To the Futurework List: The post I am
responding to is included below my answer,
Dear Keith,
I don't know whether we are speaking yet but yes or
no I believe that you are
1. making an assumption that you have
no theoretical basis for
2. not seriously discussing his last suggestion.
The assumption you make is in your statement:
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 to supply energy to all the other protein construction activities
> going on in the cell.
> 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 to supply energy to all the other protein construction activities
> going on in the cell.
Obviously professor Sykes thinks otherwise and does
he have a basis for knowing more about it that yourself? If so, why
not take a less dogmatic position about the "final word" on such a
thing. I'm not a geneticist and certainly do not have your knowledge
on it but such statements leap out at me in research in areas that I do know and
I don't take them seriously i.e. it hurts your argument because such
definiteness is impossible. Your wonderful article about the
clouds is a good example of old assumptions being most likely totally wrong
about the functions of clouds. I would suggest you not pull the door
closed so easily.
2. I find the worker bee argument believable
since Gays function in areas where only people without children have the same
advantages. The purpose of our American Masters Arts Festival
is to push the American compositional voice by finding ways to get around the
built in economic issue of "Productivity Lag" that makes it impossible for
anyone to make more than 60% of the return on their costs in producing large
masterpieces. A problem that extends in spades to the issue of
labor in producing new American works that demand much non-paid practice time in
order to even perform much less perform virtuosically. Gays,
young unmarrieds and marrieds without children perform a kind of "worker bee"
function in aesthetic society where having children with the need to fund
them is a decided dis-advantage. As C.S. Pierce and
Plato suggested and I agree: Aesthetics and the exceptionalism of
perceptual _expression_ in the Arts is a decided advantage to those who would
function on the creative end of a society.
Pittsburg economist Richard Florida is making quite
a splash over here where his research is indicating that communities with vital
arts programs are more creatively productive than communities built around
drudgery. It seems common sense but without the numbers no one
believes it and Florida is providing the numbers. So much so that
both industry and politics are watching it closely. Texas has
now made music a requirement in the public schools, the first in the nation,
based upon Florida's observations about the economic "miracle" in the blossoming
city of Austin, Texas.
The most efficient way to have something crucial is
to have a gene that demands that it be provided no matter what the cost. A
talent gene is built into the legal system over here. It is called
the "Gift of God" and subverts a king size amount of capitalist interprise
in the arts. So genetic "laws" and the limitation they imply are not
always such good social tools in society preservation. That being
said there is such a thing as talent and the "worker bee" idea for a person who
puts role above economics seems like a good Darwinian connection to me
especially if the society needs the role that it economically devalues.
All of this ties in intimately to the issues of
free will, humanism, determinism etc. and what "filter" (some say "laws")
we have to observe these things. Such "filters" seems to
determine our opinions or at least the approach we take to solving the a
question. I come from a "filter" that tends to
mistrust definiteness and binary thought. My "filter" says
that there must be balance in the midst of all of these theories if we are to
catch the sense of the whole system. It makes sense to me that all
of these various theories are true within their own contexts and that the
environment including human genetics, is capable of sustaining many views and,
more importantly, manifestations of those views in societal roles and action
than a simple right or wrong. Such a judgment can only be made if
one first examines the rules or context within which the judgment is being
made.
If you limit something to simple genetics you will
probably get the wrong answer. If you limit it to simple behavior
you will also probably get the wrong answer. It is in the
possible intersect of genetics as suggested by Sykes and actual homosexual roles
and behavior in society, apart from the sexual expressions, that probably
suggests the evolutionary reason. (IMHO) This is a whole new area of
research since the research has almost been total as to the evolutionary roles
of the heterosexual in genetics and in societies. I think it is
about time. We should remember that it was not so long ago that our
attitudes towards twins was that one should be killed because of the myths
around why there were twins and what they meant to the societies where they were
allowed to florish.
All this is to say: There is plenty of
evidence in society for the "worker bee" to be a possibility.
We also note the almost extreme stereotypical connection of Gays to the
mother. There are references in the language to "Queens" as a
typical term for a Gay person as well. Might that not be a
subconscious connection in the deep linguistic resources of the mind to the
"Queen bee" function? Bees aren't that of
course. That is only what we believe about
bees. Projections from human conditions anthropomorphized onto
the animal world. Intiuition and Imagination are holistic dialogues
with the world through the human condition that arrive at answers that leap over
order, time and logicallity to achieve a higher synthesis.
That synthesis later makes sense as the society "works through" the structure
that the individual percieved intuitively from the depths of his
being. Almost all of human knowledge is projection of one sort
or another. It is in exploring that projection and relating it
back to the human condition that we become wise. I would hope
that the heterosexual world is beginning to achieve some wisdom about
Gays in the same way that society learned to accept twins as natural and to
stop abusing and even murdering them.
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 2:20 AM
Subject: [Futurework] Another theory of
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 to supply 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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