Exuberance
Vital Liquor quotes from Desmond Morris’ The Human Zoo, 1969.
Under normal conditions, in their natural habitats, wild animals do not mutilate themselves, masturbate, attack their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, become fetishists, suffer from obesity, form homosexual pair-bonds or commit murder. Among human city-dwellers, needless to say, all of these things occur. Does this, then, reveal a basic difference between the human species and other animals? At first glance it seems to do so. But this is deceptive. Other animals do behave in these ways under certain circumstances, namely when they are confined in the unnatural conditions of captivity. The zoo animal in a cage exhibits all these abnormalities that we know so well from our human companions. Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.
Salon writes about Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance, 1999.
The scientist gasps and drops the binoculars. A notebook falls from astonished hands. Graduate students mutter in alarm. Nobody wants to be the one to tell the granting agency what they’re seeing.
A female ape wraps her legs around another female, “rubbing her own clitoris against her partner’s while emitting screams of enjoyment.” The researcher explains: It’s a form of greeting behavior. Or reconciliation. Possibly food-exchange behavior. It’s certainly not sex. Not lesbian sex. Not hot lesbian sex.
Yeah, Morris is a little dated- seeing homosexuality as he does as a strictly behavioral phenomenon. I'm not sure what the science currently is, but my general feeling is that there's a growing concensus that it's actually biological. Which still fits Morris' hypothesis: when animals overpopulate their habitat, compensating measures (both biological and behavioral) present themselves. Even if it were true, I think a documentable connection between overcrowding and homosexuality-as-population-limiting-mutation would be nearly impossible to pin down... Nonetheless, you'll find there's still much that provokes when reading Morris (both The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo were very controverisal upon publication) more than 30 years on- which is pretty impressive.
Posted by K. on August 12 2005 01:18
Oh- also meant to say that Morris nowhere states that homosexual activity is exclusively unnatural (that is, occurring only in captivity or in overcrowded habitats)- It's the formation of long-term homosexual pair-bonds which he claims is not seen in nature.
Posted by K. on August 12 2005 01:33
If the accounts in Biological Exuberance are accurate, then Morris is wrong on that count as well. It looks like same-sex pairs will create nests, maintain a shared territory, and even raide "adopted" young together, all in a natural state.
I think that Bagemihl's theory on individual uses of a species' evolutionary adaptations makes a lot of sense. Sexual creatures evolve mechanisms to make sex pleasurable, and that encourages reproduction. But some individual members of the species find that they enjoy those pleasure-generating mechanisms in other ways. It doesn't harm the species as a whole, and whether it's a "preversion" of nature is really just an individual value judgment.
Personally I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it. We evolved feet in order to move us around, to find food and get away from harm. But what's the problem if some people like to use them to play soccer?
Posted by Jimcat on August 12 2005 10:28
Well, not to be a Morris apologist- but having read him recently, I'd better comment before it's forgotten. He does treat sex for pleasure in one part of the book- and though long-term homosexual pair bonds in primates may have been unknown to him (or maybe infrequent enough not to rate mention), I don't really see where his work and Bagemihl's are in conflict. Perhaps the primates in Bagemihl's study had reached some tipping point regarding population density (they needn't be as overcrowded as us to provoke an "overcrowded" response), or maybe some other aspect of their way of life had triggered the response. To credit that behavior to individual choice- among creatures so heavily ruled by biology (as though we're not!)- is, I think, further than I can go. But I haven't read Bagemihl's book, so maybe a change of mind is in my future.
I guess I'm most intrigued by the idea of long-term homosexual pair-bonding as a natural population-limiting mechanism. Morris would never have put it that way, since he thought it was merely a behavioral response and unnatural (in a non-pejorative sense)- but I wonder what he would say now- he's still alive (and writing, I think). Since these pair bonds DO happen in nature, they must serve a purpose, or else be a random mutation (I'm presuming a biological explanation for homosexuality here). And since homosexuality is frequently recurrent and appears to be ancient, it seems unlikely to me that it's random.
The Human Zoo contains far deeper and more cogent arguments than I have the ability to present- you'll find a copy cheaply enough at almost any thrift store. His conclusions may be distasteful, but I didn't detect any political bias- and I'm fairly sensitive to that sort of thing.
Posted by K. on August 12 2005 13:37
God - one more comment. Morris also states that in the wild, animals don't attack their offspring. That's not true. The English Coot (a species of water fowl) almost always pecks to death the weaker members of its brood. So I think Morris WAS using a bit of generalization throughout... but it was written for the layperson, so that might account for his cutting some corners.
Posted by K. on August 12 2005 13:42