Is homosexuality genetic?

Well, I don't think that SF or Brighton are necessarily representative of homosexuality as a percentage of populace in North America or Europe - those are known 'destinations'. (I used to live in Vancouver - you could say something similar about that city as well.)

My point is that homosexuality between Muslims (and Muslims/non-Muslims) in Islamic countries DOES exist. Certainly in Afghanistan (and in UAE/Dubai) there is a vibrant community, with sufficient numbers of participants to suggest that its not just an anomaly. If for example, one expects 5% of the population in 'The West' to be gay, I wouldn't expect the number in Afghanistan to be hugely different - just a lot more difficult to count.
 
epepke said:
Also, it seems to me that a lot of the "choice" rhetoric popped up about 30 years ago when people started using the term "sexual preference." Except that term came from classical behaviorism, which specifically discounted choice and indeed all internal states. They used "preference" as jargon for what most people would call "tendency."
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I did not know that, never having studied behaviorism enough to be familiar with its jargon.

I always thought a person's sexual preference meant, did they prefer to have sex with men or with women, not did they prefer to be heterosexual or homosexual. So I never connected it with any implication that being gay was a choice. Huh. Learned something new.
 
Bad Lieutenant said:
No you didn't...not from where I'm sitting.
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Explain, then, the errors in posts 42 and 43. A 50% concordance is at least five times higher than chance.

Are you saying that it's all due to sharing the same environment in utero and early childhood (because surely environmental factors diverge as they get older)? If so, fraternal twins should have the same concordance as identical twins. Do they? I honestly don't know--haven't read all the studies.

By the way, when it comes to environmental factors, I wonder how we're defining situations in which access to the opposite sex is impractical.

I'm not counting a man as gay if he always chooses sex with women in normal life, for example, but has sex with men in prison, then switches back to women after being freed. Nor would I count as heterosexual a man who fantasizes about sex with men but always has sex with women, in a society where sex with men is punishable by death.

If the prisoner would be counted as gay and the man in a repressive society would be counted as straight while they're in those situations, then yes, I'd say that people's sexuality can easily change due to environmental pressure throughout their adulthood.

Otherwise, it doesn't seem so easy for people to change, or for society to change people, after some undefined time in utero or early childhood.
 
Bad Lieutenant said:
So the difference in "gene expression" is caused by the environment - an environmental influence.

Sounds likely to me - everybody has the capacity to be a gender normative heterosexual.
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Gene expression is something that a bunch of proteins do in a cell, under certain conditions. Basically some chemical signals signal some proteins to unspool a piece of DNA and make a RNA copy of it for transcription to a protein.

It's really just chemical reactions, not stuff which would know whether women are considered equal or not.

Think of the way your addaptive immune system works. A partial match on a foreign protein will cause the transcription of proteins that will (A) cause the lymphocite to start cell division, and (B) thrash a random nucleotid in the variable segment of its DNA, which will then be repaired to a random valid nucleotid by the DNA repair mechanisms. That's gene expression in a nutshell: triggering the unspooling and copying those genes into proteins, which in turn will do SOMETHING.

And, again, it's not something that can be influenced by religion, opinions towards women, etc. You can't make your immune system fight off, say, AIDS, by just adopting a different philosophy.

While "environment" can have a hand in it, we're talking as in: the chemicals in the environment. Some stuff coming from outside can trigger reactions in your cells. E.g., phytoestrogens from your food may bind with the same proteins that react to your own estrogen, and it can cause some genes to be expressed or not. But again, as in chemistry, not whether your brain believes in gender equality or not.

So, yes, I suppose that at least theoretically, someone could make a Potion Of Gayness that causes expression of different genes, which flip one's turn-ons to turn-offs and viceversa...

... except not really, or not that easily.

Gene expression isn't something that happens all the time. There are genes in your body which are only expressed during meiosis (short version: while producing sperm or eggs), or only during very specific stages of embryo evolution, etc. Even with chemicals, triggering them in an adult would at best do nothing, and at worst could cause serious damage.
 
Aridas said:
I'd suggest that far too many people have let their views be swayed one way or another by that. Add to that, then, the feeling that I think that many homosexuals hold, that they did not actively "choose" which gender that they were attracted to, and the likely too commonly held false duality between choice and genetics bearing all the blame... well, you get an area where feelings tend to run high and confirmation bias on both sides holds too much sway, in general. My apologies for any grammatical dissonance that one might sense while reading that last sentence.
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For what its worth, I'd like to submit myself as a datapoint:

I have a twin sister, fraternal. She's a 0 on the Kinsey scale, I'm a 6.

I've asked her why she's attracted to men, she says she's never thought about it.

She's asked me why I'm attracted to women. I can't say I've never thought about it, because for some reason US cultural norms demand that I justify my sexuality in a way that never applies to heterosexuals. And the best answer I can come up with is, "because women are so damn attractive"--errrm, "because men are really really gross"--errrm, "because I've always been attracted them"--errrmm, "because I just am, alright?".

Its been a lifelong thing for me, just part of the first-person experience of being me.

(Sorry to all the men reading this, you guys really are gross. Try looking more like Andrej Pejic and get back to me.)
 
Dessi said:
For what its worth, I'd like to submit myself as a datapoint:

I have a twin sister, fraternal. She's a 0 on the Kinsey scale, I'm a 6.

I've asked her why she's attracted to men, she says she's never thought about it.

She's asked me why I'm attracted to women. I can't say I've never thought about it, because for some reason US cultural norms demand that I justify my sexuality in a way that never applies to heterosexuals. And the best answer I can come up with is, "because women are so damn attractive"--errrm, "because men are really really gross"--errrm, "because I've always been attracted them"--errrmm, "because I just am, alright?".

Its been a lifelong thing for me, just part of the first-person experience of being me.

(Sorry to all the men reading this, you guys really are gross. Try looking more like Andrej Pejic and get back to me.)
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As I said. There is, very often, no feeling of having had a say in the matter. In the cases where there is, I'd suggest that bisexuality is the more obvious answer to that, without the cultural misconceptions. Either way, logically, saying that environmental factors, i.e. not genetic factors that were in play in the womb (much as I'd suggest that development, even in the womb, isn't solely determined by genetics), could affect gene expression, psychological makeup and development, and so on, is not the same as saying that a person bears any responsibility for the environment or their development or even that they could have consciously affected it.
 
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Bad Lieutenant said:
I can't believe you're quoting the 50% figure. Sorry, but there we have it.
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Please explain why the higher rate of the same sexuality between identical twins than fraternal twins shows that genetics doesn't play a part?
 
Alan said:
Please explain why the higher rate of the same sexuality between identical twins than fraternal twins shows that genetics doesn't play a part?
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Genetics plays a small part, as it does in all things live. Where have I said otherwise?
 
I think that the figure points to a bigger genetic component than what you're suggesting. And your nonsense about monogamy and other things playing a bigger part seems like pseudosexology.

Bad Lieutenant said:
Doesn't she know you were born male? ROFL or is your internet persona a mere fictional stimulant?
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The trans thread she started isn't about herself.
 
Alan said:
Please explain why the higher rate of the same sexuality between identical twins than fraternal twins shows that genetics doesn't play a part?
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I'm not sure whether it's worth saying anything more, on this specific point, than quoting the person a bit up the page.

Bad Lieutenant said:
A small contributory genetic influence and a very large environmental determinant. That's all I've said.
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I don't think 1+1=2 needs support, although it would be good to see it still, I agree but feel my hands are tied..such very big fish to fry. The pathetic frailty of the "genetic determinant" hypothesis overwhelmingly directs to an environmental determinant, through a process of elimination.

How did the narcissistic opera singer warm up? "mememememeememememe!"
 
Alan said:
But I'm much more interested in Bad Lieutenant supporting the environmental influences.
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I'm fairly certain that his premise relies almost solely on the understanding that identical twins do not always exhibit the same explicit sexuality, based on the arguments that he's seemed to put forth. I'd tend to point at the Kinsey scale and the concepts contained in that as an easy answer and explanation at once, before anything else, if I had any investment in debating him.
 
While it's far from impossible for a gay person to live as a heterosexual and have children, for obvious reasons, their rate of reproduction will obviously be lower than that of the general population. Surely this means the 'gay gene' would eventually die out?
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not true. I know plenty men who lived such a life. Some never stopped. Others divorced and split custody.

Regardless, if it is genetic, I wouldn't think that it would be carried only by gay men, that's ridiculous. I'm gay yet both my parents are straight. I know a lesbian who got sperm from a gay male friend. Her daughter turned out straight. While she is only a teen, its pretty clear she's not lesbian.

My $0.02.


-- Sent from my HP TouchPad using Communities
 
Bad Lieutenant said:
I can't believe you're quoting the 50% figure. Sorry, but there we have it.
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:confused: You're the one who originally introduced it as evidence for your viewpoint, so you apparently thought it was good enough to quote a few posts ago. I'm just asking you to explain why you thought it was evidence.
 
calcmandan said:
Regardless, if it is genetic, I wouldn't think that it would be carried only by gay men, that's ridiculous. I'm gay yet both my parents are straight. I know a lesbian who got sperm from a gay male friend. Her daughter turned out straight. While she is only a teen, its pretty clear she's not lesbian.
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Isn't that true for most things, though, that apparently have a genetic component, from schizophrenia to diabetes? It's not strictly and obviously inheritable, like brown eyes or blue eyes, with a well-known recessive and dominant gene so you can predict the exact odds of eye-color and explain why, but there's still some kind of genetic component not fully understood.

For example, here's a basic layman's article on the genetics of diabetes:
http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/genetics-of-diabetes.html

You've probably wondered how you got diabetes. You may worry that your children will get it too... Unlike some traits, diabetes does not seem to be inherited in a simple pattern. Yet clearly, some people are born more likely to get diabetes than others.
What Leads to Diabetes?

Type 1 and type 2 diabetes have different causes. Yet two factors are important in both. First, you must inherit a predisposition to the disease. Second, something in your environment must trigger diabetes.

Genes alone are not enough. One proof of this is identical twins. Identical twins have identical genes. Yet when one twin has type 1 diabetes, the other gets the disease at most only half the time. When one twin has type 2 diabetes, the other's risk is at most 3 in 4.
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Sounds pretty familiar. One just needs to take out the word "diabetes" and replace it with "the gay."
 
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