One for Science Friday, perhaps...I have never heard of this man - and I majored in Biology (so ashamed!) - but he seems to be
taken seriously enough.
Freelance physicist Gregory Cochran has a reputation as a bit of a maverick in his thinking and scientific pursuits and has put forth some fairly controversial theories over the years. How many physicists study the evolution of diseases, after all?
But if you ask me, anyone who writes an article called
Bush's Napoleon Complex, can't be so bad.
Yes, this is still about homosexuality; this was just too fun an intro to let go.
No two wars are ever the same any more than you can step on the same banana peel twice. That said, Napoleon's invasion and occupation of Spain, from 1808 to 1814--the war that gave us the word "guerrilla" and was immortalized in Goya's "Third of May," the war that drained France's army, smashed Napoleon's reputation for invincibility, and left Spain thrashing like a broken-backed snake for decades--has striking similarities to our invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Both wars started under the influence of similar delusions. Napoleon thought that the Spanish would roll over and play dead as so many other European states had; he thought marching to Madrid and placing his brother Joseph on the throne would complete the subjugation of Spain. We pretty much thought the same: crushing Saddam's army would be easy; we would then install a pro-American government (Ahmad the Thief) and have most of our Army home by fall.
The invasions went well, as expected, but in each case a tiresome guerrilla war broke out. The French eventually lost over a quarter of a million men in "the Spanish ulcer," as Napoleon called it, while Iraq has tied down half of the Army and is costing us more than $75 billion a year. What went wrong? As it turns out, Boney and Bush made some of the same mistakes.
At least if he's crazy, he's my kind of crazy! Anyhoo, his most contentious theory so far may well be that homosexuality is the result of infection. Warning: PDF
The kind of preferential homosexuality seen in human males is very rare. I know of only one other species in which something similar is known to exist. And of course it should be rare, if there is anything to neodarwinism.
The existence of a significant fraction of males that show sexual interest in other males and no interest in females is just as much an evolutionary anomaly as, say, a few percent of that species dying from spontaneous liver failure in early life, or jumping off a cliff.
...The word 'fitness' is a technical phrase in evolutionary biology: it says how effective you are are propagating your genes, compared to the group average. Homosexual men have low fitness, around 0.20 in recent US surveys.
And they aren't what you'd call rare: probably over 1%, possibly as high as 4%. That is an anomaly. You don't expect any substantial fraction - and for these purposes 1% is pretty substantial - of the population in any species to pursue a strategy that is never going to work well.
Let me make this very clear:
If one in ten thousand men were homosexual, homosexuality would not be an evolutionary anomaly. A few genetic diseases are that common. But when ,say, 3 in 100 men are homosexual, it's a huge anomaly.
...I should also make clear that failing to mate is not the real anomaly. The anomaly is failing to try. In many species, huge fractions of the young never live to grow up. Most seeds never become trees. Most males never get to mate, in some species. But they try. They pursue behavioral strategies that work on average.
Some birds, in poor conditions or attacked by predators, don't make it south for the winter. But damn few fly north! If a few percent of geese flew north for the winter, it'd be an evolutionary anomaly, in exactly the same way that human homosexuality is.
There are plenty of syndromes with comparable evolutionary cost, but almost every one is caused by an infectious organism, a parasite. Most are somatic, but some involve behavioral change.
...That's the way things work. The big syndromes that reduce fitness are caused by infection or new environmental insults - but the greatest of these is infection.