Homosexuality is not a biological accident

1996? Written as a deliberate provocation for the AntiClockwise column in The Statesman

Tell you what, homosexuals are not only a great credit to our society, they are also specimens of a superior evolutionary expression whose contribution to the benefit of mankind is indispensable. The practice is prevalent in every strata of the animal kingdom starting from insects upwards but the most illustrative fact about homosexuality is that it finds its most mature manifestation among the most intelligent group of primates, viz., rhesus macaques, baboons; chimpanzees and, of course, the gayest of them all, the homo sapien himself.

This is surely not a biological accident. Mankind has pressing social and intellectual requirements which just cannot be fulfilled by individuals who are driven by the natural need for reproductive maximization. Homosexuality sets promising individuals free from arduous parental duties and enables them to concentrate efficiently on their roles as seers, shamans, artists, keepers of knowledge, etc. It is no surprise that celibate monks (and the occasional maiden aunt!) were entrusted to preserve and propagate knowledge by both the Buddhists and the Christians. It was wisely realized even then that heterosexuals had too many worries and children on hand to bother too much about matters of civilization.

The key thing to remember about homosexuals is that they voluntarily sacrifice their reproductive potential and thus lose all their chances of spreading their genes into posterity. This is a monumental level of martyrdom but crucially for the argument here, such altruistic behaviour is not characteristic of mankind alone. It is, in fact, quite widespread across the entire zoological spectrum. Common examples abound. Among the best known is the behaviour of sentinels in animal herds who deliberately expose themselves to predators so that the rest of the brood may escape unhurt. Human body- guards who fling themselves in the line of assailants' fire also display similar tendencies. A personal sacrifice, a la homosexuals, is therefore no biological aberration or exception but an adaptation measure essential for the survival and flourishing of the species' as a whole. Indeed, without homosexuals among us, we would be lesser people.

It is sad, therefore, that the immense invisible contribution that the homosexual community makes to the general society is neither perfectly understood nor appreciated. One possible reason is that ours is a culture obsessed with breeding. Soldiers who rape hapless women in vanquished enemy territory are silently applauded by their mates because it is subconsciously understood that they have planted their genes in the enemy population thereby maximizing the reproductive potential of their own community at the expense of the enemy's. Raped women are then ostracized by their own people for the same reasons. We have been biologically attuned to conclude that even rape is worthwhile if it culminates in reproductive success. Among animals, ducks and scorpion flies in particular, resort to the stratagem of rape for reproductive success, and mankind taking a cue from them often turns a blind eye towards the evils inherent in rape if reproductive interests are involved. Rapists who pine for kids invariably win public sympathy.

It is immediately comprehensible in this context why the homosexual refusal to propagate is automatically construed as a threat to the established modus vivendi. Science and other evolved streams of knowledge are fast and surely veering towards the ineluctable conclusion that homosexuality is not unnatural, as has been made out to be for centuries by prudes worldwide. It is about time that the vital role of homosexuality in the larger context of evolutionary progress is assessed and respected. Over the ages it has been myopic of us to have derided and vilified homosexuals for favoring other pursuit over the artificial social obligation to rear kids. Recognize them now for what they are -- folks who breed in spirit rather in kind. Without them we would still be amoeba.

Schindler's List: a squandered opportunity

Schindler's list is a film that has had greatness thrust upon it, but what else can you expect when the audience watches it with head bowed in respect and the mind's eye reverentially closed? They watch it with the sub-conscious awareness that what is unfolding before them is not another celluloid dream but the long delayed funeral march of the millions of innocent people who were brutally slaughtered during one of the most horrific pogroms in human history. They are cathartically conditioned to conclude, as they did with 'Gandhi', that the movie has plumbed the very depths of human evil.

Sad to say, then, "Schindler's List" remains an essentially superficial movie bound by formula conventions. It deals with the story of Schindler who, regardless of his personal foibles, pulled off an extraordinary act of courage while millions were systematically massacred by fellow Nazis. It is a colossal subject for any director to undertake and Steven Spielberg, while being faithful to the sad facts of history, takes the emotionally manipulative short-cut when it comes to dramatizing the action.

The characters remain one-dimensional and stereotyped as per dubious conventions established by rabble-rousing Hollywood war movies with no pretensions of historical fidelity. The Nazis in the movie represent real historical figures but they are played in the typical fashion of monstrous villains in fictional dramas. They are utterly uniformly vile, prompt in the execution of sadistic orders and untouched by the faintest trace of dignity or remorse at their actions. Throughout the movie not a sigh escapes any of the Nazis. The only moment when they are not trigger-happy comes right at the end of the move when they have lost the war and refuse to mow down Schindler's Jews. Their defeat is not pitiable but comic, as Schindler makes patronizing remarks, and provides the audience opportunity to smirk victoriously in the movie.

Schindler himself is a prototype of the rare good Nazi that Hollywood allows itself -- an outcast who wears the badge of the establishment but does not truly belong to it. His money and style ultimately symbolize not the opportunities that war provided to unscrupulous businessmen like him but the moral decrepitude of Nazi officers who threw principles to the wind at every chance of making a fast buck. Fittingly he is perched stop a hillock during the scene midway in the film when his countrymen run amok in the camp below and he recognizes that his salvation lies with the God's chosen people.

The Jews in the movie suffer from extreme nobility. The holocaust is an occasion for stoicism and dignified suffering -- a link in the chain that unites them with their persecuted ancestors. There is little dissension among them and almost no defiance. A hopeless bid to escape by a cherubic little boy that precipitates great carnage sums up the situation --angels violated by demons! A more obvious symbol is the anonymous death of a pretty child marked out in superimposed red, whose disturbed grave symphonizes the satanic malaise gripping the Nazis. God however does not entirely abandon his chosen people. Guns jam, almost miraculously, when a rabbi is taken out to be summarily shot -- the priest survives to preserve the brood's conscience. No doubt the Jews endured great misfortune but by garbing them in holiness, Spielberg ceases to be dispassionate and objective.

Spielberg 's greatest asset is his identification with the audience's needs and he delivers an emotional, heart-tugging statement garnished by black and white photography, somber music, leisurely pace, skilful design and other prerequisites of ‘admirable' cinema. However, he has lost the opportunity to explore the war and its impact on human behavior. He has just made clichés honorable.

Man’s libido explained

Sex drive and associated velleities are all over the news headlines once again. Hugh Grant’s little peccadillo and the more grievous misadventure by Sushil Sharma have once again raised queries about rampantly libidinous males and the inevitably tragic consequences the befall them in our society which is frightfully quick to frown upon the slightest of sexual transgressions.
Can it, however, be held that both the protagonists mentioned above are mere pawns in a great biological game where their actions are governed not by free will but by evolutionary history that has condemned man to be promiscuous? The two men, so to speak, were perhaps just helplessly following biological commands!

The startling theory seeks to justify its claims by hearkening to the path-finding works of none else buts Charles Darwin, the first man to successfully elaborate a cogent evolutionary system. Darwin’s paradigm rests upon the simple notion of the survival of the fittest wherein fitness quite plainly means the ability to reproduce successfully and plentifully. It can therefore, be said that species are genetically tutored to adapt strategies, which enhance their procreative potential to the utmost. This is the line that sociobiologists take to adumbrate that sowing wild oats comes naturally to men while women are innately inclined to be conservative when it comes to doing what the birds and bees do!

The empirical evidence is presented in the following fashion. When it comes to reproductive equipment an average man is provided with more than he can handle whereas an average woman has only a precious little store that she must utilize to its optimum. Consider their respective inventories in outline. Very few men possess any less than at least 100,000,000 sperms, which can be used to fertilize myriad women. The opposite sex, on the other hand, has been blessed extremely frugally in comparison. A mere 400 eggs is almost a pittance. What makes it worse for women is the restraining fact that only about 20 of these eggs can be fertilized in a lifetime, and that too only one at a time. A woman therefore puts far more at stake when she embarks upon a reproductive venture than a man whose investment is diffused.
The sensible reproductive strategy for a woman thus is to scout for the best available mate and establish a monogamous relationship with him. A man, however, if he has to obey the evolutionary imperative to spread his genes, must seek to cast his net as wide as possible in search of as many mates as possible to propagate his genetic line. Promiscuity, it apparently follows, is his biological duty.

The argument, if taken at face value, appears very persuasive indeed but several prescient observers of science take it with a pinch of salt as it appears to reinforce several conservative and patriarchal beliefs about women.

Science, despite its obvious contributions, has often tended to besmirch its reputation by passing prevalent prejudices for verified fact. Intelligence tests, heavily under laid by racist bias, which had ostensibly ‘confirmed' the cerebral superiority of the Anglo-Saxons, are one of the best known examples of science going obsequiously haywire when confronted by the dominant prejudices of the day. The fact that most of the socibiological assertions fit in far too neatly with conservative ideals make them immediately suspect in the eyes of several sociologists.

Ms Patricia Uberoi, of the Institute of Economic Growth, is among those who have qualms about the fidelity of the 'masculinist' conclusions of sociobiology. Mincing no words in denouncing the' speculations' of sociobiology she avers that it "sustains the patriarchal schematization of popular assumptions which often betray double standards of morality". Her contention is that human society is fundamentally different from anything achieved by other animals and to confuse certain aspects of mammalian behavior with apparently similar human dispositions is to miss the point completely. In any case human behavior itself is not universal across various civilization and several human communities display widely varying patterns of behavior, which finally end up flying in the face of the facile generalizations of sociobiology.

She cites the case of women in South Asia who are apparently considered far more promiscuous than the males there, thus creating a belief-system entirely disconsonant with sociobiological wisdom, which makes promiscuity virtually a fiefdom of males. The rigid control that men exercise over the freedom of women in these parts is the direct fallout of the socio-cultural conviction that the sexual behavior of women needs to be controlled lest they run amok. A 'free' woman easily acquires the label of 'dangerous'. These are entirely specious assumptions, but so, she hastens to add are those of sociobiology.

Women, Ms Uberoi reiterates, have long suffered at the hands of folklore and ' scientific' attempts to foist respectability upon misogynist tenets is only one of the ways to disparage feminine sexuality. Examples abound, and the most insidious ones are inherent in our daily language itself. 'Bitch' is a nasty word often used to describe unpopular women. The reference to an animal often ' in heat' is an invidious way to run down female sexuality. The implications are that a woman exhibiting sexual proclivities is not to be trusted, and any woman accused of such conduct naturally becomes a fallen woman.

The need, she explains, is to look at specific gender roles in specific historical contexts instead of rooting for slippery ideas that prey upon the prejudices of our times.

It is, however, difficult to dismiss biology entirely from human behavior. Several sophisticated analyses of men-women relationship that have little or almost nothing to do with biological nitty-gritty do feel compelled to hark to at least a few larger biological issues to explain the discrimination that is an ineluctable concomitant of inter-sexual relationships.
Noted psychologist, and currently the Director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Mr. Ashish Nandy, has included a thoughtful chapter in his book ‘On the Edge of Psychology’ in which he argues that men feel insecure with women as they are conscious of a sort of biological inferiority which springs from their inability to physically bear children.
Our phallocentric society has, however, consistently sought to deny this shortcoming in man and the concerted effort to emphasize the primacy of 'productivity over reproductivity' is a pointer in this regard. It is an unfortunate trend, he feels, and may well be the ruination of human civilization at a later date unless man realizes that nature is essentially reproductive. The phallocentric obsession with putting the woman in her place must yield to more egalitarian impulses.

Perhaps the most cardinal of the errors of sociobiology is its confusion of reproductive strategy with life. A spider's life may be said to revolve around its biology but surely human beings have requirements that transcend the merely physical. This is perhaps the trait that makes them civilized unlike other animal species who can never be worthy of this tag.

In fact the distance between man and other animals is so great that the phrase 'biological instincts' is no longer used to describe the natural urges in man. ‘We nowadays prefer to use the term 'biological needs", says Prof K D Broota, the Head of the Department of Psychology at Delhi University , ‘because man is not as beholden to biology as the other life forms are.’ There are minimum biological requirements that do cry out to be fulfilled but the driving urges in man are socio-cultural attributes like recognition, power or achievement rather than simplistic needs like sex or food.

Indeed the promptings of socio-cultural imperatives may often be so great that a man may sometimes be compelled to act entirely in defiance of the most basic biological considerations. Suicide, for instance, goes against the very grain of the biological rationale of self-perpetuation, yet it is virtually integral to human society. Men are not prisoners of biology, they have overcome it in several ways.

Prof Broota goes on to enunciate that civilizational biological conditioning is the more fruitful way to comprehend the misdemeanors of Messrs Sharma and Grant. The aphrodisiac in their case was not some hyperactive hormone but a false sense of power, the belief that they were above the law and that they could get away with anything. They had definitely been encouraged in this belief by the manner in which our society is structured. A sad laxity in inculpating the high and the mighty is one of the unmissable hallmarks of contemporary life. He hopes that examples are made out of the offenders in the current cases and measures aimed at de-conditioning society encouraged. All the biological hogwash quite obviously does not wash with him.

Certain questions, though distanced from sociobiology per se, remain. Man's ability to apparently transcend biology raises questions about whether the march of civilization depends upon a negation, or denial, of biology. Mr. Nandy's caveat apropos the nature-defying emphasis on productivity over reproductivity is one of the cases in point.

Other, less esoteric, points are raised by Professors R N Saxena, Head of the Department of Zoology at Delhi University. He peers history to explain that several biological functions in human beings have altered the dependence upon, and the subservience to, natural phenomenon. The yearlong birth cycle characteristic of human reproduction is an illustration. Most animal species are characterized by seasonal birth cycles but mankind is not slave to such limitations possibly due to the artificial environments it has cloistered itself with. Several domesticated animals, who too are privy to these artificial environs, display similar freedom from natural limitations.

It is often said that those who best understand biology are the ones least bound by it. Successive human civilizations have tended to manipulate biology for their own ethnocentric ends. Take homosexuality, for example. The practice fell into disrepute only with the onset of the Christian era. The ancient people, particularly the Greeks, thought of homosexuality as a rather refined way of having sex. The Christians however thought of sex as only fit for procreation and homosexuality was immediately branded as 'unnatural'.

Women's sexuality suffered a similar fate. The Victorian fascination for linear, teleological explanations extended itself to the suppression of matriarchy and creation of patriarchy. The monogamous relationship was celebrated as the apogee of civilization and women were warned to keep within its limits. The current sociobiological endeavor to justify male philandering is plausibly a pseudo-scientific conservative backlash to this very effect and an attempt to make occidental moral values universal.

It is therefore prudent to tread carefully when considering scientific assertions, which have cultural ramifications. Science is not an inviolable tool. The popular image of a scientist as an impartial seeker of truth is only half true. Most scientific agenda are governed by hidden factors and several conclusions are premeditated by cultural anticipation. All 'purely' scientific rationale of the conduct of criminals and others must be taken suspiciously lest we fall into the trap of bad science. Our biology has no doubt bound us in certain ways but we are much more than merely the sum of our contributory parts. Life is a gift not a sentence. We are a free species.

Superficial intelligence,

I often wrote about things I had no clue about. An example is this article on artificial intelligence on which I probably read up more than I did for a tutorial that was due around the same time. And here is one that discusses research, which ‘proved’ the superiority of the white race, based on skull size. I don’t have the whole article with me any more but hopefully you’ll find enough to chew on.

Size of skull has nothing to do with race of intelligence

For he truly believed in his science, belonging to his own race afforded him immense pleasure, and boy did he blush at his own sight! One day he was scrutinizing the unworthy skull of a brigand when he had the kind of joyous insight that occasionally. marks serendipitous discovery but more regularly signals crackpot invention. Thus was born Cesar Lambroso's celebrated theory of L'uamo delinquente, crime and the man, which posited that criminals were but evolutionary throwbacks in our midst, the straggling biologically retarded who had failed to fully traverse the distance between ape and man.

Nature however, had been merciful to the authentic Homo sapien and cursed the delinquents with visible anatomical signs that automatically revealed their atavistic criminality. Some of these giveaways included large jaws, relatively long arms, precocious wrinkles, low and narrow forehead, large ears, darker skin, thick skull and inability to blush. The theory secured Lambroso's place in history.

Biology determines society, or the credo that innate, inborn and inherited biological distinctions are accurately mirrored in society, as political, economic, cultural and most significantly racial hierarchy was a keynote in Darwin's century. Our society has always been infatuated with gradation and Darwinian advances seemed to hint that the people left in the wake by modernization must rank lower on the biological scale. The level headed Darwin himself did not escape the tenor of his times when he wrote of a future when the gap between humans and apes would increase with the extinction of such intermediaries as the Hottenentots and aborigines.

Nineteenth century was also the age of hardboiled empiricism and mere theories unsubstantiated by clinching 'facts' carried no weight. The proponents of biological determinism chose the measurement of intelligence as a single quantity as the means to establish the chasm between races and to this end generated two major sources of scientific data -- craniometry (or the measurement of skulls) and certain styles of psychological testing. The methods were clearly founded upon the gospel that all there was to intelligence was what lay in the head and external, unquantifiable vagaries like environment or culture had no say in the matter of gray matter.

The white man's burden was a popular truism at the time and most erudite hypotheses suggested the following pecking order -whites way up, the rest in the pits. To prove this, scientists scurried to their skull collection and research data and soon arrived with empirical evidence that whites had larger brains and superior cranial index (the ratio between the maximum length and width the skull) while the poor blacks were destined to slave in the fields and had their miseries compounded by mysterious diseases like ‘dyesthesia' a diseases that caused inadequate breathing and ‘drapetomania' or the insane desire to run away from their benevolent masters.

Brain size was crucial, as a diligent scholar had recently managed the impossible feat of establishing that European brain size had increased with the progress from feudalism to modernism. The jaws and facial angle of the blacks confirmed their stature as groveling idiots and IQ tests proved their moronic sensibilities. The theory of recapitulation, which showed that black adults were like white children, reinforced black imbecility and the theory of neoteny, which showed that white adults were like black children, reinforced white acumen.

Sensibly and understandably, the rigors of modern science and social education have relegated such fact finding to naught and their exponents to historical footnotes. Intelligence is not a measurable thing like height or weight and the idea of measuring heads is rather preposterous. Brain size does not vary with race or correspond to gifts. Indeed the human body can be measured in a thousand different ways and a randomly determined small scale of measures almost always toes the line of the prevalent paradigm while being purblind to alternatives.
It may embarrass scientists now but entirely specious marvels like the distance between the navel and the penis were once bruited to countenance white nobility whilst an equally ludicrous rejoinder could well have been made that whites were simian as they had thin lips -a Chimpanzee trait. IQ tests being culture specific were similarly misleading and sometimes even ‘neutral' questions were but glimmers of the examiner's biases.

Science is often a powerful ally of entrenched institutions and the quandary that is ours is whether the scientists involved were racists? Most of them were bitterly opposed to the rising ethical hopes of equality and their scientific pronouncements had several tragic consequences on state policies like slavery, immigration, colonialism etc. It is little known that millions of Jews from Central and southern Europe who, anticipating the holocaust, had sought to emigrate to the US were often denied on specious eugenic grounds, and thus virtually condemned by votaries of science.

Science, it must be remembered begins from the void of ignorance and chases the truth by ceaselessly falsifying its own assumptions. The scientist involved published all their data, hid nothing and truly believed in the validity of their assumptions. Scientists themselves are prisoners of their own cultural condition and the truth they seek can never be 'pure', sullied as it is by the vision of their times.

Computers cannot handle every hue of human behavior

The dream of a mechanical mind is centuries old and since the industrial age humans have fastidiously held that the brain, the seat of thought -- which in the 19th century was described as a property at par with electricity, the faculty of motion and impenetrability --could be duplicated. The dream of mechanized thought, however, began to resemble a vision only towards the close of the last century when Charles Babbage, with suitable encouragement and inspiration from Lady Lovelace, invented the 'difference machine' that could, at the heave of a designated crank, tabulate any function, and in principle even perform that most emblematic of all intelligent activities - play chess.

Then came the World Wars. The immense logistics involved hastened the development of number crunching computers. Meanwhile, on another arena in the war theatre, scientists examining the plethora of brain damaged patients thrown up by the fighting concluded that the operations of a nerve cell and its connection with other nerve cells could be shown in terms of logic. Thereon it was deducted that intelligence could be shown in purely mathematical or computational terms. Thus was the cast assembled.

The creators of artificial intelligence did not seek to merely design efficient goal-oriented machines, like say the pocket calculator, but their ambition was to replicate the human thought process itself and thus provide scientific answers to the philosophical questions concerning the nature of knowledge that had gripped mankind down the ages. They believed that they had hit upon the pivotal idea that what distinguished human intelligence from its animal counterpart was its innate ability to manipulate symbol systems such as those found in math and logic. The machine's other human propensities included its apparent mimicry of the human thought process during a chess game as it sought to process information over time in a logical manner by decomposing the task into sub-tasks.

The cardinal sin of such a serial-device was its obeisance to the Greek dictum of men as rational beings, and the concomitant fallacy that the mass of men leads a mental life as logical and rule governed as a chess-game. And lest the reader deem himself an acolyte of the perished Greek tradition, a sucker-punch: Four cards, with a number on one side and a letter on the other, are laid out on the table with their faces displaying respectively; E, K, 4 and 7. The given rule is, "If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other. One is permitted to turn over two cards to determine the validity of the rule.

Now you perhaps realize that the card marked K is superfluous to the rule and that it is imperative to pick the card marked E. The trick lies with the numbered cards and if your mind is attuned to the vast majority of your brethren you are likely to dump logic for intuition and rush to read between, above and below the lines and conclude that the rule logically implies that even numbered cards have a vowel on the other side and thus fatally plump for 4. The right choice, however, is 7 because while a consonant on the other side would be irrelevant to the rule, a vowel would falsify it.

Surely this is not a conclusive example of human irrationality but computers imprisoned by an absolute contrary faith were indubitably destined to fall short, especially with the rigid programming condemning the machines to endless repetition of processes minus any learning and improvisation.

Quite obviously toy problems like chess did grave injustice to any simulacrum of the human mind and the need was to locate real world issues like perception. Soon came the imaginatively termed 'society of minds' theory, wherein the brain was reckoned to be not a general unambiguous processor of all information but a repository of myriad agents that could selectively handle different kinds of information simultaneously, and thus serial symbolic machines were abandoned in favor of parallel processing machines.

Since computation was achieved by the excitatory and inhibitory interaction among a network of competing cooperating neuron like units that depended upon the statistical properties of the entire ensemble to meet the target, information ceased to inhere in a specific locus and the need for symbolic processing was obviated in favor of direct perception models. There was thus no need of any separate knowledge store, it simply resided in the strength and appropriateness of the connection between simple neurons and dedicated to specific functions.

But will a computer ever learn to discern animals in the shape of clouds, faces in stone or drama in inkblots? Or find the way through a forest? A great deal of human knowledge is biologically learnt and culturally transmitted, something, which a computer cannot mimic.

It would be imprudent to expect artificial intelligence to handle every hue of human behavior and those who sought a facsimile of the human mind in artificial intelligence must resign themselves to the fact that human beings may be an amalgam of several kinds of computers and may indeed be at odds with any computer hitherto designed. There are certain ways in which our thought process has an affinity with computer framework but there are also basic incompatibilities. Paradoxically, there is little semblance the human mind bears to a computer.

Horns of dliemma

My fascination with the Internet took several, often contradictory, forms. Here’s an article in which I talk of the Internet as a web of illusion. Also on this site. Evidently not a thought that I would have bet my life on, for here’s an article suggesting that we don’t use the Internet efficaciously enough.