Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

The thing that particularly fascinated me about this book was the broad array of variations in physical gender found in animals. For many animals (e.g., hyenas, bears) a significant percentage of their population at any time is made up of intersexed individuals. Nature is both more strange, and more wonderful, than we usually perceive. The book was a real eye-opener.

Dr. Bagemihl presents us with information neglected or even suppressed for decades. The book is somewhat repetitious and longer than it might have been, but the author is determined to break through barriers of denial and resistence and to establish the scientific basis for his presentation. He does so convincingly and challenges the scientific establishment to a new examination of the facts and a letting go of cultural prejudices regarding human and animal sexuality. A extremely important book.

Anthropology, geology, and even most all religions have all "updated" their views on the way the world works, based on our ever-unfolding knowledge and new discoveries. It's time that zoology has done the same! In Biological Exuberance, Bruce Bagemihl exposes the data that cries out for a new acceptance and understanding of animal behavior.In the first part of the text, he systematically builds a case for "updating" our views. He explains why we can no longer continue believing that the very core of animal nature is based on scarcity and reproduction. By compiling the reports written by hundreds of scientists all over the world who have been "into the field to peek under the rocks," Bagemihl demonstrates without question that we must awaken to a new set of theories about wildlife, if we are to remain honest with the facts. A most interesting portion of this work is his uncovering of several reasons why these reports have been misused, overlooked, edited for content, or simply "tucked away" over the course of history. The last section of this part of his book is a dance into "the possible," in which he eloquently proposes some modifications we ought to consider to the traditional evolutionary theory. He has titled the book after these revolutionary ideas, and declares them merely a starting point for a dialogue he hopes he has initiated.Seemingly unending descriptions of individual animals compose the second part of the book. Bagmihl has created the world's first sourcebook for future reference on the subject. (Try asking any librarian for a book on animal sexuality! This one's the only one you'll find!) This book has been reviewed in dozens of mainstream city newspapers, in TIME Magazine, and has been featured in many radio programs across the U.S. All that I've seen are outstanding reviews. This book has become a gift from my heart to many of my friends and relatives. But sadly, I have a deep suspicion that Bagemihl's work might only become truly popular--first in the academic fields--long after we have all passed on.

The first part of the book is an independent 262 page exposition of homosexual, bisexual and transgendered animal sexuality. If you want to know what the birds and the bees are doing when Jerry Falwell isn't looking, this is the place to find out. Don't expect to find traditional family values in these pages. What you will discover instead is that animals aren't doing it for Darwin, they are doing it for fun. There are amazingly detailed descriptions, pictures and illustrations here of animals having all kinds of sex (that will amaze you), and most of it isn't for procreation.More interesting to me, though, is the speculation on the sexual origins of language and culture in chapter 2 and the devastating examination in chapter 3 of bigotry in the biological sciences in over two hundred years of observations of animal homosexuality. Bagemihl shows, for example, that in science as in society, there's a presumption of heterosexuality. Field researchers have commonly assumed, with no independent verification, that whenever they see a pair of animals engaging in what appears to be sexual behavior they are observing a male-female pair. Conversely, whenever they observe a known same-sex pair engaging in behavior that would be classified as sexual between a male and female, they classify it in some other way. This protocol largely precludes the gathering of data about animal homosexuality even when it's being observed. In some cases, though, it resulted in published studies being repudiated as much as 20 years later when it was discovered that what was presumed to be heterosexual behavior in a population was really entirely homosexual. (It's an interesting fact that in some species heterosexuality has never been observed by scientists even when they go to great lengths to observe it over periods of many years.) Also, a lot of animal homosexuality that has been recognized as such has simply been excluded from the published reports. As a result, there is still widespread belief among scientists and the public that animal homosexuality is rare or nonexistent. People will believe otherwise after reading this book.Chapter 4 looks at the attempts to explain away animal homosexuality and chapter 5 considers arguments on the other side that try to attach evolutionary value to homosexuality. Bagemihl rejects all the proposals on both sides, demonstrating the weakness of all the explanations and typically showing that they are plainly inconsistent with the evidence of animal behavior. Finally, he arrives at the question that the reader has been waiting for for almost 200 pages: "Why does same-sex activity persist--reappearing in species after species, generation after generation, individual after individual--when it is not 'useful'?" His answer is not to show that it is useful, but rather to treat the plain existence of homosexuality as a reductio ad absurdum argument against the biologists' assumption that only