Female monkeys challenge Darwin theory -- Part II

(Our site strongly disagrees with the misleading term Lesbian to define females when they have sex with other females amongst animals)

Lesbian monkeys challenge Darwin theory
Wed Feb 26, 7:35 PM ET

A psychologist claims that a group of lesbian monkeys in Japan shows that Darwin's theories of evolution are incorrect.

Paul Vasey, of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, has been studying the sex lives of Japanese macaques.

According to Darwin's theory of sexual selection, said Vasey, the male monkeys should compete amongst themselves for access to potential mates -- but the macaques don't follow that pattern.

A colony of 120 wild macaques in the mountains in Kyoto shows enormous sexual diversity, including female-female relationships. Females will reject the advances of a pursuing male in favor of their existing female partner 92.5 percent of the time.

"If females are choosing female sexual partners over male reproductive partners," Vasey told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (news - web sites), "that suggests a pretty fundamental revision of sexual selection theory.

"We've got females that are competing for males with other females, we've got males that are being choosy, males that are sexually coercing females ... we've got females sexually harassing males that don't want to copulate with them, we've got females that have sex with each other, we've got females that are competing with males for other females, we have females that are mounting males."

Vasey said it is clear the females are deriving sexual pleasure when they mount other females. In some positions, he said, a female will rub her clitoris against her partner's back, while in others, "it's common for females to masturbate with their tails" where there is no direct genital contact.

"The traditional evolutionary theory says you do things in order to reproduce," he said, "so why would you do all this non-reproductive sex? To me, that's a really compelling evolutionary puzzle."