ArticleFrontiers in psychology2019
Prosociality and a Sociosexual Hypothesis for the Evolution of Same-Sex Attraction in Humans.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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13 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sexual Disgust Decreases Sociosexuality Across Genders and Sexual Orientations.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- The Search for Love in Human Evolution: Primate Social Bonds and a New Science of Emotion.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Review
- Relationship Status Rather than Sociosexuality or Sexual Orientation Predicts Male Sexual Functioning.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Same-Sex Sexual Behavior, Age-Class, and Coalitions in Male Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta).Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Sexual Orientation Affects Neural Responses to Subtle Social Aggression Signals.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- What Develops in the Biodevelopment of Sexual Orientation?Archives of sexual behavior · 2023Article
- Primate Sex and Its Role in Pleasure, Dominance and Communication.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Myc suppresses male-male courtship in Drosophila.The EMBO journal · 2022Article
- Did Prosociality Drive the Evolution of Homosexuality? Response to Luoto (2021).Archives of sexual behavior · 2021Article
- Did Prosociality Drive the Evolution of Homosexuality? Response to Barron (2020).Archives of sexual behavior · 2021Article
- Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives on Romantic Love.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Did Prosociality Drive the Evolution of Homosexuality?Archives of sexual behavior · 2020Article
- Response to Luoto's (2020) "Did Prosociality Drive the Evolution of Homosexuality?"Archives of sexual behavior · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human same-sex sexual attraction (SSSA) has long been considered to be an evolutionary puzzle. The trait is clearly biological: it is widespread and has a strong additive genetic basis, but how SSSA has evolved remains a subject of debate. Of itself, homosexual sexual behavior will not yield offspring, and consequently individuals expressing strong SSSA that are mostly or exclusively homosexual are presumed to have lower fitness and reproductive success. How then did the trait evolve, and how is it maintained in populations? Here we develop a novel argument for the evolution of SSSA that focuses on the likely adaptive social consequences of SSSA. We argue that same sex sexual attraction evolved as just one of a suite of traits responding to strong selection for ease of social integration or prosocial behavior. A strong driver of recent human behavioral evolution has been selection for reduced reactive aggression, increased social affiliation, social communication, and ease of social integration. In many prosocial mammals sex has adopted new social functions in contexts of social bonding, social reinforcement, appeasement, and play. We argue that for humans the social functions and benefits of sex apply to same-sex sexual behavior as well as heterosexual behavior. As a consequence we propose a degree of SSSA, was selected for in recent human evolution for its non-conceptive social benefits. We discuss how this hypothesis provides a better explanation for human sexual attractions and behavior than theories that invoke sexual inversion or single-locus genetic models.
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