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The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller hints at why in The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. In Darwinian terms, the survival of homosexuality makes no sense. "Any genetic propensity towards exclusive homosexuality would have been eliminated in just one generation of selection," he writes. Its existence in modern humans "is a genuine evolutionary enigma that I cannot explain."

Some say the mystery will never be solved until we've developed a new post-Darwinian evolutionary model. It may be in the works. In Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, biologist Bruce Bagemihl argues that, given all of the apparent "purposelessness" of so much sexual activity in the wild, scientists have to rethink their basic models of what sex is all about. "Contrary to what we've all been taught in high school," he writes, "reproduction is not the ultimate 'purpose' or inevitable outcome of biology."

9. What then is the purpose of sex?

For Bagemihl and others, sex is life's celebration of its own gaudy excess. What he calls "biological exuberance" is, above all, "an affirmation of life's vitality and infinite possibilities; a worldview that is at once primordial and futuristic, in which gender is kaleidoscopic, sexualities are multiple, and the categories of male and female are fluid and transmutable." Brilliant birds, iridescent fish, wrestling Greeks, Ingrid Bergman's face -- it's all part of a crazy parade weaving out of the past, bound where we do not know. Sex is life's swaggering boast that it's got the mojo to weave and slither around any barrier time throws in its way.

Jeremiah Creedon is a senior editor at Utne.

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