Homosexuality as a genetic abnormality
Posted on: Sun, 2007-01-07 20:33
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Homosexuality as a genetic abnormality
The argument I've heard in favor of classifying homosexuality as a genetic abnormality rests surprisingly on the principal points of evolution, namely natural selection. I retained a much more watered down version of it, but the gist of the argument was: natural selection continues traits that lead to the animal's fitness, fitness being determined by reproduction, and homosexuality, in that environment, would lead to unfitness, as it is not possible to reproduce and pass the homosexual gene.
Any thoughts on this?
I've never heard of this, however I have heard that homosexuality is more prevalent in higher evolved animals than lower ones.
Er... kinda... it's more prevalent in more social animals. The more social the animal, the more homosexuality there is, for the most part
Think of it like this. People with the recessive Hepatitis gene are resistant to HIV strains. That is a good thing in HIV ravaged countries, such as Africa. However, this also means more people will have Hepatitis. So this recessive gene, and thus Hepatitis' frequency will increase.
This parallels homosexuality(at least in women)
Female animals which engage in same-sex sex are more fertile. This is obviously a genetically beneficial gene, but only if they still have sex with males. So whatever gene it is will be skewed towards bisexuality among women. However, as with the above example, this also creates more lesbians. While homosexuality is not inherently good for a gene, it can still be a byproduct of it.
(also, the lesbianism would not be an evolutionary problem prior to civilization... before we wised up and finally realized the genders to be equal well... not much choice in marriage and so on. And in the animal kingdom, rape does exist)
Secondly, there is a thing called womb memory. Basically it only holds for guys, but the more boys a woman has, the more likely it is that her next son will be gay. This could be some sort of rudimentary population control, and beneficial in some way to the gene, I'm not quite sure how.
Thirdly, this ignores pleiotropy. For example, a mother who is fertile is more likely to have gay sons. She's also more likely to have more children(this is quite apparant simply looking at womb memory). This means that the other children are more likely to carry some form of the 'gay gene', and pass it on.
My theory would be that if homosexuality is genetic, it isn't like sex or hair color, with dominant and recessive, but more like a scale, with completly straight and completley gay on opposite ends.
Wow... i diddnt know any of that
I sorta thought that it was biological... like some chemicals get produced diffrently in the womb so the child might have his or her hormone levels altered (or something...)
Hmm... Definitely want 3 or more sources on that... at least one saying that lesbian women are more fertile, cause it sounds like something people want to be true, but isn't.
Ya! I forgot to be sceptical... Ya *chuckles because he accepted facts...*
But i dont know why lezbian women would be more fertile ... I think that i might have missed or forgot that part... diddnt really think about it
[quote=AgnosticAtheist1]Basically it only holds for guys, but the more boys a woman has, the more likely it is that her next son will be gay.
[/quote]
Here is a source concerning this:http://www.discover.com/issues/sep-06/rd/gaybrothers/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3735668.stm
gay sons tend to come from more fertile women
http://users.cybercity.dk/~dko12530/qstudies.htm
In one line it seems to suggest lesbians are more fertile
Cnemidophorus whiptail lizards are parthenogenic -- they are all females, no males. But it's been found that an individual's fertility increases when another female acts like a male and attempts to copulate with it (they apparently do this quite regularly and quite unprovoked by experimenters, by the way). These lizards' nearest relatives -- oh okay, the ones most similar to them in geography, genetics, anatomy and biochemistry -- are sexual species. And the hormones for reproduction in these others are stimulated by sexual behaviour. So it's no surprise -- to 'evolutionists' -- that although Cnemidophorus are parthenogenetic, simulated sexual behaviour increases fertility. But it's a bit of an odd thing to design. (Especially if the designer were the Biblical God, for Leviticus seems to be rather against girl-on-girl action...)
http://www.nerve.com/Regulars/ScienceOfSex/09-19-00/09-19-00.asp