I’m a strong believer in sociobiology, in the idea that our everyday actions are motivated by our genes’ desire to reproduce themselves. But I’ve never considered the link between this genetic desire and what happens in our real lives to be a simple one to track. People perform actions every day and make many choices that would seem to decrease or even eliminate their potential to reproduce. (Consider, for example, the decision to wear leisure suits.)
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Exhibit number one: the pigeon. “I always wanted to be someone who would mate for life, like pigeons and Catholics,” Woody Allen says in Play It Again, Sam. It’s true that pigeons tend to hang on to the same mate year after year, cooing and clucking and appearing to be fond of each other. But people who raise pigeons for homing and eating also know that males in captivity frequently mount other males. No one was sure whether this was some kind of aberration or whether it occurred in the wild as well until Hervey Brackbill, in a 1941 issue of an ornithological journal called the Auk, described watching two wild male birds taking turns crouching submissively and mounting each other. Like captive birds, wrote Brackbill, they “performed, to every appearance, normal copulation.”
Exhibit number two: the lesbian gulls. Like pigeons, standard operating procedure for seagulls is to form monogamous, heterosexual pair-bonds (scientists shrink from calling such things marriages) and then stick together until the death of one of the mates. But in 1979 a trio of ornithologists discovered that in three colonies of western ringbills, 1 to 2 percent of the gulls were female-female pairs. The girl gulls laid eggs and in some cases hatched and reared young just as the heterosexual couples did. In fact, 60 to 70 percent of the eggs were fertile, which also meant that some of the supposedly monogamous male gulls had to be straying from their mates. After further study the scientists stated that the phenomenon was widespread enough “not to be dismissed as a unique event peculiar to California, but rather seems an occurrence of evolutionary significance.”
Exhibit number six: snakes in drag. Every spring male Canadian red-sided garter snakes congregate in groups of thousands while they wait for females to wake from hibernation and emerge from dens. When a female appears the males surround her, wrapping her in a “mating ball” that can contain anywhere from ten to a hundred guys. When scientists investigated the writhing sea of mating balls–clearly not a job for everyone–they were surprised to find that one out of six contained no female at all and that the males were all busy courting another male. The surrounded males turned out to have a female combination of pheremones rather than a male mix, and the other males responded to them as if they were actually females.
