aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, June 29, 2007

Tango on the nature/nurture question

The NY Magazine Science of Gaydar piece made mention of the breakup of the penguins featured in the most banned book in America:

But for most in the animal kingdom, same-sex pairing is either fleeting or situational. Even Silo and Roy, for six years the poster-penguins for same-sex love in the Central Park Zoo-they famously raised a daughter together-were not destined to last forever. Silo waddled off with a female named Scrappy in 2005, says zoo director Dan Wharton, adding that we shouldn’t worry about Roy’s hurt feelings. “Penguins are matter-of-fact about these things.”

The religious right made sure that I knew that long ago. What I didn’t know was this:

Of course, biology doesn’t determine everything. And some critics of sexual-orientation researchers blame them for minimizing the role of experience in determining our affectional course in life. The feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has waged a constant battle against their research, which she calls “a big house of cards” that ignores the power of environment in creating personality. Nurture, she argues, can and should be studied as a link to sexual orientation. The baby penguin raised by her two dads [Tango] is a potential case study-though genetically unrelated to either parent, in the last few mating seasons she has mated with another female.