I can hear the gears grinding in the heads of the big wigs at the Discovery Institute.

“Darwin can’t explain those lesbian macaque monkeys.”

“Quick! Dispatch a press release! Lesbian macaque monkeys must be intelligently designed.”

“But wait… I thought God didn’t like homosexuality.”

“No, you doofus! Lesbians aren’t homos. That’s when two men do it. Besides, they’re sexy.”

“So you’re saying God wanted us to watch hot, dirty, lesbian macaque monkey porn?”

Well, the Sci Am author does that annoying pop-journalism thing where they start with a playful strawman (“[it] seems pointedly un-Darwinian”); then she kinda-sorta knocks it down with a rhetorically useful quote from the one of the study authors (“it’s a force“[!]) that’s never fully explained, before ending with the obligatory hand-wringing about why the subject is relevant to people (which in this case is emptier than usual, as she says nothing substantive on the matter).

All in all, an example of the shit science journalism that’s responsible for Sci Am’s plummeting reputation. They’re not at New Scientist levels yet, but they’re getting there. (A recent uncritical interview with a homeopathic cellulite-fighter didn’t help.)

I’ll read the study, though, to see what it actually says.

BTW, why does this post not show up on the top of the front page? I only knew about it because of the list of recent comments. I’ve seen other posts do that once in a while, too.

@Butter: I know!! I saw that interview with the homeopath and my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe this was the same Sci Am I grew up reading.

This post does show up on the front page. It’s in the Selected Shorts section. You can click on the # symbols to comment on Selected Shorts articles. It also appears in the RSS feed and Archives and is tweeted when published. Selected Shorts is a section meant to be used for short commentary, links to articles, or anything else that doesn’t warrant a full blog post.