Is there any scientific way of deducing if homsexuality is increasing

Are there more homosexuals on the planet than say 1000 years ago, after correcting for population growth. This question may suffer from lack of historic and accurate scientific data.

If the answer reached is no then why is that so? With increasing acceptance across the world the numbers should be more than previously shouldnt they?

If answer is yes, can societal acceptance be the only reason. Or is there a scientific/natural explanation for the rise?

Why?

I think you don’t technically have more gay people, you just have fewer closeted people.

The problem is that no one kept track of the number of homosexuals over time. Any number is just a guess. So there’s no hard data to compare against, and even today you can’t be sure of the numbers.

I was thinking the same thing, I just didn’t want to be the first person to ask it. :slight_smile:

I assume there isn’t this class of person waiting until it’s socially acceptable before their body starts to become aroused to a particular gender.

It’s safe to say as the population increase so does homosexuals.

If anything, I would expect greater social acceptance to lead to a decreased incidence, though only after multiple generations. In times and places where homosexuality isn’t acceptable, a homosexual is likely to marry a member of the opposite sex and have multiple children, just to fit in. Any genes associated with homosexuality will thus get passed on. Where and when it’s accepted, however, homosexuals are likely to just form relationships with their own sex, and thus probably won’t have biological children of their own, and thus will not pass down their genes directly (though the genes might still be passed on via other relatives).

One would have to establish that a change had occurred before one could speculate on the reason. And as has been said, data are lacking to establish whether any change has happened. For that matter, it depends on how homosexuality is defined. (Exclusively attracted to one’s own sex? Anyone who has ever had sexual contact with someone of their own sex under any circumstances? These two rates are going to be very different.)

The OP excludes an increase produced purely by population growth.

Ah, I get it now. :smack:

This was my thought as well. If homosexuality is genetic, the greater acceptance should result in lower incidence of homosexuality occurring in the future.

You’re assuming that sexual orientation has a genetic component, a rather dubious assumption.

Plus . . . it’s only very recently that “homosexual” refers to something you *are, *as opposed to something you *do. *At no time previously were individuals singled out as being in a different class as the heterosexual majority, it was only some of their behavior that was different.

And is left-handedness more common today, now that it’s more accepted? How about red-headedness?

There is a scientific way, but it’s currently unavailable to us.

Basically, you would need to track over time how many people respond to specific sexual stimulus (rather than by asking them what their sexuality is). After a century or two, you’d have a decent idea of how things were tracking.

And you’d also need to perform this around the world so, if the number fluctuates at all, you’d have different regions with different cultures to compare and contrast again, to form hypotheses on the reasons.

Since this hasn’t been being done, we can’t currently give any result, but we could start it up and maintain the practice today.

The only things I know about are opinion polls asking people if they are gay. The younger they are the more likely they are to say yes.

This could be due to less social pressure so people do not feel the urge to lie. However, who knows if there are other environmental factors that could be turning people gay too.

Yes, I realize this is GQ, not GD or IMHO, but why do you say that? I wouldn’t be surprised if we find a gene for it at some point in the future of genome mapping.

True story. A friend at my undergrad uni was gay, and he was honestly convinced everyone was really gay, just some people admitted it. You had to be very careful what you said around him, because he was always looking for proofs positive and would take any innocuous sentence at all as such. But if he were correct, then you can’t increase from 100%.

Even assuming that complete acceptance means no offspring by homosexuals, which may be a stretch, that would be canceled out if the genetics (currently unproven, but let’s hypothesize) created families with, say, a preponderance of A) male homosexuals and B) very fertile females.

In that case, a homosexual individual may produce fewer or no offspring, but his sisters have many more offspring, including the next generation’s percentage of homosexuals.

I believe in ancient Greece and Rome it was considered entirely normal for adult men to have sex with both adolescent boys and women. I have no idea what percentage of the male population engaged in these activities, but it might have been the entire male population.

It’s pretty much certain that homosexuality has some genetic component, given that there’s a greater correlation of sexuality between identical twins than between fraternal twins. It’s also pretty much certain that there is some non-genetic component, given that there’s not perfect correlation between identical twins.

And while there are a number of hypotheses that suggest that a certain level of homosexuality might be favorable to the population as a whole, and kin selection would thus make the genes associated with homosexuality at least somewhat favorable, they would be even more favorable if the homosexuals were also having their own children.

One could posit that a trait for homosexuality in a species might be more favored in situations of higher population density than lower. If so, then as world population and population density increases, so would the prevalence of homosexuality. I’m not aware of any such tendency; if it is true that homosexuality is more prevalent in urban than rural communities, this could be explained easily by migration.

Conversely, smaller families (seen in more developed nations) may mean lower prevalence in humans. Fraternal birth order is supposed to contribute to male homosexuality (about 15%). That is, having more older brothers increases a male’s likelihood of homosexuality. If population pressures and/or development cause smaller families and fewer older brothers, there would be a small decrease in prevalence.

As noted upthread, unless we start getting reliable figures now, we’ll never know for sure. Also as noted upthread, maybe we don’t really need to know so bad.