Today’s topic comes courtesy of Jim Comer – “evolution in sci fi”.
I’m gonna take this one and run with it. Did you know that fully a third of adults in the US don’t believe in evolution?
As an openly gay man, I feel that I was born this way – that it’s part of my genetics. I always figured that being gay or lesbian was nature’s release valve for population control – we don’t generally bear our own children (though we now can) but we do take care of others, and thus lower the overall birth rate.
There’s even research to back this up, showing that as population becomes more dense, rats become more likely to engage in gay sex.
So here’s my question today – how might humans evolve in the near and far future? and how does LGBT identity play into this? Will humans evolve new orientations to cope with a changing environment?
Image via New Grounds.
That is a very good question. Like almost anything related to evolution, I am sure the answer is extremely complex. The commonly rendered version of Darwin’s theory is simplistic in the extreme, and scientists now know there are layers of factors involved in species evolution. But based on the rat study you mentioned, one could postulate that Mother Nature is a very practical dame, so I see no reason why new and expanding orientations couldn’t occur. The problem is we humans sometimes have a bad habit of getting in our own way when it comes to scientifically examining ourselves, and to some extent, we are even capable of subverting the old girl in the interests of not-necessarily-reasonable ideas and beliefs about ourselves as a species. Increasing societal acceptance of the reality of alternative sexual orientations as every bit as natural as plain vanilla heterosexuality could very well have evolutionary benefits for our overpopulated and environmentally ravaged world in the nearer future. We can only hope we are able to get over ourselves to recognize the possibilities before it is too late for the slow-moving process of evolution to generate solutions.
Needless to say, as a theme of science fiction, sexual evolution gets a lot of play. Books by Ursula K. Le Guin and Storm Constantine come to mind. Anybody have other examples to mention?