If your childhood was anything like mine, then you grew up reading a selection of tales known as Just So Stories — a Rudyard Kipling book that offered whimsical narratives about how, for instance, the leopard got his spots (which I just skimmed because I wanted to remember what the story was and, uh, it’s pretty racist so never mind, I think I read a bowdlerized version as a kid).
The concept of the “just so” story is simple: things are a certain way, and there must be a reason why. Maybe the giraffe has a long neck because it was intentionally stretched out to reach something far away. Maybe the tiger painted himself with stripes as a gag and they just stuck around forever. You get the idea. The world operates by an order, and it’s there if we can uncover it.
Kipling’s stories are fantastical and obviously not intended to be read as fact. And yet there is a branch of science — call it sociobiology, call it evo psych, I know there are differences between the two but for my purposes it’s all the same — that operates by a similar logic. Things now are a certain way, these scientists tell us, and it must be for an underlying biological reason. Maybe humans act the way they do because it provides an evolutionary advantage. Maybe it’s just coded in our genes. But it can — it must! — be detected and made sense of.
I think, on some level, it was that mindset that drove the study about bisexual men and risk taking that came out last month, a study that, uhhhh, I really hated. It was partly because the study seemed so fixated on the idea that there must be a biological basis for bisexuality (seems debatable!) and partly because it seemed convinced that there must be an evolutionary advantage to being bisexual (and, let’s not forget, the bizarre little bit about how bisexuality was going to outcompete homosexuality because the gays aren’t having enough babies). Bisexuals cannot simply be, we must be explained. There must be an explanation for what we are, you know? (And for some reason, the explanation can’t just be “people just be hot sometimes.”)
Anyway. All of the above is why I was heartened to see Scientific American push back on said bisexuality study earlier this week, gently but firmly explaining that, uhhhh, the study is kind of bunk and reading too much into potential genetic connections between sexuality and other behaviors (or even assuming a simple genetic basis for sexuality, period) is sloppy at best and dangerous at worst.
It’s a good takedown of the original piece, and you should go read it because I’m not gonna just plagiarize it here (I would never!). But, commentary on the quality of the science aside, I’m still left wondering why people are drawn to do studies like this in the first place. Why, out of all the scientific questions that we could be devoting time, energy, and money to, is “do bi people take more risks and have more babies and if so why” even on the list? Why does anyone think that’s a question worth answering?
Is the lure of the Just So story truly that powerful?
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