Same-sex sociosexual behaviour, ranging from co-parenting to sex, has been observed in over 1,000 species with likely many more as researchers begin to look for the behaviour explicitly. Homosexuality is widespread, with bisexuality even more prevalent across species.
Developing this line of research further, and uncovering the genetic underpinning of human sexual orientation, has the potential to alter people’s perceptions of homosexuality.
Rethinking our sexual behaviour
Imagine the effect we would have on society if we could demonstrate with solid scientific evidence why it is normal, natural and expected for homosexual behaviour to be observed across the animal kingdom and human societies. This is the vision for a research team at Imperial leading the way in unravelling how, and why, homosexuality is found across nature.
Homosexuality has often been considered a ‘Darwinian paradox’ in some scientific circles. The existence of this supposed paradox is likely a confluence of the assumption that those who engage in homosexuality fail to reproduce, coupled with intolerant attitudes towards homosexual behaviour.
Recent evidence, however, indicates that genetic factors influence sexual behaviour, and that homosexuality could play an important role in reproduction and evolution.
This cutting-edge research is led by Professor Vincent Savolainen, a world-renowned evolutionary biologist who approaches many of the same questions Darwin did, but from a contemporary perspective.
EET has funded two PhD students to join Prof. Savolainen’s collaborative team of researchers tackling this big question in evolutionary biology. The research has started in autumn 2022.
New scientific evidence
Studying homosexuality in humans has its caveats because it relies on self-reporting of the behaviour. The crucial first step in this journey is to disentangle the biological and cultural bases of homosexuality.
For this, the research team are turning to a unique resource: a wild colony of monkeys living on Cayo Santiago, a small island located to the east of Humacao, Puerto Rico. There, the research team plans to characterise the distribution of mating behaviour in rhesus macaques and quantify its heritability, as well as quantify fitness costs of same sex mating behaviour (if any) and characterise genetic models for sexual behaviour.
“Research such as this is still uncharted territory and is often biased by misconceptions of sexual orientation in humans and other animals. The gift from EET was critical to allow us to start the work of disentangling the Darwinian paradox of homosexuality in nature and societies.”
Prof. Vincent Savolainen, Lead Researcher
Transformative research
Despite past scientific searches for a ‘gay gene’, the biological and hereditary factors of homosexuality are most certainly not tied to a single gene.
This unique research project aims to discover the genes, biological underpinning and function of same-sex sociosexual behaviour. The results are expected to lead to rethinking the prevalence and causation of sexual orientation.
