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The most compelling of the new evidence for the gay gene is that fraternal twins, carried in the same womb and reared in the same household have only a one-in-four chance of sharing a gay habit. Identical twins, on the other hand, with the same nurture and the same nature, have a one-in-two chance of sharing the same gay habit. If one identical twin is gay, the chances that his brother is also gay are fifty per cent.1 There is also good evidence that the gene is inherited from the mother and not from the father.1

How could such a gene survive, given that gay men generally do not have children? There are two possible answers. One is that the gene is good for female fertility when in women, to the same extent that it is bad for male infertility when in men. The second possibility is more intriguing. Laurence Hurst and David Haig of Oxford University believe that the gene might not be on the X chromosome after all. X genes are not the only genes inherited through the female line. So are the genes of mitochondria, described in Chapter 4, and the evidence linking the gene to a region of the X chromosome is still very shaky statistically. If the gay gene is in the mitochondria, then a conspiracy theory springs to the devious minds of Hurst and Haig. Perhaps the gay gene is like those ‘male killer’ genes found in many insects. It effectively sterilizes males, causing the diversion of inherited wealth to female relatives. That would (until recently at least) have enhanced the breeding success of the descendants of those female relatives, which would have caused the gay gene to spread.

If the sexual preferences of gay men are greatly influenced (not wholly determined) by a gene, then it is probable that so are the sexual preferences of heterosexuals. And if our sexual instincts are so heavily determined by our genes then they have evolved by natural and sexual selection and that means they bear the imprint of design. They are adaptive. There is a reason that beautiful people are attractive. They are attractive because others have genes that cause them to find beautiful people attractive. People have such genes because those that employed criteria of beauty left more descendants than those that did not. Beauty is not arbitrary. The insights of evolutionary biologists are transforming our view of sexual attraction, for they have begun at last to suggest why we find some features beautiful and others ugly.

Beauty as a Universal

Botticelli’s Venus and Michelangelo’s David are both considered beautiful. But would a Neolithic hunter-gatherer, a Japanese, or an Eskimo agree? Will our great-grandchildren agree? Is sexual attraction fashionable and evanescent or permanent and inflexible?

We all know how dated and frankly unattractive the fashions and the beauties of a decade ago look, let alone those of a century ago. Men in doublet and hose may still seem sexy to some, but men in frock coats surely do not. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a person’s sense of what is beautiful and sexy is subtly educated to prefer the prevailing norms of fashion. Rubens would not have chosen Twiggy as a model. Moreover, beauty is plainly relative, as any prisoner who has spent months without seeing a member of the opposite sex can testify.

And yet this flexibility stays within limits. It is impossible to name a time when women of ten or forty were considered more ‘sexy’ than women of twenty. It is inconceivable that male paunches were ever actually attractive to women, or that tall men were thought uglier than short ones. It is hard to imagine that weak chins were ever thought beautiful on either sex. If beauty is a matter of fashion, how is it that wrinkled skin, grey hair, hairy backs and Bardolph-like noses have never been ‘in fashion’? The more things change, the more they stay the same. The famous sculpture of Nefertiti’s head and neck, three thousand three hundred years old, is as stunning today as when Akhenaten first courted the real thing.

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