Prosociality and a Sociosexual Hypothesis for the Evolution of Same-Sex Attraction in Humans

Abstract

Human same-sex sexual attraction (SSSA) has long been considered to be an evolutionary puzzle. The trait is clearly biological: it is widespread and has a strong additive genetic basis, but how SSSA has evolved remains a subject of debate. Of itself, homosexual sexual behavior will not yield offspring, and consequently individuals expressing strong SSSA that are mostly or exclusively homosexual are presumed to have lower fitness and reproductive success. How then did the trait evolve, and how is it maintained in populations? Here we develop a novel argument for the evolution of SSSA that focuses on the likely adaptive social consequences of SSSA. We argue that same sex sexual attraction evolved as just one of a suite of traits responding to strong selection for ease of social integration or prosocial behavior. A strong driver of recent human behavioral evolution has been selection for reduced reactive aggression, increased social affiliation, social communication, and ease of social integration. In many prosocial mammals sex has adopted new social functions in contexts of social bonding, social reinforcement, appeasement, and play. We argue that for humans the social functions and benefits of sex apply to same-sex sexual behavior as well as heterosexual behavior. As a consequence we propose a degree of SSSA, was selected for in recent human evolution for its non-conceptive social benefits. We discuss how this hypothesis provides a better explanation for human sexual attractions and behavior than theories that invoke sexual inversion or single-locus genetic models.

Keywords: bonobo; endocrine hypothesis; homosexual; self-domestication; sexual inversion; sexuality; testosterone.