Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [58]
At some point in the argument someone inevitably says, as if no one else would have ever thought of it, that animals do all kinds of things we don't want to emulate, for example, eating their young or abandoning their elders. The implication, presumably, is that what animals do is sometimes repugnant, so we should ignore their behavior when considering our own. While it's certainly true that we don't need to use other species as role models for behavior to emulate, animals need not mirror all aspects of our lives to be useful in teaching us about some of them. We use animals as experimental models for many parts of our biology that they do not possess in their entirety. We can learn a great deal about how babies grow into adults by observing rats, even though rats never learn to drive or go to college. And we are fascinated with the things that animals do that seem so uncannily similar to what we do, as anyone who has watched a mother monkey expertly sling her baby on her hip before setting off for a nearby shrub can testify.
Insects play a special role in our use of animals to help us understand ourselves, as I argue throughout this book. Because they are rarely cared for by their parents, and usually live relatively solitary lives without the input of others, the behavior they exhibit as adults is largely controlled by their genes. And although we are increasingly discovering how flexible their behavior can be, as I discuss in the chapters on insect learning and personality, it's still a safe bet that if a bug seems to be homosexual, it didn't get that way because of an absent father or overbearing mother messing things up during its larval stage. Their behavior is thus stripped down to its essentials, a handy tool for looking at complex actions.
So what do we know about homosexuality in animals, particularly insects? And what does that tell us about sexual orientation in humans? The results of studies showing same-sex behavior in flies, beetles, and butterflies are coming in every day. This news is significant for several reasons, but it is meaningless for another one, and that one is the reason that many people are interested in it in the first place.
Lowering of Moral Standards in Butterflies
AS BRUCE Bagemihl points out in his 1999 book Biological Exuberance, researchers have been noticing same-sex behavior in both wild and captive animals for many years. This is not to say they were always happy about it or viewed their discoveries dispassionately; a scientist greeted the sight of male bighorn sheep mounting each other and forming long-term homosexual bonds with: "I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly.... To state that the males had evolved a homosexual society was emotionally beyond me. To conceive of these magnificent beasts as 'queers'—Oh, God!"
Even lowly invertebrates are subjected to such dramatic responses; the 1987 volume of the Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation contains "A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera [butterflies and moths]," a gem I have read several times, still without being sure whether it is meant to be tongue in cheek. In it, the author laments, "It is a sad sign of our times that the National newspapers are all too often packed with the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offences committed by our fellow Homo sapiens; perhaps it is also a sign of the times that the entomological literature appears of late to be heading in a similar direction." He then goes on to detail observations of male Mazarine blue butterflies, a lovely European species, vigorously and persistently courting other males, particularly when the object