Seeking the Not-So-Obvious

By Peter Lloyd

Mother Nature, who gives us everything we need to survive and occasionally takes it back in tantrums of devastation, also displays an equally vicious sense of humor. She simply can't resist making us look like fools when we attempt to understand and explain her.

Just when we were quite sure she expected us and all of our animal cousins to be straight, she began to show us homosexuality in animals. And we reacted like fools.

The Evidence

For centuries, scientists have dismissed homosexuality in animals as an exception to the rule. Bruce Bagemihl, in his book Biological Exuberance, cites more that 150 years of evidence of homosexuality in animals. Nature, most observers seem to have assumed, expects all sex to be hetero.

They have been motivated principally by the social prejudice against homosexuality in humans. That kind of prejudice, always bad for science, is especially obvious in those observers who have gone beyond merely marginalizing male-on-male or female-on-female sexual behavior to expressing outright disgust.

Same-Sex Blindness
In "The Love that Dare Not Squawk Its Name," John Mooallem describes how field observers failed to notice that some nesting albatross pairs consist of two females, not just occasionally, but season after season. The assumption was that all mating and nesting pairs in nature must be heterosexual. Even when two eggs appeared in some nests, the same assumption blinded observers to the fact that each female had deposited an egg.

Lately, perhaps as homosexuality in humans has become better understood, scientists have begun to observe more of it in more species: macaques, swans, flamingos, beetles, bisons, guppies, bonobos, warthogs, koalas, dolphins, orangutangs, dung flies... more than 450 species fly the rainbow flag, as it were.

An intelligent and legitimate question arises when we apply Darwinian logic to the observation of same-sex activity in animals. How does homosexual behavior promote species survival? Some scientists offer hypotheses. For example, dung flies may mount and mate with other males in order to tire them out and reduce their chances of mating. Male dolphins may mate with each other in order to bond and form alliances that increase each other's chances of finding and mating with females.

Seek the Not-So-Obvious
How appropriate that Mother Nature offers such a glaring example of overlooking the obvious in the word we use to describe something that hinders us—albatross,

The last thing we need in our eternal search for the truth is an albatross around our collective, creative necks. I identify the handicap at work in missing or dismissing the obvious as the Cage of Affinity—the assumptions that lock us into thinking inside our prescribed affiliations of gender, nationality, race, religion, politics, or whatever other affinity we allow to limit our creative efforts.

Just as science has begun to stop looking at animals as inferior forms of humans or assuming that we humans necessarily represent the leading edge of evolution, anyone attempting to solve a problem needs to seek the not-so-obvious.

Assume that nothing is normal. Beware of all assumptions. Look for the not-so-obvious. Never be surprised by the wrong answer.

Or as Roger von Oech advises in his book, Expect the Unexpected.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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