13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time

by Michael Brooks

Roughgarden has supplemented Bagemihl's work: in her book Evolution's Rainbow she took the total number of vertebrate species observed in"nonstandard" couplings up to three hundred or so. Many more examples may yet be exposed. Bagemihl's work took a decade partly because biologists suppress reports of homosexual behaviors in the natural world. One biologist told him that admitting the animals he was observing were living in a homosexual society was"emotionally beyond [him]." Others admitted documenting homosexual behavior in animals but not publishing until they had tenure. These couplings certainly do not fit with the mainstream idea that genes, or at least organisms, are hell-bent on reproducing themselves. They do fit, however, with the idea of a social role for sex, and they fit with the idea that sexual reproduction is a spandrel, a by-product of some other phenomenon.