Bighorn Sheep and Giraffes, Oh My!

If you ever smugly thought that homosexuality was a crime against nature, Stanford’s Joan Roughgarden has some animal behavior stories to tell you.  She is a biology professor who claims to have identified over 450 species that regularly engage in homosexual acts, and she documented all this in her book Evolution’s Rainbow.  Her transgender status and this radical break from Darwinian sexual selection have led to hostile critiques of the book, but you can decide for yourselves without having to slog through hundreds of pages.  Seed Magazine has just published an article by Jonah Lehrer entitled “The Gay Animal Kingdom,” to which you can repair for stories about homosexual tendencies among Japanese macaques and Eurasian oystercatchers, among many others.