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Did Prosociality Drive the Evolution of Homosexuality?

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A Commentary to this article was published on 07 August 2020

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Fig. 1
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Notes

  1. Elsewhere in the article, Barron and Hare (2020, p. 4) emphasize that their hypothesis “is not that homosexual people are […] more prosocial than the population average.” This statement seems to be incompatible with their hypothesis about the shared genetic links between prosocial behavior and same-sex sexual attraction.

  2. In fact, there is some evidence that homosexual men have larger penises than heterosexual men, which contradicts the prenatal hypo-androgenization hypothesis and the gender shift hypothesis in homosexual men (Breedlove, 2017a). Prenatal hyper-androgenization has more evidence in homosexual females than hypo-androgenization has in homosexual males (Breedlove, 2017a, 2017b; Luoto et al., 2019a, 2019b).

  3. For a more extended discussion of “proper domain” and ”evolved psychological mechanism,” readers may consult Sperber and Hirschfeld (2004).

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Markus J. Rantala for comments on an earlier draft.

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This research was supported by a grant from Emil Aaltonen Foundation.

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Correspondence to Severi Luoto.

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Luoto, S. Did Prosociality Drive the Evolution of Homosexuality?. Arch Sex Behav 49, 2239–2244 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01749-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01749-0

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