| PRO (YES) Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Liverpool, England, stated in the July 23, 2004 National Geographic article "Homosexual Activity Among Animals Stirs Debate" by James Owen: "The bottom line is that anything that happens in other primates, and particularly apes, is likely to have strong evolutionary continuity with what happens in humans."
7/23/04 Robin Dunbar 
Paul Vasey, Associate Professor at the University of Lethbridge, and Volker Sommer, Professor at University College London, explain in the introduction to their book Homosexual Behaviour in Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective published in September 2006: "Because we are committed to a broad comparative perspective on the topic of homosexual activity, this volume also includes a chapter on the human ‘animal’. It is our conviction that evolutionary treatises should not be ‘homocentric’ in that they either focus on humans, while excluding a comparison with other animals, or that they focus on animals, while excluding our species, Homo sapiens. Such boundaries, when maintained for reasons of orthodoxy and dogmatism, are meaningless and counterproductive to scientific understanding – a point which we will reiterate below. Of course, humans are unique and the behaviour of humans does, therefore, require unique explanations – but so does the behaviour of bottlenose dolphins and bisons."
09/2006 Paul Vasey Volker Sommer
Bruce Bagemihl, Ph.D., stated in his book Biological Exuberance, Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, (St. Martin's Press, 1999): "[H]omosexuality in any given context (or species) can be seen as the intersection at various points on a number of... axis, thereby allowing comparisons to be made across multiple factors... [T]he plurality of homosexualities in both animals and people suggests a blurring of the seemingly opposite categories of nature and culture, or biology and society...such diversity may in fact be part of our biological endowment, an inherent capacity for 'sexual plasticity' that is shared with many other species. On the other hand, it is equally meaningful to speak of the 'culture' of homosexuality in animals, since the extent and range of variation that is found (between individuals or populations or species) exceeds that provided by genetic programming and begins to enter the realm of individual habits, learned behaviors, and even community-wide 'traditions.'"
1999 Bruce Bagemihl  | |  | | CON (NO) Erik Holland, author of The Nature of Homosexuality (Lincoln, NE, iUniverse Inc.), stated in his 2004 book: "The best evidence so far suggests that same-sex sexual behavior is uncommon in the animal kingdom. Depending on the species, same-sex sexual behavior could possibly be related to dominant-subordinate relationships, regulations of social tension, alliance formation, seeking a partner to help take care of one's offspring, undermining the conceptive-reproductive success of non-relatives, or could simply just be non-adaptive behavior that exists for the sole purpose of satisfying sexual desires in those experiencing same-sex attraction."
2004 Erik Holland
Luiz Sergio Solimeo, a member of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, wrote in the article "The Animal Homosexuality Myth," which appeared on the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality's website which was accessed on Febrauary 13, 2007: "If seemingly 'homosexual' acts among animals are in accordance with animal nature, then parental killing of offspring and intra-species devouring are also in accordance with animal nature. Bringing man into the equation complicates things further. Are we to conclude that filicide and cannibalism are according to human nature?... The animal kingdom is no place for man to seek a blueprint for human morality...The fact that man has a body and sensitive life in common with animals does not mean he is strictly an animal. Nor does it mean that he is a half-animal. Man's rationality pervades the wholeness of his nature so that his sensations, instincts and impulses are not purely animal but have that seal of rationality which characterizes them as human. Thus, man is characterized not by what he has in common with animals, but by what differentiates him from them. This differentiation is fundamental, not accidental. Man is a rational animal. Man's rationality is what makes human nature unique and fundamentally distinct from animal nature."
2/13/2007 Luiz Sergio Solimeo
The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) stated in a 1995 letter to the New York Review of Books written by NARTH President Dr. Charles Socarides: "Firstly, the term homosexuality should be limited to the human species, for in animals the investigator can ascertain only motor behavior. As soon as he interprets the animal's motivation he is applying human psychodynamics -- a risky, if not foolhardy scientific approach. Secondly, assumptions as to the origin of human homosexuality cannot be based on the study of genes, hypothalamus, anterior commissure, or the lower brain structures, or species such as the drosophila fly, or even lower primates; because in man the enormous evolutionary development of the cerebral cortex has made motivation -- both conscious and unconscious -- of overwhelming central significance in sexual patterning and sexual-object choice. Below the level of chimpanzee, sexual arousal patterns are completely automatic and reflexive."
1995 NARTH | |
