I read it in his column in the mid 1980’s. I am looking for it on the web.
While you wait for that, read this:
Thanks Hastur, I read that, and I had read other sites with some choice “Uncle Pat” quotes. Although Pat is pretty much a dim bulb and seems pretty hateful, I was pretty sure that he hadn’t said the quote you originally referenced. I can’t find it on any anti-Pat website I can find. Just wanted to know if I could have a cite so if I repeat it to someone and am challenged, I can show I didn’t make it up.
Let me know, please, if you can find a ref.
No, I think my sexuality being compared to cancer is pretty darn offensive, too. To be fair, I don’t think the poster intended any harm.
If you want more cites in this thread, how about starting with your 30% statistic?
I"m “quite obviously incorrect” because most gay people come from straight parents? Care to elaborate on that non sequitor? Most Down syndrome children come from non-Down syndrome parents. Does that mean that Down syndrome is not being selected against? (Note to Hastur and other like minded individuals: if you want to claim that I’m comparing Down syndrome to homosexuality, you can do it in the Pit. This is the place for intellectual arguments, not hysterical emotionalism).
Myrr21
“Selection” does not mean that a given trait simply goes poof and is never seen again. “Selection” means a consistent difference in reproduction rates. If homosexuals consistently reproduce at a lower rate than heterosexuals, then that is by defintion selection against homosexuality.
matt_mcl
I think that you would be better served if you actually read that book instead of using it as a blunt intrument. According to your logic, every trait has a good chance of being passed on to the next generation.
I see no legitimite reason to take offense at this particular comparison between cancer and homosexuality.
Look, the kin selection arguments hold water, in that homosexuality is not neccesarily as deleterious as one might at first believe. Many gay people have kids, many have nieces and nephews, so homosexuality (if we stipulate that there is a genetic cause) isn’t nearly as big a fitness hit as people imagine.
That said, there are many other possibilities. It could be that some form of balanced polymorphism creates homosexuality. That is, the genes that “cause” homosexuality are beneificial for other reasons, but a particular combination might cause homosexuality. Or there could be some maternal hormonal influence.
But we know for sure that there isn’t a classic mendelian gene for homosexuality. I don’t know if there are statistics on this, but it seems to me that gay parents don’t always have gay children, or even a higher incidence of gay children. And even if there is a higher reported incidence of homosexuality among children of gay parents, that could be explained by reporting bias…gay children of heterosexuals are probably more likely to conceal their homosexuality than are gay children of gay parents.
Anyway, back to genetic engineering. Why does genetic engineering seem likely to cause a fascist government? Perhaps totalitarian governments might like access to genetic engineering, but how does genetic engineering make totalitarian government more likely? Answer, it doesn’t.
All we have to do is preserve our liberal democratic form of government and 90% of the fears for genetic engineering of humans vanishes.
The question is, who decides what modifications should be done and what should not be done? Obviously, the patient themselves cannot chose, since they don’t exist yet. Therefore, the parents are the ones who will choose. But, doctors must carry out the procedures. Therefore, doctors will have some say as well, primarily in the kinds of things they won’t do. There are many operations that a doctor could perform today, but won’t. If you asked them to amputate a healthy limb, 99.999% of doctors will refuse. If you asked them to amputate the healthy limb of your child, 99.99999999% would refuse.
Similarly, if you asked a doctor to turn your unborn child into a circus freak, professional ethics would lead the doctor to refuse your request. The standard must be the good of the potential child being altered, and implied consent. I think we can agree that we can imply consent to remove genetic disease. That is, we would imagine that any reasonable person would have agreed to the procedure if they had been in a postion to give consent.
Parents and doctors make similar medical decisions for children at the present time. So, we can extrapolate similar decision making for genetic engineering. And unless the procudures are absolutely safe, then doctors will turn down requests for blue eyes and blond hair. And even if some parents desire blue eyed blond haired kids, MOST won’t.
Also, genotypes are often a matter of trade-offs. What if there was an allele that was correlated both with homosexuality and, say, creativity or intelligence? If you selected against that gene to reduce the probability that your child will be homosexual, then you are also reducing the probability of other desireable traits.
Bagkitty loves them doomed causes.
Now, if we are talking about the immediate evolutionary consequences of my homosexuality perhaps you are right. Compared to any individual heterosexual male, I am an evolutionary dead end. If, however, you recognize that I am part of a social species (think chimps as opposed to orangutans), consider the advantages of a recessive trend towards homosexuality.
My extended family grouping (that takes too long to write, let’s say clan) has produced a healthy male who is not going to create new demands on resources. I will be a net contributor to the material well-being of my clan – any surplus I generate goes back into the group, giving us an advantage over those whose surplus is eaten up (almost literally) by an ever-expanding pool of offspring. If you want to the take “the nature red of tooth and claw” route… Bagkitty is going to come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who threatens the offspring of my clan. If Bagkitty has to pull a kamikaze in order to protect them I can do so without damaging the reproductive ability of my clan.
So let’s see, my clan now has the advantage of an extra adult male to contribute surplus production and defensive ability. How is this a “disadvantage” in any way?
So long as homosexuality remains a recessive trait, my clan is going to be a hell of a lot more competitive than one whose members are all reproducing, making demands on resources and being burdened with raising their individual young without the benefit of on-call babysitters. Consequently, the young of my clan are more likely to grow into adulthood (albeit having been exposed to better fashion and better music) and reproduce, passing on that recessive…
Obviously, the future belongs to Bagkitty’s clan… and their funny uncle, cousin, second cousin… whatever.
Individuals don’t evolve, species and societies do.
The thought of eliminating or diminishing homosexual/bisexual individuals is simply repugnant. The government should focus on consequential resources where unnecessary money won’t be utilized.
I agree that the existance of a gay individual inhances the survivability of an extended family. And I’m going to be sure not to mess with the Bagkitty clan! 
I agree that any gay man or lesbian who wants to have children can manage it without any high tech medical assistance.
I agree that there probably is no one gene for homosexuality. Genetically engeneering it out of the gene pool will probably prove to be either very difficult or impossible. Which won’t necessarily stop people from trying.
What about mental conditioning? Could individual parents, groups, governments use mental conditioning to attempt to insure that children grew up to be whatever was desired? Including (but not limited to) being heterosexual?
I believe being raised in today’s society is brainwashing enough (although things are obviously changing, although who knows for how long). When did our parents’ generation (some of whom were actually gay!) get any kind of positive gay reinforcement? (The answer would be “never.”) Society does its best to brainwash its people enough as it is.
And we’re also talking about actually finding the cause for human sexuality. I really, really, really hope that day never, ever, ever comes.
Esprix
**
But heterosexual men and women are already net contributors to their clan. Plus they have the added bonus of giving birth and making more clan members.
**
As would just about any other member of the clan.
**
Losing a few males wouldn’t be such a big deal. Losing a male who wasn’t going to reproduce anyway wouldn’t be a big deal either. Now on the other hand losing a few women could endanger the existence of the clan.
**
We’re talking about a time when child mortality rates were very high. If you’re not helping to make babies then you might not as valuable as a heterosexual to the survivability of the clan.
**
Who said they didn’t have on-call babysitters? There’s evidence that some Neanderthals lived long past the point where they couldn’t gather food or have babies. Surly they contributed something to the clan in the forms of crafts or helping to watch over children? If they could afford to care for the severly injured and the elderly then having enough resources for children probably wasn’t much of an issue.
**
Except that we’ve got a high infant mortality rate and you’re not helping to make babies. In a small group of 30-50 people this can be bad for our survival. Probably not that big a deal for a male.
Marc
Maybe the reason they had resources is because they didn’t have so many children? In small groups of 30-50 the food is almost always quite limited and having too many babies would cause less total babies to live as while they are alive an insufficient amount of food would probably be split among them. Not to mention that pregnant women cause more food to be consumed. The difference is gays could make babies fairly easily. They just wouldn’t create an excess amount of babies like a totally heterosexual population would. Having a higher amount of born babies would hurt the amount that actually lived to adult hood.
Look, what makes people believe that gay paleolithic hunter-gatherers had fewer children? Just because you prefer to have sex with members of your own sex doesn’t mean that you won’t have kids. Yes, I suppose that gay people might, on average, have slightly fewer kids than straight people…but not very much fewer.
[monty python]
“Yer marryin’ Princess Lucky…so you better get used to it!”
[/monty python]
Even when we look at cultures such as ancient greece where male homosexuality was encouraged, we find that all these gay men who prefered sex with other men/boys also had wives with whom they had children. And if your culture is opposed to homosexuality, why then you stay in the closet and have kids with your wife and gay sex in secret.
When you add in kin selection, then homosexuality is only slightly deleterious. And when we consider that perhaps some of the traits that might cause homosexuality could also be highly advantageous, then the mystery is over. It’s not that homosexuality is an advantage, or is selected for, just that it would have a very low selective pressure against it.
But back to Genetic Engineering. The point is that the government is NOT going to be forcibly removing homosexuality from the gene pool. The government is going to have nothing to do with it. PARENTS are the ones who are going to make the choices for their children.
And Esprix? Why would it be bad if we worked out the mechanisms of sexual orientation? I just can’t see why that would be bad. Even if we understand what causes it, I doubt that could be used to change people who are already born, in fact it would probably prove that attempts to change people won’t work in ~99% of the cases.
**
And I bet they didn’t have many children because the mortality rate was so high.
**
The small bands of humans that were living well into this century didn’t seem to have food problems. If it ever got to the point where there were to many mouths to feed they probably just split up.
**
And they also provide babies to replenish the population.
Well there had to be heterosexuals that for one reason or another could not produce babies. So I really doubt that having a homosexual was all that positive or negative in the long term survivability of the clan.
Marc
Bagkitty waves to Hazel. Don’t worry, my clan is peaceful unless provoked.
As for the quotation – like they don’t already? Fortunately, due to the surplus generated by my clan, we have sufficient free time to take a break from grubbing around for a living and do a little self-reflection… must be why my clan tends to be a wee bit anti-clerical and has this distressing tendency to vote for social democrats.
As for the meander into Neanderthalic family life that some other posters have taken… Hunting/gathering social groups never really generate surplus production. You have to enter a pastoralist/agriculturist style of food production to generate a true surplus. At which point my argument still holds.
Too much power, too much knowledge, too much mystery taken out of life. I dunno, I’d just rather not be alive when they unlock all these secrets. Sometimes I like secrets. The universe’s secrets. Maybe some of them should stay secret. It’s a fantasy.
Then again, there are some secrets I feel we will never unlock, but we will always strive vainly for them. Maybe this is one of them.
Esprix
Well, I can understand the position that we probably won’t understand how things like this works for quite some time. We don’t even understand how memories form, for crying out loud. I imagine that a pretty complete understanding of the human brain will be required, which is a project of decades of future research.
I guess I always think understanding what human nature acutally is will always be a good thing. Ignorance BAD, knowledge GOOD.
Of course, getting back to the original poster, we still have to determine why the producers of the show are so gutless… I think they are still riding on “prestige” of showing the first inter-racial lip smacking way back when between Uhuru and Kirk in the original series… Hey, new millennium… time to boldly go… etc.
this question seems like a new version of:
if you could take a pill that would make you het, would you??
[actually the q i’ve heard many too many times is actually, “if you could take a pill that would make you non-trans, would you??”]
i’d like to ask the counter-q:
will genetic engineering, mental conditioning, or some other means be used to eliminate bigotry, fear, and hatred of homosexuality??
I don’t think the questions are analagous. In order to “eliminate bigotry, fear, and hatred” of homosexuality, or of anything else for that matter, with some kind of medical “procedure”, you would have to have a policy of forcing people who don’t want the “procedure” to take it, implying some kind of totalitarian government.
The implication of the first question is, would you voluntarily “take a pill to” etc etc? There’s a difference.
If such manipulation of sexual persuasion were possible (and I very much doubt that it is), then the issue would come down to parental choice.
In my own case, my son is left-handed. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It is an inborn characteristic, something of a pain in the butt, but there you are.
Now, if I had a doctor tell me this, and he has an utterly safe and effective “software patch” to “repair” the “defective” genetic coding, what would I do? Of course, I would choose that he had been right-handed, its a damn sight easier for all concerned.
Why, then, would we imagine that parents, advised of a “homogenetic” situation for thier prospective child, would not choose to have thier children be heterosexual? Even if you feel, as I do, that there is no moral issue involved in preferred sexual behavior, you are unlikely to choose that your children be homosexual (especially seeing as how the vast majority of us “breeders” are emphaticaly hetero).
Therefore (ah! the point at last!) if it were possible (it isn’t) that sexual orientation could be chosen before birth then homosexuality would very likely become as rare as Siamese Twins, because the parents would decide, and they would almost certainly decide against it.
How many homosexual parents-to-be would deliberately choose such an orientation for thier children? Clearly, if 99.9% of hetero parents would choose a herero orientation, and say, 50% of homo parents chose the same way, in a matter of a few generations homosexuals would be as rare as chicken lips.
Ain’t gonna happen.
That level of sophisticated genetic manipulation lies at the same technological level as warp drive. Our great-grandchildren? Maybe. Our lifetime? No way.
For the forseeable future, we will be freckled, left-handed, near-sighted, homosexual, brown-eyed and riotously various etc.
Thank Goddess. Or Whomsoever.