Genetics of Homosexuality

Scubascott

steve_inhiding wrote:

It's also worth keeping in mind that from a darwinian sense, homosexuality should have died out millenia (sp?) ago. This is surely evidence of environmental factoring rather than genetic.

Cheers,
Steve

There are darwinian explanations for homosexuality too. Altrusim genes and sibling raising etc.

Everything is genetic. You are less in control of your behaviour than you might like to think.

Come Back in Black

It is very hard to talk about darwin and humans when talking about traits that should be long gone. Darwin does not apply to modern day humans over the last several thousand years because we keep the inept alive long enough to breed. We mess with our own evolution by caring for each other. There should be no retarded people but others carry the slack so they survive. So you cant take rules we use in nature and make them work for us. The more technology we get the more we don't weed out bad genes. If you have diabetees here is some insulin. I mean our gene pool has gotten pretty weak. There are kids who are alergic to everything including grass and yet there is little worry they wont survive. Survival of the fittest does not apply to humans. If you are the fittest you may be more sucessful but we have surpassed the survival part. If your loved one can't survive on their own you will do what it takes to keep them alive.

Scubascott

Come Back in Black wrote:

It is very hard to talk about darwin and humans when talking about traits that should be long gone. Darwin does not apply to modern day humans over the last several thousand years because we keep the inept alive long enough to breed. We mess with our own evolution by caring for each other. There should be no retarded people but others carry the slack so they survive. So you cant take rules we use in nature and make them work for us. The more technology we get the more we don't weed out bad genes. If you have diabetees here is some insulin. I mean our gene pool has gotten pretty weak. There are kids who are alergic to everything including grass and yet there is little worry they wont survive. Survival of the fittest does not apply to humans. If you are the fittest you may be more sucessful but we have surpassed the survival part. If your loved one can't survive on their own you will do what it takes to keep them alive.

All that is true (and I'm glad, because I have a genetic disease that would suck major arse without the modern technology to treat it), but the fact that humans take care of each other does not negate the effect of natural selection. As a species we have changed very little in the 10,000 years or so that it has taken us to develop all our technologies. It still makes sense to look for Darwinian explanations for the prevalance of things like homosexuality. It has almost certainly been around in human society for much longer than all our technology. It still warrants the question, because even now, it is very rare for strictly homosexual people to have children, so if there is a genetic basis for their sexuality its not being directly inherited. There are plenty of interesting theories on this one. Google it and I bet you'll find lots of interesting material.

surferdude

If they really have found the gay genes should governments outlaw gay gene testing? Allowing the testing would probably lead to abortions by many mothers. But then again we are comfortable as a society doing this type of testing for Downs Syndrome and many other gentically identifiable issues.