An anonymous viewer asks Bill whether homosexuality makes sense from an evolutionary and genetic standpoint. Bill's response? Homosexuality exists across species and none of them are dying out anytime soon.
Bill Nye:
So when I was growing up there was this controversial and super bestselling book called The Naked Ape. And this guy, the author, Desmond Morris claimed, I guess he documented that there is homosexual behavior among primates. And from what I remember – I haven’t read it in many years – was chimpanzees and Bonobo’s exhibit homosexual behavior. And the answer nowadays we give to everybody about this is it’s a spectrum. I don’t know about you but I have known a great many gay men who are married, who have babies, who have kids. So apparently – I’m not an authority on this. I’m an observer of the human condition.
Apparently there’s a spectrum. Some people are more inclined to have sex with people of their same sex than others. And I think if you just watch the news right now you can see that for yourself. And so being somewhere on the spectrum of heterosexual with homosexual being on that it’s not genetically lethal, you still have kids anyway. And you’ll hear people talk about the feminine side. You’ll hear people talk about the masculine side. You’ll hear women use the expression well she’s got a lot of balls which can’t literally be true if we’re using balls in that conventional construction. So I would say that it’s something that happens in nature and I remember very well in this book – now I haven’t read it in a long time but man it was a big deal. Openly talking about sex in the 1960s was a big deal that he claimed that there was more homosexuality in zoos than he observed in nature. And that may be just because we happen to capture a couple of homosexual Bonobos or whatever. In other words the sample size is way too small to extrapolate. So let’s celebrate being alive everybody. Apparently it’s just something that happens in nature and look, we’re all here.
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