Adam Mars-Jones
BODY LANGUAGE
Mrs Patrick Campbell once famously said that she didn’t care what people did in the bedroom as long as they didn’t frighten the horses. Now it turns out that no human sexual act has much prospect of startling our animal cousins. In his astounding book, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, Bruce Bagemihl shows that homosexuality is little short of ubiquitous in nature, and that no pattern of sexual behaviour, from cordial threesomes to lifelong commitment between individuals of the same sex, can safely be claimed for our own species alone.
Bagemihl draws on, and persuasively interprets, a vast quantity of data. So how is it that an activity so widespread in so many species could have remained unnoticed for so long? The explanation has disturbing implications for the entire scientific method, so often announced as value free, as if the values of the scientists making observations did not impinge on their project. The answers to the questions you ask are structured by the questions you don’t think even need asking.
There are three ways in which trained observers can overlook a widespread activity: by not seeing it; by not noticing it; and by making it disappear from their results. Primary, secondary and tertiary invisibility, in descending order of defensibility.
Sexual behaviour can be physically elusive, particularly in marine animals and birds: there are still many species in which copulation of any kind has never been observed – humpback whales, for instance.
Logically, they must copulate heterosexually, or there would be no whales to observe, but it takes open-mindedness, the sort that the empirical method promises more often than delivers, to acknowledge that there may be other unseen acts (one of the many startling photographs in the book shows ”penis intertwining” between grey whales, the erect organs breaking the surface of the water). It should be basic information given to novice biologists, though, that there are species in which homosexual acts were observed before – in the case of wild emus, 70 years before – heterosexual congress was verified.
Homosexual behaviour can pass unnoticed if all sexual acts are posited to be heterosexual. When scientists studying a population of birds, for instance, assume that every mounter is male and every mountee female, every cranny of the habitat could be throbbing with same-sex couplings and they will be none the wiser. This lesson could have been learned long ago, on the basis of the study of a population of king penguins carried out at Edinburgh Zoo between 1915 and 1930.
Genders were assigned to the birds on the basis of their first round of shenanigans. As the penguins partied on, the observers were forced to rechristen Bertha Bertrand and Andrew Ann. It turned out that only one of the birds had been correctly identified. In a wild population, the errors might never have shown up (”That looks a lot like Andrew, but … it can’t be!”). Yet sexing by behaviour is still being used in the field.
It is tertiary invisibility that is the most sinister. So if a male giraffe merely sniffs a female’s rear end, that is recorded as a sexual act, while if he sniffs another male’s genitals, mounts him with an erect penis and ejaculates, then he is merely engaged in dominance behaviour. Bagemihl is eloquent about the wrongheadedness of the dominance argument.
What we need is a new paradigm of animal sexuality which doesn’t insist, in the teeth of the evidence, that it’s all to do with breeding. Bagemihl proposes a new model of evolution, which recognises that natural systems are driven as much by abundance and excess as by limitation. Perhaps he’ll develop this in a later book.