How Evolutionists Rationalize Human Sexual Deviancy

The problem lies not in the data
but in how the behaviors are
being classified and interpreted

 

When Sexual Form Loses Sexual Meaning
Why “Same-Sex Sexual Behavior” in Animals Is a Category Error

by John Wise, PhD

Ecological and social pressures drive same-sex sexual behaviour in non-human primates (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 12 January 2026). This recent journal article claims that ecological and social pressures “drive same-sex sexual behaviour” in non-human primates.

Same-sex sexual behaviour (SSB) is widespread across animal species; however, its evolutionary origins and ecological underpinnings remain poorly understood. In social animals, SSB is probably shaped by both genetic and environmental factors.

The authors compile reports from 491 primate species, noting that 59 species have documented instances of what they classify as SSB, with prevalence estimates available for 23 of those species. From these data, they conclude that social complexity is the strongest predictor of SSB, with ecological and life-history factors playing indirect roles.

The problem lies not in the data but in how the behaviors are being classified and interpreted. At the heart of this literature is a basic category error: sexual form is too often confused with sexual meaning. This is a moment when philosophical clarity can enhance scientific understanding.

Form Is Not Telos

In animal behavior studies, SSB functions as a descriptive umbrella term. It includes mounting, genital contact, and related motor patterns performed between members of the same sex. But in the animal kingdom, motor patterns (form) do not define meaning. Function does.

The same physical action can serve very different biological ends. Mounting, for example, is frequently observed in primates as a signal of dominance, submission, alliance formation, or tension reduction. In many cases, the behavior lacks courtship, exclusivity, pair bonding, “nesting” or any orientation toward reproduction. It is not mating behavior in any biologically meaningful sense.

The distinction between a motor pattern and a biological function is easily understood in other contexts. If a beaver chews on a heavy branch to sharpen its incisors, it is employing the motor pattern of eating (mastication), but it is not “dining.” Calling the behavior “wood-based nutrition” would be a category error because the utility of the act (dental maintenance) has nothing to do with the telos of the system (digestion).

Similarly, when a primate uses a reproductive motor pattern to achieve a “social glue” effect or to signal a hierarchy, it is not engaging in sexual behavior. It is employing a physical tool for a social utility. We might call this an example of biological exaptation.

This distinction matters.

In animals, sexuality is not a psychological category, still less an identity. It is a biological function ordered toward reproduction. When a behavior is not ordered toward that end, calling it sexual imports a human interpretive framework that the animal itself does not possess.

A Taxonomy of Mixed Behaviors

The primate literature itself documents that behaviors grouped under SSB arise in very different contexts:

• Dominance and hierarchy regulation, especially among males
• Affiliation and reconciliation, particularly after conflict
• Developmental play or misdirected behavior in juveniles
• Situational or captive-context behaviors under social constraint

In each of these cases, the behavior is an instrument of social utility, not an expression of sexual orientation.

Lumping all of these under a single “sexual” label collapses crucial distinctions. It treats resemblance of form as evidence of identity of function. That is not careful ethology (study of animal behavior); it is projection.

The Disney Effect in Scientific Dress

What we are seeing here is (again) not merely a loose metaphor or an unfortunate choice of words. It is another manifestation of what we have called the Disney Effect:[1] the systematic projection of human interiority (one’s internal, subjective experience) onto an animal, followed by the subsequent re-importation of that projection as if it were an independent biological discovery. In this closed loop, we do not study the animal; we use the animal as a canvas for a self-portrait, then cite the canvas as ‘evidence’ for our narrative.

In this case, the move is subtle but decisive. Behaviors in animals that resemble human sexual acts are treated as if they mean the same thing. Once that step is taken, animals are quietly transformed into moral or psychological analogues of ourselves. They become little human beings, acting out miniature versions of our own struggles, desires, and identities. But this transformation is not discovered in nature.

It is imposed on it.

Boundaries Are Real, Even When Theory Resists Them

Everyone knows, at an instinctive level, that animals and humans occupy different categorical planes. For instance, animals are outside morality. No one moralizes about an alligator killing a person or a pet. We do not accuse the alligator of violence, cruelty, or sin. It is simply doing what an alligator does.

That intuition reflects a real boundary.

Animals do not participate in moral reciprocity. They do not act under obligation, responsibility or moral meaning. They do not justify themselves, excuse themselves, or symbolize their actions. Their behavior is biological and situational, not ethical.

Human sexual behavior, by contrast, is unavoidably moral because it is unavoidably symbolic. It involves intention, covenant, meaning, responsibility, and consequences. That is precisely why it can be judged at all.

To collapse these two domains, animal behavior and human moral action, is not scientific sophistication. It is category confusion.

How the Boundary Gets Dissolved

Modern evolutionary narratives are deeply uncomfortable with real discontinuities. Under the influence of Darwinian continuity and Hegelian ‘becoming,’ boundaries are dismissed as optical illusions – temporary pauses in a seamless, unfolding process. If we see only a sequence of biological increments rather than a hierarchy of being, then the distinction between ‘kind’ and ‘degree’ vanishes. On this flat plane, animals become ‘early humans’ and humans become ‘late animals,’ leaving no room for the unique symbolic weight of human action.

Once that assumption is absorbed, it becomes almost irresistible to read animal behavior as if it were human behavior in embryo, and to use the animal kingdom as a mirror. But that move does not arise from the data. It arises from a metaphysical commitment to continuity at all costs.

Why This Matters for Interpreting “SSB”

When researchers label dominance displays, reconciliation rituals, or stress behaviors in animals as “same-sex sexual behavior,” they are not merely describing form. They are smuggling in meaning (and even more subtly morality).

This metaphysical commitment to continuity explains why popular science reporting so often contradicts itself in the same paragraph. We see this ‘naturalistic shuffle’ performed with remarkable clarity in the New Scientist coverage of the primate data, “Is there an evolutionary reason for same-sex sexual behaviour?”, 12 January 2026:

What does this tell us about homosexual behaviours in people? Well … it might help explain why it is as common as it is. What it does not tell us, the researchers stress, is anything about the rights or wrongs of such behaviour – this is the so-called naturalistic fallacy … human behaviours should not be judged based on what animals do.

That said, there is a certain delicious irony in the idea that when it comes to the survival of the fittest, we may need to redefine who the fittest really are.

This quote is revealing because it performs, in real time, the very move it claims to resist.[2] On the surface, the writer warns against the naturalistic fallacy, insisting that human behavior should not be morally judged by what animals do. Yet in the very next breath, the animal data are reintroduced as explanatory ballast for human homosexuality, capped with a rhetorical flourish about “redefining who the fittest really are,” and of course the “delicious irony” of it all. The moral boundary is formally denied, but the psychological and cultural bridge is quietly preserved and reinforced.

This is precisely how meaning is smuggled in. Animal behaviors are stripped of explicit moral force, only to be repurposed as a kind of evolutionary validation. The animal kingdom is not asked to judge human conduct, but it is still recruited to normalize, contextualize, and soften it. That is not neutral science; it is a projection with disclaimers.

In animals, reproductive motor patterns can be repurposed for non-reproductive functions. That does not make those functions sexual in the biological sense. It only makes them superficially similar in form. To insist on calling all such behaviors “sexual” is to mistake resemblance for identity, and analogy for equivalence. That mistake then does cultural work far beyond the laboratory. The rhetoric denies moral inference while quietly relying on it, turning animal behavior into an interpretive mirror for human self-understanding, a textbook example of the Disney Effect at work.

The Animal Kingdom Is Not Our Alibi

The animal kingdom is morally neutral because animals are amoral. They neither excuse nor condemn us. They simply are. There is no ought.

When we feel compelled to turn animal behavior into a justification for human conduct, the problem is not with the animals. It is with us. We are the ones who moralize sex, who detach it from function, who invest it with an identity and meaning beyond biology. Then we look outward, searching for validation in nature. That search inevitably, as we constantly see in evolutionary biology, reshapes what we think we see.

A Boundary Worth Defending

Western theism, grounded in the Bible, has always insisted that boundaries are real. The distinction between man and animal is not one of degree alone, but of kind. Humans alone are moral agents. Humans alone are accountable. Humans alone can sin. Nothing in the primate data challenges that distinction. It is challenged only by a prior philosophical refusal to allow such boundaries to exist – “methodological” naturalism and Darwinian dogma.

And it is that refusal – that denial, really – and not the observations themselves, that drives the interpretive excess we see here.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Scientists reveal what drives homosexual behavior in primates (Phys.org, 12 January 2026). This version states,

“Diversity of sexual behavior is very common in nature, among species and in animal societies—it is as important as caring for offspring, fighting off predators or foraging for food,” Imperial College London biologist Vincent Savolainen told AFP.

Even on its own terms, the dataset does not support the strongest rhetorical claims, like those made here, often drawn from it. Documented SSB appears in about 12% of surveyed primate species, and detailed prevalence estimates exist for fewer than 5%. Moreover, the authors acknowledge that absence of reports often reflects lack of observation rather than confirmed absence of behavior.

In other words, the data show that non-reproductive uses of reproductive motor patterns occur in some species under some conditions. They do not show that animals are broadly “sexually diverse” in anything like a human sense.

Why This Matters

The animal kingdom is not a moral proving ground. It is a biological one. When we turn animal behavior into a mirror of our own psychological or moral struggles, we do not in fact raise animals to human status.

We lower ourselves to theirs.

Humans are unique in attaching symbolic, covenantal, and moral meaning to sex. That uniqueness includes responsibility. Animals are not participants in that drama. To conscript them into it, even unintentionally, is to blur categories that ought to remain clear.

What animals do is what animals do. When researchers describe dominance displays, alliance rituals, or stress behaviors using sexual language, they risk confusing form with function, and biology with anthropology. That confusion may feel explanatory, but it ultimately tells us more about ourselves than about the animals we claim to be studying.

The danger is not that animals behave in unexpected ways. The danger is that we insist on seeing ourselves in them. When sexual form is detached from biological purpose, interpretation rushes in to fill the void. That move may be comforting to some, but it is not careful science.

Footnotes

[1] I am losing count of the number of articles I’ve written for CEH that include this designation. It is endemic to evolutionary biology, and thus to our cultural self-understanding.

[2] This exemplifies Oscillatory Evolutionary Reasoning (OER), a term I have coined for an impulse rooted in the Hegelian dialectic. OER is not a rhetorical slip, but a structural necessity for a system that must simultaneously deny teleology (to remain ‘scientific’) and rely upon it (to remain ‘meaningful’). By oscillating between these two poles, the writer can formally disavow the naturalistic fallacy while quietly harvesting its rhetorical benefits.

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John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.