It’s certainly plausible. I just wonder how you get the signal out of the noise in such a study. If you could measure actual fertility in those families, that would be more convincing. But family size is determined by lots of factors, and isolating those factors is problematic, to say the least.
Regardless of the particular mechanism of this familial size effect though, I’d say it is evidence against the insinuation that homosexuality will inevitably lead to lower birth rate and a population crisis. I certainly agree that there are probably other factors at work here.
I agree that it would be incorrect to state that homosexuality will inevitably lead to lower birth rates. But something that occurs as rarely as homosexuality does, needn’t have any selective benefit just because it persists in a population. Lots of seemingly adverse traits, like actual sterility, occur at about the same frequency. You don’t see people tripping over themselves looking for what positive effect sterility might have on a population.
Kind of an odd choice having all the subjects come from sexual infection clinics, though.
So if Aliens released a chemical with a similar effect on humans as to the fruit flies in the OP and human rates of homosexuality shot up to 90%+ we all agree this would be a bad thing? When we can’t (horror of horrors) just ship in some extra Turkish immigrants to solve the problem?
eta:
You haven’t heard of the “sterile uncle” theory? 
But homosexual humans do reproduce. Some of them do so by sleeping with members of the opposite sex, even though they would prefer to sleep with a member of their own sex. Some of them reproduce these days using technologies such as artificial insemination. Homosexuality isn’t a complete barrier to reproduction.
I didn’t say it was a complete barrier. I said 90%+ homosexuality would be a “bad thing”. I hate to break it to you but artificial insemination costs a lot. Sure the poor people could break out the turkey basters and some stoic gay men will impregnate women for king and country but humans are lazy. They’d for the most part prefer just to have sex and let the race die off, istm.
Of course. I’m not really comfortable with the idea of aliens massively dumping behavior-altering chemicals on our planet. But this hypothetical has minimal relevance to the question of whether society should care whether or not its members engage in same-sex activity, since (1) it’s not clear that family size correlates negatively with incidence of same-sex activity (at least at the rate of activity we have right now) and I’ve presented evidence to suggest the opposite is actually true and (2) I don’t think we have to worry extensively about the extinction of the human race due to low reproduction at this point.
I don’t think anyone really put forward that question, though. LonesomePolecat just said choosing a low birth rate has societal ramifications and everyone seemed to think he was saying homosexuality needing addressing for that reason. Unless he has some history on the subject, I don’t think he was extending his point that far.
Is it possible, btw, that your cited study really shows that gay men with a sexual infection are more likely to come from larger families?
They don’t do it for king and country. They do it because they want kids. People do want kids independent of wanting heterosexual sex. The best evidence for this is the existence of fertility treatments and adoption.
The idea that there’s something “wrong” with homosexuality because birth rates may go up if gay people turned straight is a little weird, too. Even besides Anne Neville’s insightful point, this sort of thinking seems to support saying there’s something “wrong” with not wanting kids, or only wanting to have one kid when one could have three instead, or so on. I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with any of that. At least, not for any useful sense of “wrong”.
Absolutely. It’s findings have been replicated several times however. Here are some excerpts from a more recent paper reviewing this phenomenon.
So one study contradicts the other three, but I think taken together, these studies support my point, which is: I doubt that same-sex behavior, occurring at the rate it does today, negatively affects family size.
But I don’t see anyone making this insinuation. Lonesome Polecat mentioned that Japan and some European countries were breeding below replacement. No one is suggesting that this is due to homosexuality.
Regards,
Shodan
Here’s the conversational sequence that made me :dubious: a little–
But at any rate, I can see how I might have read too much into this and I will let it drop if nobody’s going to take up that position.
Well, I’ve never gone more than a few days at a time without speaking Spanish, but when I’ve been using English as my primary language for a few months, I start having a particular kind of “can’t find the word in this language” problem… if I’ve been using Spanish as my primary, then I have those problems when using English.
Depression is known to have either
- perfectly reasonable external triggers (exogenic depression), in which case the depression goes away when the trigger does (think of someone being depressed after losing his job), or
- perfectly reasonable if not fully-known biochemical triggers (endogenous depression), in which case the right pill does wonders. Think post-partum depression.
And yet, it’s still a hush-hush subject, as much The Illness That Shall Not Be Named as, say, cancer. Therefore, I don’t expect people to be any more reasonable about sexual orientation if/when it’s ever proven to have a biological origin.
Hardly, it’s a benefit ( and one that has little or nothing to do with homosexuals ). Our present population is much too high; we need to lower it. And the moral, acceptable way to do that is a lower birth rate. If anything the problem is that too many people are still having children.
And as said, you don’t need children to pass a culture on; it’s learned, not genetic.
Except that wouldn’t happen. The non-homosexuals would outbreed the homosexuals and in a few generations we’d be back roughly to the ratio we have now; that’s how evolution works.
Yes, orders of magnitude.
Says you, I guess. I think your confidence is seriously misplaced. There would be quite a few hurdles to overcome. First of all, such a massive loss of breeding stock would have serious implication for disease resistance and the emergence of recessive genes. I’m under the impression that humanity is already thought to have a rather non-varied gene pool compared to other animals. Then there is the problem of exactly how society would handle such a turn of affairs. With your pessimistic view of human nature, I’m sure you can imagine some dark scenarios for yourself.
Whatever the case “a few generations” is bizarrely optimistic, IMHO.
That’s apparently the result of homo sapiens being reduced to the size of a small-town population when the Toba supervolcano went kerblooey. The conjectured scenario of nine deviated preverts for every one normal God-fearing heterosexual is nothing compared to that.
Why ? It’s a direct implication of the whole “gays are evil child hating monsters” theory. If they don’t have children, they will be outbred in a SINGLE generation, by definition.
Yes, it would be less damaging than that, but since that Volcano die off already happened I’m not sure we can afford another genetic disaster.
What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t imply that nutjob theory so I can only imagine you are arguing with some warm comforting mental image of the perfect bigot.