I have been accused of being homophobic due to some Posts I have made. I deny this allegation & defy the allegaters. In the forties when gays were called faggots & often physically beaten, I was part of a coffee house group which included quite a few gay men. I became friendly with several of them & one was the best man at my wedding. This is not equivalent to a racist claiming to have a black friend. First: I believe that that homosexuality is due to a complex set of environmental circumstances, with little or no genetic influence. Second: I do not think that a male makes a conscious choice to be homosexual. I think it is a behavior which evolves. Third: If restricted to consenting adults, I consider it to be an okay behavior since it causes no physical or emotional harm. In prehistoric times, there was no social pressure for a man to take a mate. If there were a gene for homosexuality, such a gene would become extremely rare. If dominant, it would be likely to disappear. If recessive, it would be as prevalent (or less prevalent) than the gene for hemophilia, which is rare while homosexuals are estimated to be 3% to 10% of the male population. I suspect that the higher figure is due to switch hitters and/or males who have a sex drive & problems relating to females. My father once said Lesbianism seems to me to be due to a male chauvinist culture and/or male attitudes/approaches to sexual encounters. My father also said: Since women in many ancient & modern cultures are treated as property rather than as human beings, there could be a gene for lesbian behavior which did not disappear or become extremely rare in the gene pool due to male physical dominance.
"Scientists have found even more evidence that sexual orientation is largely determined by genetics, not choice. That can undermine a major argument against the LBGT community that claims that these people are choosing to live "unnaturally." That's at least according to a new and groundbreaking study recently published in the journal Psychological Medicine, which details how a study of more than 800 gay participants shared notable patterns in two regions of the human genome - one on the X chromosome and one on chromosome 8. While many previous studies have looked into potential genetic drivers of homosexuality, these studies often boasted a significantly smaller sample size or lacked common controls. This is the first study of its kind to boast such a robust sample size and also be published in a scientific peer-reviewed paper. Most stunningly, the team who conducted this study comes from the scientific community that has been hesitant to acknowledge the claims of previous studies, not because of their own opinions, but because of a lack of conclusive data. The study detailed an in-depth analysis of blood and saliva samples taken from 409 pairs of openly gay brothers, including non-identical twins, from 384 families. The only common characteristic shared by all 818 men was being gay. Knowing this, the researchers theorized that any single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) consistently found among these men would have something to do with sexual orientation. Interestingly, five uniquely presented SNPs did indeed stand out, expressed in two portions of the human genome. "The most pleasing aspect is that the confirmation comes from a team that was in the past somewhat skeptical and critical of the earlier findings," Andrea Camperio Ciani, of the University of Padua in Italy, told New Scientist. Now the same team is working to compare these gene variants to heterosexual males, expecting that it will not be a common find among "straight" men. Still, the researchers stress that regardless of genetic preference, genes are but a factor in the greater picture, taking into account that social and cultural pressures can still effect an individual's sexual lifestyle, no matter how they were born."===http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/10443/20141118/homosexuality-genetic-strongest-evidence.htm
If that's true, then matriarchal societies would tend to have lower rates of lesbianism. From what I have read, the opposite is true.
As I recall, the heritability of homosexuality on the transformed liability scale (as a threshold trait) is something like 35-50%. As an evolutionary biologist, we would tend to call this "highly heritable" (medical types would call it "moderate"; essentially biologists are happy to get anything significant). However, it is true that this means somewhere, in the classical model, a very slight majority (50-65%) of homosexuality is non-genetic, again classically. There are associated genetic elements of decomposition, such as genotype-by-environment interaction, intergenomic epistasis, fixed maternal pedigreed effects, etc, which might all in account for another 10-15% of variance. So about half is probably non-genetic under any model. This doesn't translate into 'choice', however, any more than environmental effects on any other social axis constitute choice. I'm sure if the reactionary right understood it a little better, they'd be much happier to attack it on that basis, which is ignorance. I assume the OP relates to that in some way. Anyway, that's the system. Speaking frankly, what would it matter if it was choice? This I'd like to see explained.
Nonsense. There is always social pressure to be dominant male. Sexuality has had millions of years to evolve, and part of that translates into social pressure. It's not something you can just ignore. You don't know that. Some traits come along with others because they somehow related genetically. When you domesticate foxes, for instance, floppy ears and a colorful coat go along with it. Homosexuality could be the by-product of a gene which increases heterosexual fecundity. It must be so effective that even if it causes homosexuality sometimes, it still confers a benefit to the gene pool. But I also agree that a large measure of human behavior is influenced by culture and experience.
"Homosexuality in males may be caused in part by genes that can increase fertility in females, according to a new study. The findings may help solve the puzzle of why, if homosexuality is hereditary, it hasn't already disappeared from the gene pool, since gay people are less likely to reproduce than heterosexuals. A team of researchers found that some female relatives of gay men tend to have more children than average. The scientists used a computer model to explain how two genes passed on through the maternal line could produce this effect. In 2004 the researchers studied about 200 Italian families and found that the mothersPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!, maternal aunts and maternal grandmothers of gay men are more fecund, or fruitful, than average. Recently, they tried to explain their findings with a number of genetic models, and found one that fit the bill. "This is the first time that a model fits all our empirical data," said Andrea Camperio-Ciani, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Padova in Italy who led the study. "These genes work in a sexually antagonistic way — that means that when they're represented in a female, they increase fecundity , and when they're represented in a male, they decrease fecundity. It's a trait that benefits one sex at the cost of the other." The researchers detail their findings in the June 18 issue of the journalPLoS ONE."===http://www.livescience.com/2623-gays-dont-extinct.html
That's generally how 'less fit' (less offspring) genes survive - by pleiotropic correlation with other traits in either themselves or relatives. Real fitness is an aggregate of all possible exposures and genetic 'value' for breeding, timing, survival and so forth.
That's simplistic, and almost certainly wrong. The presumption going in - given the obvious reproductive cost of exclusive homosexual orientation - should be that some other reproductive benefit accrued to communities harboring such genetic proclivities in their gene pool. That may be false, but in the absence of good understanding it's obviously the way to bet initially. One clear possibility is kinship benefits - that children with gay relatives enjoy significant survival and reproductive advantages. Since human beings gain obvious and very great advantages from their uniquely complex and coordinated social structures, that seems to be - as an initial approach - an intriguing one.
That seems to boil down to, "They can't help it." That's a pretty weak basis for tolerance. Why not just acknowledge that somebody else's sexual orientation is none of your damn business?
