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Originally Posted by Helm
what purpose can same-sex mating serve in a natural environment? The purpose of sexual intercourse in nature is to procreate the species, not to have fun fucking. Doesn't an animal that cannot spawn progeny (lol) become useless instinctively.
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Either a few natural abberation cases somehow survived natural clensing (and we human observers might have been more than a little involved in that) and spread their defective genes, or a large fraction of our academic knowledge on instinctual urges is flawed in some ways. The incidents seem far too widespread for the first answer to be completely valid...
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Your first assumption is indeed a viable one. Because of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (population genetics). I. e. as deletere as a given recessive might be, it will not disapear from a population, rather, an equilibrium will establish itself over time, with a more or less constant proportion of affected and carriers.
BTW, "deletere" is used in respect to evolution - i.e. if we consider the propagation of his genetic material as an individual's only purpose. Not any kind of "moral" connotation here of course.
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Originally Posted by Helm
For humans, the pleasure derived from sex serves as additional urging towards mating, but given that we have a degree of free will the orgasm factor would be a pretty big drive for people if we could theoretically remove the instinctual hardwiring. So for people, it sort of makes sense for nature to provide additional means of persuasion to procreate. But most animals are anything but self-aware. Instinctual automations that would and indeed can procreate based on sort-of scripted behaviour. So why on earth would they fuck for fun and not for children?
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Bonobos do not fuck for fun actually, having sex is a mean of reducing tension among individual (hierarchic tensions). So it does serve an evolutionary purpose, maintaining the social group's cohesion = the survival rate. In the penguins' case cited above, I believe it is not an occurence of "fucking for fun" either - they indeed seeked procreation, too bad they chose a mate of the wrong sex.
On the other hand, I used to have a stud dog whom we had perform almost exclusively via AI. As all of the dogs I have known in this case, not only was there absolutely no problem in collecting him without any female in oestrus nearby, he actually seeked it. He started to ask to be put on the table where we used to put him for the collection whenever we had visitors with a dog (be it male or female), then later on whenever we had visitors at all. [And of course whenever one of our own bitches were in heat, but this would count as reproductive instinct, although someow flawed].
I don't know what conclusion to draw from this, except that genital pleasure does exist in higher mammals, and not only as a tension reducer mean as in the bonobos' case, but for its own sake. Yet it is still far from what we call "sexuality". And it is indeed a case where human intervention has a lot to do with the "deviation of instinct", on a large and small time-scale as well (long time domesticated animals + a matter of "education" of the individual by man).
It kinda looks like genital pleasure raises to counterbalance "civilisation's" effects - them being, to widen the gap between the self-conscious animal and his instincts.
But then, I don't know, just thinking out loud.
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