Let me give you my understanding of the debate. You are defending two claims:
1. Homosexuality does not contribute positively to group selection and,
2. Reproduction is not accidental
With respect to the second, your defense suggests you have confused the term
accidental with
incidental. Nobody has claimed, as far as I am aware that reproduction is
incidental.
If reproduction were accidental, then as far as I can see this would entail that life began as a result of either:
a) Purpose
b) Necessity
I have been asking you to clarify which you meant or if neither then what else non-accidental could mean.
Robin, reproduction
cannot be accidental or incidental. It is absolutely necessary.
No reproduction -> no evolution -> no life on Earth.
Life began, presumably on Earth, when the first elements in a "chemical soup" began to reproduce. If at any point thereafter reproduction ceased then evolution would also have ceased and life would have died out as soon as the conditions started changing.
This argument is still ridiculous. It appears that several people just want to go on claiming that UE is hopelessly wrong, even when what he is saying is obviously true. In order to claim he is wrong, those people are either persistently misquoting me (Randfan) or making blatantly absurd statements about biology and the nature of life (Belz).
With respect to the first claim I was asking
as a preliminary:
In a group who's population had reached the limit of what it's environment could sustain, would a fertile member of that group worsen the group's survival chances by failing to reproduce?
Now that is not a characterisation of your position, merely an attempt to establish a baseline, which is something we don't have at the moment.
The situation of reaching the limit of what the environment can sustain is a special case in the natural world. It is even more special in the specific case of the modern human race, because this time it is global and industrialised. Every time this situation occurs the same result follows: a population crash. What I am trying to say is that when we reach this special case situation, the normal rules of the game are suspended for a while. What are normally beneficial selections of genes suddenly becomes useless, or worse. If there's no fish in the sea and you are a fish-eating seabird then you are probably going to die regardless of which genes you carry. Your question isn't really relevant to this debate because for the vast majority of the history of any species, they are not in the situation of massive overpopulation, mass-destruction of resources and ecological instability. The reason for this is that life is very rarely that easy for
any species. It has only become that easy for us in the last two hundred years. Population booms like we are currently seeing in Homo sapiens only occur when there is no predation, no effective competition and a temporarily limitless food supply (caused in our case by cheap oil). In the natural world, this is very unusual. Most of the non-human cases where this
has been known to happen it is the result of some sort of human intervention, e.g. the removal of predators allowing prey species to get out of control (e.g. red deer in Scotland) and the introduction of new species into ecosystems which have no defence against them (e.g. stoats in New Zealand, rabbits in Australia).
Specific individuals failing to reproduce in these circumstances will not have a significant effect on the survival chances of the group to which they belong, because by this point it is too late to make any difference. In the example of our own species, a few less offspring from a society with a slightly larger population of homosexuals isn't going to offset the fact that there are already four times as many humans on the Earth than it can sustainably support. Homo sapiens will keep on increasing in numbers until starvation, disease and wars over the remaining resources cause the death rate to exceed the birth rate. Slight deviations in the birth rate are irrelevant compared to the speed at which the death rate will increase when TS really HTF.
