I at first want to start this not meaning any disrespect, I honestly have no problem with how one chooses to live ones life. (I infact really have no problem at all with gay people) I however have wondered about this. If being a homosexual isn’t a choice of life, meaning that you are born either being a heterosexual or homosexual, then isn’t it reasonable enough to believe that it is in some sense an imbalance of chemicals in the brain?
I guess what I am wondering is what would be the significant benefit of being born gay if we are born merely to reproduce? Wouldn’t being born gay be abnormal?
Well, yes and no. From an evolutionary standpoint of endless reproduction being gay makes no sense. however from a social animal standpoint being gay serves a purpose. Numerous kinds of animals are gay or bisexual aside from humans, and they use sex as a tool to communicate and build social bonds.
Also there are other sexual disorders that inhibit procreation as well. There is something called ‘asexuality’ that affects about 1% of people and its symptoms are just a lack of any sexual desire for anyone. That is just as bad for reproduction. However conformity and the pressure to appear normal being what it is throughout human history tons of asexual people and homosexuals have entered regular marriages and had kids and hence the fact that the trait is passed on. So it doesn’t really matter if being gay should lead to no kids, for much of human history gay people got married and had kids anyway.
Actually, it is possible that there are evolutionary mechanisms that affirmatively select for a recessive gay gene (should one exist).
Let’s say you are born in the neolithic age to parents one of whom has a gay brother or sister. Some other kid gets born under otherwise similar circumstances to parents neither of which have close gay relatives.
While it is true that gay people can reproduce (being gay doesn’t prevent you from engaging in heterosexual conduct, after all), I would suggest that they would be quite a bit less inclined to do so. So your aunt or uncle is not only gay but childless. And perhaps your aunt or uncle has a good close relationship with a significant other, so you’ve got two childless gay aunts or uncles in a sense. And they pitch in and participate in your child care, helping to spread out the childcare responsibilities, giving your natural parents a break or the freedom to go hunt mastodons or find better sweet potatoes or something.
Advantage: you. You survive in situations where the other kid, lacking such relatives, doesn’t.
And your survival means the gene-set, which may well include some components that were expressed as being gay in your uncle or aunt, persists to be passed on to your own kids, in whom, if it’s a recessive trait, will get passed on yet again.
(A somewhat similar logic is used to explain human longevity. Why do we tend to live long enough to be grandparents more often than not, if our genes have already been passed on as of our reproductive years? Because your chances of survival as an infant are enhanced if grandma or grandpa are around to help mom and dad, and so if longevity runs in your family but not in the family over yonder in the cave next door, your line survives better)
And yes, I did just reply to a thread pertaining to mental illness without even mentioning mental illness.
I think the analogy is apt, but I’m approaching it from the other side. Schizzy pride. Mad lib. We may be born different, but different ≠ sick, necessarily. Our call, not someone else’s. Just as gay folks in general would not choose to be “cured” or “fixed” and like being who they are, we lunatics, once exposed to the idea and given the supportiveness of a pride community, may well decide that we like who we are and don’t wish to be “normal”, either.
That’s only if you accept the idea that “we are born merely to reproduce.” There’s a whole lot more to life than reproduction, even for people who do, in fact, reproduce.
I vaguely recall hearing of a study with lab rats living in an enclosed “apartment” structure. When there was plenty of room and resources, the mice bred as normal. When overpopulation began to creep in and conditions became more crowded, however, the number of homosexual mice born in each generation increased, suggesting that homosexuality might be a form of population control.
Not sure if the study is still valid or if it has been debunked, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a tendency towards homosexuality might be introduced as part of fetal development in environments stressful to the mother…
Oh I never meant to make it seem as if gay people are some how “sick” for being gay. I understand that sexuality is a trait that defines people whether it is used negatively or not, so maybe mental illness is in that sense too strong of a word to use.
I guess more or less I was asking is if being gay is neither how you are brought up in society nor it it an inherited genetic trait…Then it has to be a way in which the brain develops differently right?
Explanations have been made for homosexuality evolutionarily, other threads have covered that.
Leaving that aside, mental illness has little or nothing to do with procreative ability in a direct sense. So the ‘we’re born merely to reproduce’ has little or no utility in deciding mental illness as such.
The other thing is that the ‘mental illness’ to qualify as such has to cause significant problems in general functioning, and while I guess it could be argued that not procreating qualifies as such, you presumably then end up arguing that anyone not procreating by choice qualifies as well, ie popes, nuns, people wedded to their jobs, etc.
I suspect you’re more going the ‘birth defect’ angle, which some people have tried to argue. Givne the only ‘defect’ really seems to be societal intolerance given not procreating is socially acceptable in a number of other forms, thats always seemed to be a bit of a reach to me.
The problems with looking for biological signs in the way you propose are pretty big. First, you can’t assume that biological factors cause social ones, and not vice-versa; if being homosexual has social factors contributing to it, then it’s possible this could in turn cause the brain to develop differently.
To know whether a biological difference is connected to a latent “gay” genetic trait is also pretty difficult. Homosexuality, if it has a genetic factor, is likely one of those traits that have many genes contributing to it. It’s not a case of “This guy has this gene, he’s gay”, more along the lines of “He’s got this gene, and this one, and not this one, so he might be more likely to be gay”. So we’re not able to say in the case of someone with a noticeably different brain structure that it’s linked to genes without a lot of studying.
And of course, there’s a lot of evidence already which suggests homosexuality has both social and genetic factors which add to the chance you’ll be gay. It’s possible that there’s something that’s been overlooked, but at this point it’s reasonably assumed that it would work in conjunction with those two groups of contributing factors.
Mental? well there are quite a few studies correlating homosexuality with non-mental attributes, such as finger length. So it looks unlikely thet homosexuality is just a configuration of the brain.
Illness? to be such it would have to have some significant negative effects. We don’t consider left handidness, or hair loss to be illnesses.
So wrong on both counts. Homosexuality is neither mental nor an illness.
Being gay, in a perfect world, brings no dysfunction per se. The only dysfunctional thing about it is the society that doesn’t accept it and persecutes queer people, leading to problems like stress, drug abuse, murdering Matthew Shepard, writing discrimination into the Constitution, to take a few examples. If they would just leave us alone, we’d be fine. Shit.
Transsexualism is often lumped with homosexuality in “LGBT” because they are related phenomena in some ways while totally different in other ways. One difference is that transsexual people need medical intervention just to be ourselves, whereas gays don’t need to do anything special. This complicates a debate within the trans community, whether it should be classed as a disorder or not. Homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973. I agree with this. It is definitely not a disorder of any sort.
I’m still not sure about GID (Gender Identity Disorder). On the one hand, the DSM makes us look like sick people, which we’re not. On the other hand, including GID opens the way for medical help with transition. The question is why do we need to call it a “disorder” just to get the care we need. It seems like a needless stigma. Someone born with a cleft palate needs surgery to correct it, but no one says this need is because of a mental disorder. I think transsexual people should get medical care just like cleft palate patients, but take the mental illness stigma away from it.
No offense to you, but that’s really just wild speculation, and very unlikely to explain why x% of people are “born gay”.
We pretty much know that homosexuality is not wholly genetic, given the fact that identical twins don’t always share the same sexuality. It probably has a genetic component, but there are almost certainly some other factors as well.
A more probable scenario is that there is a siute of genes controlling sexuality (and other behaviors) and that sometimes those genes mix and match in a way that produces homosexuality (when combined with other factors). However, it is advantages to the population as a whole to have the entire suite of genes in play even if some individuals in the population are less likely to reproduce. Something along the lines of the sickle cell gene (advantageous to some, yet deadly to others), but more complicated because there is more than one gene involved, and the “condition” is not deadly. In fact, the “condition” probably only acts as a mild lessening of reproductive success for the carrier.
You’re thinking that it’s important each human individual pass on his or her genes. It’s probably not. It’s possible that one human might have a unique genetic mutation that grants him some evolutionary success, but in the grand scheme of things for the species, it’s more important that the unique mixture of mom’s & dad’s genes get passed on. All the children have this same unique mixture.
If part of that genetic mixture is a strong preference for males, and it gets passed on to not only the sisters, but also one of the brothers, so what? The homosexual brother still gets to pass on his genes, by ensuring his sisters successfully pass on theirs.
So in a way, a strongly homosexual human still reproduces, albeit by proxy.
There are lots & lots of ways I can think of that make having homosexuals & bisexuals around pretty handy for the success of a human tribe.
In other animals, there are many examples of social animals giving up the opportunity to reproduce so that others in their group can do so. Wolf packs are an example- only the alpha male and female typically breed, the other wolves in the pack (who are probably related to the alphas) don’t breed, but help raise the puppies. A more extreme example would be bees or ants- the workers, who make up most of the colony, are sterile females and can’t reproduce. Only the queen can reproduce, and the other members of the colony play a supporting role for the queen and her offspring.
The OP and the first reply focused some questioning on “what conceivable benefit or evolutionary advantage could be conferred by being gay, there isn’t any, right?”, and so I described a conceivable benefit / advantage.
It is indeed just wild speculation though, and I didn’t intend it to be taken as other than.
