The Puzzle: Exploring the Evolutionary Puzzle of Male Homosexuality

Here is a fresh and readable solution to a major Darwinian puzzle. Homosexual acts do not lead to reproduction, which to Darwin was the major shaper of a species, yet male homosexuals appear in virtually every society--ancient, traditional and modern. The Puzzle describes homosexual life as it exists in the U.S. and in a number of other cultures, drawing upon field work, surveys, clinical work, and the writings of gay men themselves. The author's by-product theory is backed by evidence from anthropology, laboratory biology, and experimental psychology. In an Epilogue, the author discusses some practical issues, social and psychological, related to homosexuality.

Psychologist Louis A. Berman is a University of Michigan Ph.D., where he majored in personality theory, and minored in learning theory and social psychology. He served a post-doctoral internship in personal counseling, supervised by Harold Klehr, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he continued to work as counseling psychologist until his retirement in 1989. Now free to do as he pleased without concern about "political correctness," Berman launched an in-depth study of a significant but hot-button topic: homosexuality. He adopted the perspective of evolutionary psychology, a specialty which did not exist in his own graduate sudent days, and developed an original by-product theory, which defines male homosexuality as a response to a feeling of deficit, and as the by-product of a valuable human trait.