Gay Pride

The Daily Mail writes up an interesting study on that most fascinating of topics - if homosexuality is at least part-genetic, how come the gene doesn't die out? For some reason the headline says the research is "controversial" without anything in the article explaining why.

The gist of it appears to be this:

'The trend of female family members of homosexual men to have more offspring can help explain the persistence of homosexuality, if we also consider that those males who have such genes are not always homosexuals,' explained Chaladze.

In other words, there is one group of genes which has two effects: it can make some men gay (fewer children) but it makes women have more children and the two effects almost exactly cancel out. Makes sense to me. Plus there is the obvious advantage that children who have more childless uncles (and aunts) stand a better chance of surviving as there are more adults to look after them.

(The traditional way of explaining this correlation is the other way round - men are more likely to be gay the more older brothers (or siblings) they have, which suggests that it is learned behaviour rather than genetic, which seems a bit less likely to me).

Which segues nicely into this story (whence I nicked the post title):

This is the moment two male lions in an African safari park were captured on camera - apparently trying to mate.

The two adult lions were photographed becoming more than affectionate in the Lagoon area of the Kwando Concession in Botswana, southern Africa. Lawyer Nicole Cambré, who took the pictures during a safari trip, said she saw the two male lions 'mating' and was told by her guide that this behaviour had been evident for a week.

Quite possibly those lions are gay, quite common with many animals, they just don't appear to be that fussed.

But there is another explanation, which I saw on TV a while ago. Lions live and fight in small groups, and it tends to be the males who do most of the fighting.

So if one group realises that it has far fewer males than the other, it backs down and goes somewhere else. Some lions have developed a mutation whereby the females also grow manes, you can tell from close up that they are slightly smaller than the males, but apparently this deception works well enough at a distance.

Ergo, perhaps one of those lions is actually female.