Keith,
Your guy writes:
That is the comparison I am making because, when all is said and
done, male
homosexuals have fewer children than most heterosexual men.
So do nuns.
My view has always been that sexual orientation follows a normal
distribution with the potential for a multivariate expression as the
result of the two strands of DNA. This leads to a large number of
possible combinations. I also believe that males who grow up in
households with a dominant female tend to have homosexual expression
greater than in other situations. When you combine the genetic and social
interaction [plus the dominant female might have a specific makeup], you
get an incredible array of diversity. Giving specific toys to boys and
others to girls and dressing them in different colors also has an effect.
One of my sons is overtly homophobic among friends and I always kid him
that he lived in a primarily Gay neighborhood [our neighborhood] for
several years. That makes him a bit uncomfortable.
My feeling is that it doesn't make a tinkers dam as to the reason for
myriad variations of sexuality. From a public health perspective, I am
very much in favor of allowing same sex unions with all the benefits of
marriage [call it what you want] because it reduces the spread of
sexually-transmitted disease [as it does among heterosexuals. Further,
one of the foster teen boys who lived with us was struggling with his
homosexuality [very popular with girls] and was very unhappy as a result.
His straight brother was struggling with his inability to attract girls
the way that his brother could [go figure].
The moral, I guess is, if you are a teen boy who wants to attract teen
women, pretend you are Gay at first. News I could have used since I
didn't exactly have to carry a ten foot pole to keep girls away when I
was a teen. [:>)}.
Bill
On Mon, 25 Aug 2003 07:23:13 +0100 Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes:
> Some scientists, no doubt persuaded by current opinion that
> homosexuality
> is an entirely normal condition, have been looking for a gene which
>
> predisposes males this way. Most geneticists and biologists don't
> believe
> this, even though in this age of vituperative political correctness
> it will
> hurt their careers to say so too openly but is only expressed very
> carefully -- and not in populist books either. The plain fact is
> that
> because man and his predecessors lived for millions of years in
> quite small
> groups, hardly larger than a family or two in size, the slightest
> mutational change one way or the other -- beneficial or otherwise --
> would
> have enhanced effects. If there ever were a gene which disposed
> males
> specifically towards homosexuality then it would have died out
> instantly.
>
> The principal flaw in Prof Sykes' argument in his article below is
> that the
> mitochondrial genes (which are passed from one generation to the
> other only
> via the mother) are nothing to do with any other function in the
> human body
> cell but the supply of energy to all the other protein construction
>
> activities going on in the cell. All other genes that the original
> mitochondrial bacterium might have carried have long since atrophied
> or
> have moved to the host's DNA and are transmitted from there each
> generation
> via both the male and the female lines.
>
> I believe that the rampant homosexuality of today is certainly
> driven
> genetically in the sense that 99% of homosexual activity is not
> social but
> purely to do with the sexual act. Homosexual couples in normal
> social or
> partnership situations are as rare as hen's teeth even though they
> now have
> complete legal permission to be so. It is just another sign -- like
> the
> enormous rise of singledom and the steep decline of family size -- of
>
> modern society under great stress. Homosexuality is a classic stress
>
> symptom in several species of social mammals besides ourselves. (The
>
> versatile sexual activity of the bonobo chimpanzee is not
> homosexuality at
> all but is just an extreme expression -- albeit exquisite no doubt
> -- of
> group-bonding. All such "gays" or "lesbians" that are observed
> produce
> offspring in the normal way.)
>
> However, Professor Bryan Sykes, in his forthcoming book, "Adam's
> Curse" is
> determined to be mischievous in order to make his book a
> best-seller. In
> another preview article of his, which I have already copied here, he
>
> hypothesised that the male Y chromosome is degrading even though it
> doesn't
> need corresponding genes in the female X chromosome in order to
> self-repair
> after fertilisation because it contains palindromic genes which
> mostly
> self-repair in 'mirror-like' fashion. Both this hypothesis and the
> one
> below may turn out to be right, but in the scientific domain they
> are still
> exceedingly controversial and need a lot more investigation. They
> should
> not belong in a populist book, but he's taking advantage of a
> liberal
> society, just as homosexuals do. (It is interesting that Prof Sykes
> has not
> found an academic publisher for his book! Academic publishers are
> just as
> keen these days to publish populist books, as academic ones -- so
> long as
> they are responsible and balanced.)
>
> KSH
>
> <<<<
> WHY MOTHER DEAREST MIGHT PREFER HER LITTLE BOYS GAY
>
> Homosexual men might be the result of a mother's selfish gene
>
> Bryan Sykes
>
> As a geneticist I have been curious about homosexuality for a long
> time.
> The curiosity is that if there is a genetic basis to homosexuality,
> then
> there must by definition be genes involved. The question is how do
> the
> genes get passed on from one generation to the next?
>
> After all, at the simplest possible level, sex between partners of
> the same
> sex, while it may be fun, cannot result in children. I have worked
> on
> inherited diseases for a good part of my scientific career and there
> is no
> denying that homosexuality has some of the genetic characteristics
> that you
> might find in a serious inherited disease.
>
> As I write I can hear the loud objections and imagine being accused
> of
> saying that homosexuality is abnormal. But the point of comparison
> to
> serious inherited diseases is that there are good explanations for
> why some
> of them are as common as they are, even though they hugely diminish
> the
> chances of the sufferer passing on his or her genes.
>
> That is the comparison I am making because, when all is said and
> done, male
> homosexuals have fewer children than most heterosexual men. That is
> the
> puzzle. If there is a gay gene, why did it not become extinct long
> ago?
>
> These are exactly the same questions we need to ask about a serious
> genetic
> disease. The fact that homosexuality is not a disease doesn't matter
> so
> long as it reduces the chances of the gene being passed on. If
> having brown
> eyes meant you didn't have children, nobody would have brown eyes
> toy longer.
>
> In the early 1990s Dean Hamer and his colleagues from the National
> Institutes of Health in Washington DC took a look at the genetics of
> male
> homosexuality and in 1993 he claimed to have found a region of the
> X-chromosome on which a gene predisposing to male homosexuality was
> located.
>
> Within hours of publication the news of the discovery of "the gay
> gene" was
> flashed round the world. From drawing out family trees of his gay
> male
> volunteers, Hamer noticed that a lot of the men also had gay uncles,
> but
> only on their mothers' side.
>
> Hamer and his colleagues then tested the volunteers and their
> relatives to
> see whether or not in each family tree the gay men had all inherited
> the
> same X-chromosome, the rationale being that if they had, this was
> proof
> that a gay gene lay somewhere on that chromosome.
>
> Many gay men who had felt either guilt or confusion about their
> sexual
> orientation took comfort from the news that it was a gene rather
> than
> themselves that was responsible for their
> homosexuality. Others complained that research into the biology
> of male
> homosexuality was basically unethical and should be banned. At the
> other
> extreme, homophobes declared that a "cure" for homosexuality through
> gene
> therapy was just round the comer.
>
> Scientific outrage was confined to a technical attack on the
> statistics
> used by Hamer, and the publication was followed by a chorus of
> algebraic
> disapproval. Neil Risch, the author of one critique, decided to get
> his own
> data. Risch's large-scale survey, published in 1999, appeared to
> refute
> Hamer's claims.
>
> So we are left hanging. One set of results says there is a
> predisposing
> gene for male homosexuality, another says there isn't.
>
> I began to wonder if the genetic basis for male homosexuality might
> have
> nothing to do with the X-chromosome at all, or any other chromosome.
> I went
> back to Hamer's original paper. I could see easily how he had
> tracked the
> inheritance of male homosexuality through the gay men's mothers and
> why
> this pattern had drawn his attention to the X-chromosome. There were
> no
> instances of gay fathers with gay sons -- but that was hardly a
> surprise,
> since the gay men didn't have any children. The family trees only
> pointed a
> finger at the X-chromosome; they did not prove the gene lay there.
>
> Could the same pedigrees, I wondered, be compatible with an
> inheritance
> influenced not by the X-chromosome, but by the "female" mitochondrial
> DNA?
> This DNA passes through eggs, not sperm, and while a mother gives
> her mDNA
> to all her children, only her daughters pass it on to the next
> generation.
> It is a selfish DNA, one which would prefer a female-only species. I
>
> wondered whether homosexuality could be an example of mDNA
> "disabling" men.
>
> The answer leapt out. Mitochondrial DNA might be a symbol of
> femininity,
> but it still carries genes with the blind ambition of getting
> through to
> the next generation and beyond. The mother I can see out of the
> library
> window playing outside with her young son obviously loves him -- but
> her
> mDNA doesn't. Her mDNA wants her to concentrate on having daughters.
> Her
> mitochondria would do much better if she could eliminate all her
> male
> foetuses. And if this is not possible, she would see to it that it
> got no
> further. She would turn her son into a homosexual.
>
> This hypothesis solves the major theoretical obstacle to the "gay
> gene"
> paradox -- the puzzle of how such a gene could survive and not be
> eliminated by its failure to be passed on through gay men. That
> vanished at
> once, because if the genetic element were associated with mDNA it
> wouldn't
> get passed on by men anyway. It is inherited maternally. Of course,
> not all
> mDNA can have refined this art or the world would be full of
> non-breeding
> men or, rather, we would already be extinct.
>
> I looked back at Hamer's pedigrees and saw that it would work. A
> mitochondrial inheritance was just as possible as an X-chromosome
> association. A mother passes her mDNA onto all her children and, of
> course,
> there were plenty of examples of men whose brothers were gay but who
> were
> not gay themselves, even though they had the same mitochondrial DNA.
> But I
> didn't see that as a problem. I never imagined the mechanism for
> making a
> son gay was actually encoded by the mDNA itself. That just supplied
> the
> motivation.
>
> Perhaps mothers whose sons became gay had just not managed to
> eliminate
> them while they were in the womb. There is a famous`example in the
> 1940s of
> a French woman from the city of Nancy who came from a family that
> has
> produced 78 daughters over nine generations and not a single son.
> Had these
> women's bodies found a way of refusing to have their eggs fertilised
> by
> sperm containing Y-chromosomes? Or had the mDNA subverted the
> implantation
> mechanism to reject all male embryos or arranged to abort all male
> foetuses? How many other wombs invite, only to destroy?
>
> If this theory is true, there is no necessity to destroy gay sons,
> since
> they are unlikely to reproduce. If gay sons were the victims of
> failed
> attempted intrauterine elimination, did their mothers also have a
> record of
> successful prenatal homicide? I looked again at the family trees.
> Did the
> gay men have more sisters than brothers? Not particularly. In the
> families
> of the gay men there were roughly the same numbers of brothers and
> sisters.
>
> But when I looked back a generation to see whether the mothers
> themselves
> had more brothers than sisters, there were far more girls than boys.
> I
> found out later this was generally true. In a survey of nearly 500
> gay men,
> their mothers had a total of 209 sisters but only 132 brothers. Of
> course,
> they ought to have had roughly equal numbers of brothers and
> sisters. These
> gay men had far more aunts than uncles. So what happened to the
> missing 77
> brothers? Had they been killed while in the womb? Had these mothers
> been
> even more successful at eliminating the male embryos and their
> Y-chromosomes than their daughters, who could only neutralise their
> sons by
> steering them towards homosexuality?
>
> I am only too well aware that my theory is inadequate as a complete
>
> explanation for male homosexuality, and it isn't meant to be that. I
> am
> just happy that the headache that has dogged me for years about the
> virtual
> impossibility of an orthodox gene for male homosexuality surviving
> rapid
> extinction has now stopped throbbing. That the homosexual man and
> his
> Y-chromosome are casualties in the genetically embedded war between
> the
> sexes makes much more sense.
>
> But are the motives purely those of revenge? Could a mother's mDNA
> actually
> have anything to gain from having a gay son? For some time I
> couldn't see
> what it could possibly be. Then, much later, I realised an answer
> lay in
> the beehive I observed in a museum. Could a gay son possibly be
> doing for
> his mother what sterile workers were doing for their queen bee?
>
> Could a gay son be helping his mother to bring up his own sisters?
> That
> would be a direct benefit to the mother's mDNA. Any such small
> advantage
> would be very useful indeed and mDNAs with that ability would do
> very well,
> even if they had made all their sons sterile. That would elevate
> male
> homosexuality to a true piece of genetic altruism. It is a subtle
> plan by
> mDNA, not only to get rid of Y-chromosomes but to help itself at the
> same time.
>
> Sunday Times 24 August 2003
>
> "Adam's Curse" by Bryan Sykes is published by Bantam Press on
> September 4.
> >>>>
>
>
> Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England,
> <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
>
>
>
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