Born This Way

[Chronos]

Well, “environmental factor” doesn’t necessarily mean something that most folks would call an “experience”. As an extreme hypothetical example, it might be that there’s some chemical in legumes that mimics some hormone, and that people who are exposed to too much of that chemical in their diet before some critical age become gay. Beans are ubiquitous in world cuisine that this would account for homosexuality being worldwide, and it’s certainly environmental, but I don’t think anyone would say that it’s the experience of eating beans that matters.

[gatorslap]

@Chronos

Beans are ubiquitous in world cuisine

Not in Ireland.

[Markxxx]

I can state as a gay male I have always been gay, from the moment I was born. But I am also of the opinion there are A LOT OF SHADES of homosexuality.

Homosexuality is a self perception. If one sees himself as gay he is.

I’ve used these two examples before so I’ll use them again. Daryl Hall in Rolling Stone said, he has had sex with men. But he is with a woman now and that he is basically straight. (The question was always asked if Hall and Oates were lovers. Hall states Oates is 100% straight).

Ben “The Dell Dude” Curtis, who rose to fame with Dell Computer commercials said his father came out as being gay and so he decided to try it. He said, he didn’t care for it and he’s straight.

OK now do you see how far times have come. Here is a guy (Curtis) who decides that since his father came out, he will try it “just to see.” In my day NO MAN would ever have “tried just to see.”

There is a huge difference between being homosexual and doing a homosexual act. Young people don’t really seem to care. There more willing to say “I was horny and couldn’t find a girl.” But they have no intention of being gay. It’s just convenient and there is much less stigma now.

The problem with studies on homosexuality is they only show patterns. And they aren’t strong ones. For instance the classic pattern is the more kids a woman has the chances the latter ones will be gay goes way up.

And in my experience this seems to be the case, but I know of a gay man who has five siblings, all straight. So this clearly breaks the pattern.

So we wind up with a rule like “I before E except after C and about 100 other exceptions”

Environmental factors influence but the fail to explain a lot. For instance, I know of African Americans raised in the worst ghettos in Chicago by the same mother. One is doing great, the other is in prison. Why? Same parent, same approx time frame, but there was something in one child that allowed her to overcome her disadvantage, the other one didn’t have

[echoreply]

@Chronos

Well, “environmental factor” doesn’t necessarily mean something that most folks would call an “experience”. As an extreme hypothetical example, it might be that there’s some chemical in legumes that mimics some hormone, and that people who are exposed to too much of that chemical in their diet before some critical age become gay. Beans are ubiquitous in world cuisine that this would account for homosexuality being worldwide, and it’s certainly environmental, but I don’t think anyone would say that it’s the experience of eating beans that matters.

Yes, it absolutely could be something like this. For simplicity just say “something in the water.” So something in the water is more likely to make people who drink it as children turn gay. One would assume that identical twins, fraternal twins, and even siblings raised in the same house would all be more likely to be gay because they all drank the same magic water. So when doing a twin study researchers will see that fraternal twins (and possibly regular siblings) are more similar than would be expected based on how similar identical twins are. That discrepancy of being more similar becomes “shared environment” as I mentioned in my previous message. The article I cited in that same message suggest that this is not the case. That there is no magic water, or some such that turns people gay, as much as it would effect both twins in a family equally.

Now, that article could very well be wrong, and we might find that gayness in Sweden is not due to magic water, but in Finland it is. That’s how science works, of course, you do what you can with what you have, and hopefully advance the state of human knowledge.

@Markxxx

The problem with studies on homosexuality is they only show patterns. And they aren’t strong ones. For instance the classic pattern is the more kids a woman has the chances the latter ones will be gay goes way up.

The problem with anecdotes is they don’t add up to data. Clearly you understand that, but human behavior is very complex. Strong findings which stand up to repeated testing and say a lot about a population, might be generally meaningless to an individual. (Inventing the numbers) fifth born boys are 1.2 times more likely to be gay than first born boys, but that doesn’t tell you much about a particular fifth born boy. And knowing that lots of fifth born boys are not gay, doesn’t invalidate the finding, because in fact, it’s exactly what the finding suggests to be true.

Hopefully the advancement in the social acceptance of homosexuality will lead to more, good research on homosexuality and sexuality in general. It’s such a fundamental part of being human, it’s disappointing we don’t have a greater understanding of it.

[Pjen]

@rachelellogram

When gays say they are “born this way,” they do NOT mean that there is a “gay gene” that made them like people of the same sex–that’s a huge oversimplification. Children cannot choose their environments, though, and many (if not most) gays KNEW they were gay long before puberty set in. They mayn’t have been allowed to express it at the time, but that doesn’t change the fact that they knew.

Nobody really knows what causes gayness or heterosexuality. It could be being raised by blonde women who don’t have a vehicle, with 2 cats, having exactly one older brother and one older sister. *It doesn’t matter. *Because once established, it’s not something that can or should be changed. That is the whole point of the “born this way” meme (and song). To think that people are talking about a “gay gene” is missing the point entirely.

I agree.

I think that ‘Born this way’ s a political slogan rather than a scientific reality.

I suppose I am looking for arguments to counter an extreme advocate of ‘Gay when you are born and nothing happens after that that can alter Gayness’. That may be the case but it remains to be proved scientifically- meantime we should say that events after birth may still effect Gayness.

This does not mean that I believe that social conditioning in adulthood could alter sexual orientation.

[Pjen]

@Chronos

Well, “environmental factor” doesn’t necessarily mean something that most folks would call an “experience”. As an extreme hypothetical example, it might be that there’s some chemical in legumes that mimics some hormone, and that people who are exposed to too much of that chemical in their diet before some critical age become gay. Beans are ubiquitous in world cuisine that this would account for homosexuality being worldwide, and it’s certainly environmental, but I don’t think anyone would say that it’s the experience of eating beans that matters.

Excellent argument. I am only looking for an argument to show that doubt still exists.

[Pjen]

The other component of the argument is ‘What possible experiment could test for an environmental influence?’

Suppose some people enter this world with a tendency X to have gay tendencies (maybe as high as 90% or more even. What would show that this was actually 100%.

We know that some people (obviously) have gay internal experiences and exhibit gay behaviour - because they self identify as gay and are present in the world. How would we determine another group who are born with a high probability of being gay but for some environmental reason do not experience gay internal experiences or exhibit gay behaviour.

Another heresy (as far as this guy is concerned) that I believe is that sexual attraction is a continuum from definitely gay to definitely straight with many way stations- experimenters, adolescents, bisexuals, men who sleep with men when no woman is around, asexual people, people who find gay sex distasteful, people who find it disgusting etc. He sees things in a rather black and white terms; I tend to see everything in shades of grey.

[Hbns]

@Chronos

Well, “environmental factor” doesn’t necessarily mean something that most folks would call an “experience”…

An interesting articlefrom a few years back that ties both your points together. As well as illustrating that identical twins with differing sexual orientation neither proves nor disproves a genetic or an environmental factor.

THE BOTTOM LINE
Identical twins apparently do not have identical DNA.

“When we started this study, people were expecting that only epigenetics would differ greatly between twins,” said Jan Dumanski, a professor of genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an author of the study. “But what we found are changes on the genetic level, the DNA sequence itself.”

The specific changes that Dr. Dumanski and his colleagues identified are known as copy number variations, in which a gene exists in multiple copies, or a set of coding letters in DNA is missing. Not known, however, is whether these changes in identical twins occur at the embryonic level, as the twins age or both.

[boytyperanma]

@Chronos

Well, “environmental factor” doesn’t necessarily mean something that most folks would call an “experience”. As an extreme hypothetical example, it might be that there’s some chemical in legumes that mimics some hormone, and that people who are exposed to too much of that chemical in their diet before some critical age become gay. Beans are ubiquitous in world cuisine that this would account for homosexuality being worldwide, and it’s certainly environmental, but I don’t think anyone would say that it’s the experience of eating beans that matters.

Wait now it’s all beans that make me gay!

I thought it was only soy.