Boy you spend your whole life going to church and taking the kids to soccer and nobody give you a second thought.
But you “accidentally” make out with one delivery guy and your branded for life!
I knew I should have checked the bushes for hidden cameras.
OK - how does this explain lesbianism? That gene or set of genes only carried by males?
I was born a proper young gender-neutral kid, but then this woman did some horrible, disgusting, nasty, awful, unspeakable things to me. And then when I pestered her and bothered her and followed her around and begged her she finally agreed to do some more. So it wasn’t genetics, it’s just a matter of fine breeding and moral superiority that makes me hetero.
So far we have one concrete cite for 1-3% range and nothing but anecdotal support for the 10%. Can anyojne give any credible, factual, scientific support for 10%?
If you get a blow job off a man, everything is cool as long as you don’t touch his head.
The idea that there’s **a ** gene for a given behavior is an erroneous assumption, and the reason why some people are struggling with the “is gayness evolutionarily sound” question.
Genes rarely act as single units. More often, they act in concert with other genes, and interact with the enviroment to complicate things. Gayness could be “determined” by any of these things in combination: genetics, exposure to different hormones during fetal development, early childhood experience, plus who knows what else.
Just to throw something out there to explain the evolutionary persistence of homosexuality, consider this: Romantic love and other bonding emotions (like friendship) could easily be affected by an overlapping set of genes. Males and females need to be able to form bonds among their own gender in any typical human society. Tip the genetic makeup a bit in one direction, and you get homosexuality. Tip them in the other direction, and you get people unable to form any types of social bonds (or unable to form them in a productive way). The prevalence of both types of people may seem contrary to survival, but are a natural consequence of a complex process.
n.b.: I am **not ** saying that the above scenario is the reason that homosexuality exists, but that it’s the kind of thing that can happen when behaviorial traits are determined by a multitude of factors.
Yes, rather interesting that all the debaters here are pretty much ignoring this point. It’s like they don’t WANT to address it. For whatever reason. :dubious:
The subject has not been ignored, Evil. Furt was asking if there is any scientific support for the 10% figure. Unless you wish to contribute something scientific, the 10% has not found support here.
Here’s a friendly neighborhood summary for you on the reasons why it has been largely dismissed:
don’t ask: The 10% figure is from the old Kinsey report which doesn’t hold up.
JRDelerious: The Kinsey Report was based on questionable data. What does it matter what the percentage is? They are human beings with rights.
Cliffy: The results of the NHSLS may be unreliable because of confidentiality issues.
don’t ask: The NHSLS numbers have been used in court cases in Texas by groups supporting gay and Lesbian rights.
honeydewgrrl: "I am interested in quantifying the proportion of us gay folks out there in the world, but we humans have a lot of work to do before we can hope for any sort of valid data. " (I just couldn’t bear to change a word of it.)
labmonkey: Kinsey’s study included subjects from an all male environment even if all homosexual activity was limited to that environment.
My apologies if I have inaccurately summarized anyone’s statements.
Fair enough. I think the confidentiality issue is a fairly strong point – there are probably plenty of gay people who don’t necessarily want to reveal their orientation to every pollster who calls. Could easily cause gays to be under-represented in surveys.
As for what it matters what the percentage is – in any political debate, it’s going to matter quite a lot. 10 percent is quite a voting bloc, 1 to 2 percent … not nearly so large.
Whhhaaaa? Where the heck are you getting your info, or CITE!
I know about 100 people well enough to say if they are gay or not. 2 of them are.
As far as the blow job thing? A LOT? No way no how. At least not any of the guys I know.
Purely anecdotal evidence here, and I haven’t bothered to read past the first page because it was all boiling down to the same arguments back and forth. My graduating class out of High School was ~30 people (don’t have my yearbook on hand). Out of them, three of us have come out in the intervening 4 years as gay men (no lesbians yet). Further, if you put me in a group with a little more than 20 people randomly selected for a long period of time I’ve not yet failed to find at least one other gay or lesbian (me being very out helps, I’m sure). For example, my college courses are pretty random selection and I’ve always found at least one person who’s family.
What possible difference does it make to anyone whatsoever? WHO CARES what someone does behind closed doors? How could it possibly affect ANYTHING of what you think? The ENTIRE “issue” is COMPLETELY POINTLESS.
You are correct. Maybe. 
And I am not limiting my argument to modern child care.
It is certainly a plausible theory, but not necessarily more plausible than the idea that gay people have less reproductive success than heterosexuals. And that a gene that decreased reproductive success would tend to be selected against.
I wonder how much influence such a gene would have on populations that were hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers during the 95+% of human evolutionary history. My impression is that people had relatively little choice as to whether or not they married and reproduced. The social and economic pressure to produce children was, IMO, much greater then.
Thus a “gay gene” may have been present, but social pressure eliminated most or all of its effects on reproduction. The ancient Greeks may have had boys on the side, but they had wives and legitimate children as well.
My WAG is that homosexual orientation is a recurring variant in early imprinting. No cites to back this up, I am afraid. There may be a genetic component, but this has had relatively little effect on reproductive success until recently.
Also, my somewhat less WA guess is that 3-4% of men are more or less exclusively gay, and 1-2% of women. If you include people who have had one or few homosexual encounters in their lives, the percentage is likely higher, and may even approach the 10% level.
Regards,
Shodan
Priam and others who have used it: anecdotal evidence does little to further a debate. One person’s personal experiences do not necessarily reflect the greater picture, especially when you are dealing with specific environments like colleges. The best research available so far has put the figures at somewhere between 2-4% of men and around 1% of women, including the survey mentioned, as well as these links (this one I was wary of at first, since they seem to have an anti-gay agenda, but they quote legitimate science even if they misinterpret it or have archaic and stupid ideas).
jdbeatty, it is a very relevant topic, because politicians go where the votes are, and knowing that, even if not 10%, at least 4 or 5% of the population, plus their sympathizers, will vote a certain way should be enough to force the right changes in law and attitudes to take place so that gays will be considered fully equal in all ways. Hopefully Bush will see that (I saw his retarded speech a couple of days ago, how very sad, he should be reading the SDMB to get some enlightenment).
Evil Captor said…
How signifigant and important the data would be doesn’t make it any easier to gather, especially when there are so many disincentives for gays to stand up and be counted…so many roadblocks between the bedroom and the nice color-coded pie-chart statistics that end up on legislator’s desks.
Further, the potential voters influenced by gay issues are certainly not limited to only gay people.
Which is more important: How many gay people we can try and count…or how many people think that gay people are people, regardless of their number?
It seems to me I recall news reports of a study roughly 15 years ago (give or take a half decade) that showed that homosexual males did not have typical male patterns of cells/tissues in their pituitary glands, but rather those typical of females. Given the pituitary’s key role in our hormonal existences, if this research is sound, it’s not impossible to imagine that this could play a key role in determining sexual preference.
Unfortunately, the only link I could find to such results is a detailed book review that mentions a similar discrepancy in rams, which at least indicates it is there to be found in at least one mammalian species.
Anyway, assuming that such a pituitary discrepancy can result in an alteration of sexual preference (which I am in no position to do, but let’s suppose), and assuming that a single allele is responible for the change (IANA genetic endocrinologist, but then again, who is?), then traditional Mendelian genetics would indicate that 1 out of every 25 people is homosexual due to genetic factors (2% of males have a mutation in one allele, and 2% of females have a converse mutation). If the change required more than one allele to be altered, the frequency would be much lower.
This does not take into account the possibility of those making a conscious choice of homosexuality, nor does it take into account the possibility that gays may not be distributed evenly across the landscape, so if it is indeed a single-allele mutation, I could buy a 10% figure for urban areas, while the boonies would have a much smaller percentage.
I don’t know where the research is in humans at this stage, but I would be interested to hear about it.
[QUOTE=scule]
Priam and others who have used it: anecdotal evidence does little to further a debate. One person’s personal experiences do not necessarily reflect the greater picture, especially when you are dealing with specific environments like colleges.
[QUOTE]
Did I ever say it was a point of evidence? I just thought it was an interesting anecdote, not some sort of scientific proof. If I had meant to use it against or for someone’s point, I would’ve quoted them. I realize you didn’t mean it this way, but I don’t need a lecture on the points of admissible evidence.
According to the 2000 election exit poll, 4% of voters self-identified as gay or lesbian.
Since the question was “Are you gay or lesbian? Yes/No”, this poll doesn’t give us any idea as to how many bisexuals there are in the US. I’ve long believed that the famous 10% figure may be fairly accurate if you take it to include homosexuals and bisexuals, although there is the question of how “bisexual” should be defined. This is even tricker than defining “homosexual” for polling purposes. It’s possible to reasonable define “bisexual” so broadly that the term could apply to virtually anyone, or so narrowly that it would apply to hardly anyone.
Something I don’t think anyone has mentioned so far is the death rate among homosexuals. Homosexual teenagers are more likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual peers, although studies vary as to how big the gap between the two groups is. “Gaybashing” is, tragically, a danger still faced by homosexuals in the US, and it has proved fatal for far too many. As long as social factors cause homosexuality to be an indirect factor in premature death, even the most well-designed and honestly answered poll is going to underestimate the “natural” number of homosexuals. And as long as social factors cause homosexuality to be an indirect factor in premature death, you’re probably not going to get total honesty from poll respondants anyway.
POLITICALLY the numbers matter quite a lot – votes are COUNTED, not evaluated for their moral goodness or badness. You seem to be trying to make this into a moral debate. My whole point is that the numbers are going to be suspect no matter what they are – pro-gay partisans will try to inflate them, anti-gay partisans will try to deflate them. Both will be trying to distort the truth. What little empirical evidence there is seems to indicate that the true number is much less than 10 percent, but it could very well be that the cultural prejudice against gays will tend to cause them to underreport, so the numbers might actually be 10 percent or even more. Unless there’s a study out there that has somehow managed to compensate for the under-reporting problem, or demonstrated that it does not exist, the numbers aren’t conclusive, but that won’t keep partisans on both sides from using what’s out there to support their position.