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[G-Flex]

A 100% bisexuality rate wouldn't be against nature, no.  It would still allow for breeding to occur, and the race to continue.

It's just if over half of them are totally homosexual, and refuse to breed at all.  Those races wouldn't make it past a few generations, whittling away slowly due to lack of a good amount of children.

By this logic, ants don't exist.

It's perfectly plausible to have greater than 50% of the population that is sterile or otherwise won't breed, and this occurs in several places in nature. What you're saying might be true, but only if breeding occurs exactly at the replacement rate, whereas a species is totally fine having a 90% rate of sterility of that remaining 10% breeds enough to make up for it.

[NW_Kohaku]

But no race is ever 50% gay.  They would never survive, evolutionarilly.  The max would be something like 10% I'd think.

Meet Cnemidophorus neomexicanus. They are 100% lesbian females.

Shepherd - "Wait a second... You mean your whole species is female?"
Liara - "Asari are mono-gendered—male and female have no real meaning for us."

Anyway, yeah, that's parthenogenesis.  Another way we can make weird social constructs that I support and has been suggested, as well. 

[Jeoshua]

A 100% bisexuality rate wouldn't be against nature, no.  It would still allow for breeding to occur, and the race to continue.

It's just if over half of them are totally homosexual, and refuse to breed at all.  Those races wouldn't make it past a few generations, whittling away slowly due to lack of a good amount of children.

By this logic, ants don't exist.

Well those are queen-based hives.  The queen does nothing BUT give birth, constantly.  All day.  Every day.

That's not what we're talking about.  If the queen was gay, no more bee hive.

Seriously, G-Flex.  Do you even read posts or just look for things to disagree with?

So to make an addendum to my statement:

No race of beings with TWO GENDERS which does not have a QUEEN CASTE that does NOTHING but reproduce, or that has the ability to reproduce ASEXUALLY could survive if over half its population was homosexual. Something I didn't even think needed to be said, but there.  You guys have made me say it.

And it's a minor point anyways.  Can we move on now?  Remember, we're talking about gay civilization entities.  Not just any old creature, CIVS.  Because that's the kind of creature that gets married, which was the original idea in this thread.

[Jeoshua]

Someone tried to do a mod where sentients had the [PET] tag, so you could have a single dwarf start adopting "pet" dwarves, and you'd wind up with a "Den Mother" who had a huge collection of pets following her around everywhere.

I remember this thread.  I remember liking the idea.  And I also remember trying it, and the results being... well... not exactly what I was looking for.  The children of the Den Mother grow up normally, then refused to do any work unless they were hacked to not be pets anymore, prefering to follow momma around and just watch her.

[G-Flex]

No race of beings with TWO GENDERS which does not have a QUEEN CASTE that does NOTHING but reproduce, or that has the ability to reproduce ASEXUALLY could survive if over half its population was homosexual. Something I didn't even think needed to be said, but there.  You guys have made me say it.

Er, I seriously doubt you can prove this, and it's still pretty ridiculous. For instance, there are plenty of animal species whose survival rate (to the point of reproduction) is incredibly low, even animals who don't have such "castes" and who don't spend all the time reproducing. It is not necessary for over 50% of your population to reproduce, period. At all.

Imagine a population of 10 heterosexual male, 10 heterosexual female, and 30 homosexuals (of any sex, since it doesn't matter). The proportion here is 2/5 heterosexual and 3/5 homosexual. Those 10 heterosexual couples then produce 10 children each of similar proportion, leaving you with 20 heterosexual males, 20 heterosexual females, and 60 homosexuals.

Are you getting my drift? All that is necessary for population growth is for the breeding population to have breeding offspring that are superior to their own number (or rather, that many need to survive to reproduce themselves). That's all. If that happens, there is population growth. There is no better way to explain this.

[Jeoshua]

Imagine a population of 10 heterosexual male, 10 heterosexual female, and 30 homosexuals (of any sex, since it doesn't matter). The proportion here is 2/5 heterosexual and 3/5 homosexual. Those 10 heterosexual couples then produce 10 children each of similar proportion, leaving you with 20 heterosexual males, 20 heterosexual females, and 60 homosexuals.

Okay, I can see the beginnings of a valid point there... but your math is off.

10 heterosexual couples , 30 homosexual indidivuals

Those 10 couples have 2 kids each, since we're assuming "normal" human behavior.

Now, we have
Adults: 10 male, 10 female
Children: 10 male, 10 female
Non-Breeding, Purely Homosexual: 15 male, 15 female (some don't have partners)

Now what happens when they grow up?  We can't assume they all become hetero and couple off, can we? Because this race is 3:2 homosexual.  And they can't breed with their parents, can they? So out of every 5, 3 become homosexual and 2 are added back into the breeding population.

Adults: 14 male, 14 female
Non-Breeding, Purely Homosexual: 21 male, 21 female

Since these children cannot breed with their parents without causing severe inbreeding, their choice of partners is smaller than the 2 out of 3 that it was.  Making the breeding population slightly smaller than 2 out of every 3 individuals.  It's not a big difference, but it is one, and over the generations will slowly reduce the breeding population to smaller and smaller portions, if one is trying to avoid inbreeding of closely related individuals.

Reguardless, none of this has to do with gay marriage.  Why must people be focusing on this little comment as if it offended them? And trying to pick it apart with math and logic and all that when ultimately, if I'm wrong, it doesn't matter to the original intent of this thread, which was... if I'm not mistaken... gay marriage in the game.

Additionally, I know from experience that in Dwarf Fortress, if one makes a third caste, female, that does not give birth (litter size of 0) and takes up half the female population, the race will die off within a few generations.  I tried making a sterile elf caste and they died from lack of babies... I did give them a max age, but that's besides the point.

[G-Flex]

How is my math off? Why are you assuming two kids each? Why are we assuming normal human behavior? Since when IS normal human behavior to have "two kids each" in a non-modern society?

Inbreeding is completely irrelevant; we can assume a large enough population that it is not an issue.

You're basically missing the point entirely here. It doesn't matter what proportion of the species is breeding or not, what matters is that each breeding couple has more than two successfully breeding children. That is all. You cannot dispute this statement.

Do you need me to provide another example? Fine.

Imagine you have an arbitrarily large population in a generation. Large enough to avoid inbreeding, that's all that matters. It's two-thirds homosexual or otherwise nonbreeding. So if x is the total population, then the number of homosexuals is 2x/3 and the number of breeding members is x/3, therefore the number of breeding pairs is x/6. In order for the next generation to be of equal or greater population, then obviously, x children need to be born. If those breeding couples have six (surviving) kids each (three per breeding member), this will happen. If more are born, then the population will grow. Inbreeding will not be an issue.

You can do the math any way you want, really. If breeding members exist in proportion P of the population, each breeding member must have 1/P of children in order for the population to be sustained, and any more will grow the population.

If you want to think of it another way, just think of the non-breeding members as essentially being irrelevant to the population growth. The greater in proportion they are, the more kids each couple has to have, on average. There's no magical 50% cutoff point, which is absurd anyway; there are plenty of animals, even mammals, who have far more offspring than they have reproducing offspring, although in that case it's due to lower survival rates. In fact, I'd say that goes for most animals.

So if half your population is gay, you just need to have twice as many kids to sustain the population. If it's two-thirds gay, you need to have three times as many kids. And so forth. A humanoid race having 4-6 children per couple is hardly that unusual even by real human standards. And this is assuming extremely human behavior (and not even bisexuality); we're not considering that sexual orientation might be variable such that a lower proportion becomes homosexual during periods of low population (which doesn't really happen in humans much, but again, we're not dealing with humans necessarily), or any sort of cultural, behavioral, or other environmental influence on orientation.

[Jeoshua]

Can we go back to the topic now?

[irmo]

So to make an addendum to my statement:

No race of beings with TWO GENDERS which does not have a QUEEN CASTE that does NOTHING but reproduce, or that has the ability to reproduce ASEXUALLY could survive if over half its population was homosexual. Something I didn't even think needed to be said, but there.  You guys have made me say it.

You're still wrong. If half of the population was exclusively homosexual or otherwise non-reproductive, the other half could still produce enough offspring to replace them all. (And the lizards don't reproduce asexually. They have to be sexually stimulated to produce eggs.)

And it's a minor point anyways.  Can we move on now?  Remember, we're talking about gay civilization entities.  Not just any old creature, CIVS.  Because that's the kind of creature that gets married, which was the original idea in this thread.

Fine, then. A homosexual/otherwise non-breeding subset of a population is more sustainable in a social species, where the non-breeding siblings and cousins can still forage, farm, defend, and otherwise support the children. Ants are an extreme case of this, humans somewhat less so, but humans use sex as a social bonding mechanism, so the non-breeding folks retain sexual desire to build cohesion within the tribe. So gay civilization entities make more sense than, say, gay wild animals.

[Jeoshua]

Fine, then. A homosexual/otherwise non-breeding subset of a population is more sustainable in a social species, where the non-breeding siblings and cousins can still forage, farm, defend, and otherwise support the children. Ants are an extreme case of this, humans somewhat less so, but humans use sex as a social bonding mechanism, so the non-breeding folks retain sexual desire to build cohesion within the tribe. So gay civilization entities make more sense than, say, gay wild animals.

That's assuming that homosexuals don't hunt, or go to war, or do "manly things" isn't it?  I've heard that theory before and I've never thought it was very accurate.  I did hear, once, that homosexuality is selected for, because it's someone you can leave your kids with who will defend them, and not have to worry about them trying to have sex with your wife... which only explains half the situation.

You guys act like I'm trying to say "gay is bad"

Stop it.  I'm not.

Now... gay marriage in DF? Anyone? Anyone want to start back up the topic instead of harping on my statement that I've since recanted because it was one sentence, in an otherwise on-point thread, that people don't agree with?

The entire reason I even stated that sentence, to begin with, was that I wanted the Sexual Orientation personality trait to be 0 = fully straight, 50 = middle ground, 100 = fully gay.  And the parameters that were given as an example were 0:50:100, meaning that homosexuals would seemingly, in that system, be 50% of the population.  The person giving those numbers even recognized that gays do not make up 50% of the population of the species, and was having 100 be gay, 99 be bi, etc.

Those numbers didn't jive with me too well, so I suggested that 50 be middle ground and the personality trait could be set otherwise.

Then this whole thing explodes into people attacking me and my assertions and picking apart everything I've said, looking for something to argue with.  I naturally defend my position and have been dug further and further to ground by, primarilly, one individual who does not seem to read anything but that which he can argue with, even when I've already addressed the points (see above re:ants and check the timestamps.  He had 5 hours to read my response and chose to reply to the part he disagreed with that I had already addressed)

So yeah.  Suffice to say I will not be defending the 50% gay thing anymore, because it's been pointed out that to overcome that one just needs to have 100 babies instead. Which is far more logical than having a more reasonable distribution of homosexuals in a population.  Clearly.

CAN WE MOVE ON?!

[G-Flex]

Jeoshua, why are you acting surprised that people will attack an assertion you make when said assertion is wrong, especially when you continued to defend it, and especially when you seemed so headstrong about it to start?

The reason I specifically responded to that and not your other statements was because that's what I actually had a reason to respond to. I'm not going to respond to the rest if I don't actually have anything to say about it.


At any rate, I also think we ought to distinguish between marriage and sexual relationships here. It's easy to envision a culture where men engage in sexual activity with other men yet only marry women, for instance (I believe this has real-world historical precedent). To generalize more, I think the game would be best served making as few modernity-centric assumptions as possible.

[Jeoshua]

Just please, in the future, see if I've already responded to something before you click "quote"... that's all I ask.  We aren't going to agree with everything but I have a habit, when run to ground, to defend what I meant.  It's a test of strength of the idea by seeing if it CAN be defended.

In the case above, re 50% gays and a civ dying, I didn't initially mean that at all.  My ADD got the better of me and I kept defending myself against people who half understood me in the first place, until that monstrosity of a thing-I-didn't-initially-mean-at-all came out.  And then got quoted 500 times.

Okay so.  Yes.  We're moving on? Yay!

Relationships in general need to be expanded greatly.  We need more than just marriage = kids, and friends or enemies otherwise, for any of this to make any sense.  I understand why marriage = kids with the current system: It's a placeholder to prevent all women from getting pregnant at all times, due to the fact that beings reproduce by spores.

First step into introducing a more reasonable and robust system of interrelationships between individuals would be to introduce an alternate mechanic for baby-making: Proximity and Opportunity.

If two individuals like each other, are alone together, and are of a different gender, there should be a chance they have sex.  And then a chance, not a certainty, that they get pregnant.  Happy thoughs for the individuals involved.  Marriage should happen when two individuals like each other enough to do so, and it should have nothing to do with children and pregnancy, requiring neither either before or after.

An Ethic may need to be added to the population to ensure that not all civs are ok with children born out of wedlock (humans spring to mind on that, since they're basically medieval and not-at-all modern minded).

By "divorcing" marriage, sex, and children from being one package as they are now, we open the door to all sorts of interpersonal behaviors, homosexual love amongst them.

Inb4 "heteronormative privilege".  The current marriage and lovers system is inextricably tied to baby making.  We must change this before anything interesting can be done with interpersonal relationships.

[DrSazar]

Well, I support this suggestion because I think DF should become more and more realistic with each update, but I know that this would just never happen.

It would just make DF infamous for having gay dwarves and ruin its good reputation while labeling DF as "the game where you can have gay dwarves". I know it shouldn't be like that, but most people would be embarrased to say they play a game where they take the role of a gay elf adventurer.

[Jeoshua]

All the more reason to make sure that DF never becomes "too gay".  If it goes in (and Toady is on-record as saying he plans on doing it someday), there has to be a difference between sexual orientation and tolerance.

Dwarves would be super-tolerant.  They don't care about things like that, they just care about the quality of your crafts, and the heft of your axe.  Who you like to spend time with doesn't enter into it.

They might not be very gay at all, tho.  In fact, I think that most dwarves wouldn't be highly sexually oriented in the first place.

[G-Flex]

Well, I support this suggestion because I think DF should become more and more realistic with each update, but I know that this would just never happen.

It would just make DF infamous for having gay dwarves and ruin its good reputation while labeling DF as "the game where you can have gay dwarves". I know it shouldn't be like that, but most people would be embarrased to say they play a game where they take the role of a gay elf adventurer.

Then don't play a gay elf adventurer? Play a straight one if you or your friends are that small-minded?

Also, as Jeoshua just mentioned, Toady is already fine with the concept of broadening sexual orientation and doesn't seem to think that politics needs to enter into the question whatsoever. If something like this would actually cause the game's reputation to suffer, then that's hardly the game's fault anyway.