the biochemical conditions in the womb, but the latter could also be achieved by social pressure to reproduce despite the gay sexual preference.
Once that happens, gays are back in the game of evolution, and to the extent there is any genetic component to gayness, they will evolve. If their parents have evolved the instinct to kill gay offspring, then the gay offspring will evolve a way to to resist. One solution would be to evolve a way to hide their gayness, in which case the gay mark will go away.
A few notes are in order: I have taken the liberty of describing evolution as if it had a purpose. It doesn’t. But its results often seem to have a purpose, which is good enough for my purposes. Also, as far as I know, how homosexuality fits into the theory of evolution is not well understood. We might figure it out when we learn more about how the sexual modules of the brain develop and function. Finally, don’t assume this theory means it’s natural or right for parents to hate their gay children. Human psychology and culture is a lot more complicated than the simple reasoning of this article. In any case, nature is a terrible guide to morality.
Hmmm, just guessing here, but in this fanciful hypothetical, it seems to me that there’s more of a case to be made that evolution would actually result in gay children being part of large families.
Those who choose to have children in addition to the gay child(ren) will have their genes carried on. It is the creation of children to carry on the genes that is the evolutionary demand, not the elimination of the gay child.
The waste of resources argument doesn’t really hold unless that’s enough to actually remove families from the gene pool. (ie, in situations of drought or famine where the extra child means they both die of starvation, then evolution would theoretically demand the death of the gay child). But in most of the world today, killing the gay child has no evolutionary “value.”
In fact, it’s possible to conceive that killing the gay child could so psychologically damage most couples as to reduce their likelihood of further reproduction (“No sex for you, you monster!”). Evolution would quickly eliminate their trait.
Pete, Kip did ask us to speculate on what would happen if it started now, but I found Kip’s original “What if it had always been so?” question more interesting to try to answer, so that’s what I did.
So while you’re certainly right about gay children not being much of a waste of parental resources in the modern world, our species did not evolve in the modern world. My impression is that our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors faced extremely harsh conditions in which most of their offspring did not live long enough to reproduce. Famine, drought, and harsh winters would all take their toll.
I think prehistoric human families had to make some tough decisions, as indicated by the presence of infanticide in many historic cultures. One common form of infanticide was to abandon the child to the elements. This strikes me as a way to get around your “monster” problem, since the parents could emotionally hold onto the possibility that the child might have survived.
In any case, I think that in the prehistoric world (or the animal world of our more distant ancestors) a “gay mark” would face evolutionary pressure that would prevent it from ever occurring.
This is ugly stuff, and I want to emphasize that it’s all just speculation about the effect of hypothetical biology on events we know little about, and it’s certainly not a statement about the modern world.