That or the parents starved to death or got eaten by a seal
Comment on Penguins ❤️
Tudsamfa@lemmy.world 5 months ago
From the penguin documentaries I watched as a kid, I feel like the “leaving eggs behind” might involve relentless bullying.
Rolder@reddthat.com 5 months ago
Snowclone@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It takes two penguins working together to care for an egg, if one penguin dies the remaining penguin can’t hold the egg and feed itself, so either a couple steps up or a lone penguin starts to help, having several homosexual couples who are on standby to take care of orphan eggs is a clear evolutionary advantage.
Tudsamfa@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’d be cautious with saying evolutionary advantage here.
I don’t believe the “Gay Uncle hypothesis” any more than the somewhat debunked “Grandmother Hypothesis”, which aimed to explain menopause with biological altruism. Just because we could think of a way in that it might be advantageous for a species doesn’t mean it’s advantageous for an individuals fitness.
Of course, it can be still an advantage, but we’d only know with more free, uncensored research.
Snowclone@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Does evolutionary pressure only exist on individuals? I’ve never heard that. There’s a wide variety of species that are highly socially organized, do you not accept that that’s through evolutionarily pressure?
Tudsamfa@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I never said that. What I meant is that a behaviour, which benefits a species as a whole but reduces one individual’s fitness, is not evolutionary competitive. It’s evolutionary game theory, like the prisoners dilemma from normal game theory.
And to determine if some behaviour is such a dilemma, you have to consider costs and benefits of it, which is not at all clear in natural situations. That’s why I said it needs to be studied.
But I must concede, I sort of assumed what exactly you called an evolutionary advantage. Common homosexuality in penguins or not discriminating against homosexual individuals in penguins have very different analysis here.