this is obviously only over the last few decades, but the numbers don’t seem to be varying much over time.
And what would that “specific sexual stimulus” be? Homosexuals, just like heterosexuals, respond to a wide variety of stimuli. People have all different “types,” and are attracted to all sorts of body parts, actions, circumstances, etc. Show a man a picture of a naked woman. If he doesn’t get aroused, what does that say about him? Is he gay? Does he not like that particular type of woman? Does he find her pose off-putting? Tests like this can result in inaccurate results.
a) You say all of this like it is a particularly hard problem to mitigate. It isn’t.
b) The OP’s goal isn’t to find out whether person A is gay, nor is it to determine what number of people is gay, it’s to determine whether the vector of gayness over time is changing. For that purpose, any reasonable non-subjective test of homosexuality should suffice, regardless that in reality there may be no absolutely definable thing as “homosexual”.
c) Most results are inaccurate, in science. That’s why there’s a confidence variable attached to the results. If you demanded perfect data, we’d still not have a single person willing to publish their theories on gravitational pull since they could never perfectly replicate a doubling in velocity per unit time under test conditions, no matter how good a vacuum they had. I’m not sure that there’s a single scientific finding that can be tested and replicated with guaranteed perfect, measurable replication.
Problem with this is that it seems it isn’t so. Correlation between identical twins is low to non-existent. This site presents a pretty rigorous meta-analysis of some very large (many tens of thousands of subjects) identical twin studies across the world. They do present some interesting and I suspect still controversial data about development of sexual preference and identity. Certainly thinking about those friends and colleagues of mine that are not heterosexual, what they present makes significantly more sense than some of the politically correct, or simplistic ideas of sexuality.
Interesting I was kinda-sorta thinking that the latest science showedsexual orientation was heavily influenced by in utero epi-genetic factors related to the mothers estrogen/testosterone hormone levels at very specific developmental periods for the fetus. Is this science out the window now?
Or, the relation simply indicates that people who are intersex, or lean that way, are more likely than those who are not, to be homosexual. Feminine men are more likely to be gay and butch women are more likely to be gay.
And that may be true, but most gay men aren’t androgynous. Freddy Mercury was about as butch looking as they come, as are many gay men, and most are simply normal.
With gay women…that’s a bit harder to judge. It’s hard (for me, at least) to tell the difference between developmentally butch and not following the general female caretaking regimen (e.g., not wearing makeup, not plucking eyebrows, not trying to stay slim, etc.) It’s easier for women to look androgynous, I think. Maybe.
But I think it’s likely that the correlation (if their study is accurate) explains the higher probability for some to have become gay, but does not explain homosexuality in general.
Francis Vaughan, that cite appears to be to a book advocating for so-called “conversion therapy”. You’ll forgive me if I don’t trust that it’s impartial.
Exactly. We have no reason to assume that groups of prehistoric hominids and humans have always discouraged same-sex sexual behavior (among other animals that exhibit such behavior, there seems to be no evidence of groups shunning or attacking individuals that participate in it).
So if the incidence of homosexuality (and varying degrees of bisexuality) became fairly stable in hominid/human biology long before humans began systematically trying to suppress it, then AFAICT we wouldn’t expect to see that incidence substantially changing once humans stop systematically trying to suppress it.
Agreed. I read through the book, and found that whilst the early stuff seemed pretty good and well supported, it became less and less so, and somewhere in the middle of the arguments, crossed over into very dubious and clearly agenda ridden ground. Pretty much coincident to where references ceased and hand-waving began.
But, despite this, I think a the points he makes about a pure genetic origin are good. But they need working back to the original papers.
If we accept that homosexuality is present at birth (and I think we should accept that 
) that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is heritable. Congenital != genetic
The article astro linked to about the possible influences of the in utero environment is very interesting. Especially since, if they’re not monoamnionic, identical twins can have a non-identical prenatal environment, which can account for some identical twins not having the same sexual orientation.
I have no doubt that homosexual behavior has increased over some recent period in history. I don’t know what happened 1000 years ago, and likely there is no way to accurately measure a level of homosexuality that long ago. We are talking about behavior though, the dubious genetic and environmental ‘causes’ really aren’t important. Over the past 50 years at least, homosexuality has become more acceptable in much of the world and while it may be difficult to measure precisely it is also difficult to argue that homosexual behavior has not increased as a result of that acceptance and removal of social barriers to the practice.
If there is such a thing as homosexuality as an innate consistent and identifiable characteristic of people that still does not mean that we would know the percentage of people in that category in the past, and we don’t know it now. When we also consider that some people practice bisexuality, and bisexuality as a characteristic can be indistinguishable from heterosexuality or homosexuality based on behavior then we don’t have any way to quantify homosexual behavior as proportional to the number innate homosexuals, even if we could make such identifications.
We can’t even get a good, agreed-upon number on how many homosexuals there are now, let alone 50 or 100 years ago.
I’ve had a theory that some people are born ‘bisexual’, or are genetically sexually ambiguous and what path, so to speak, they pursue as they mature, is largely dependent upon their upbringing/environment.
In other words, the other side of the asexual coin.
So perhaps with modern society and changing attitudes, there could be an increase in homosexuals in western culture - the easy access to whatever pornography floats your boat, the greater freedom to follow your own instincts, and the protection of the law could help clear this path in future.
Or maybe hetro/homosexuality is a spectrum and nobody is 100% either/or.
I think we’ll discover the science behind it soon enough, and what a shit storm that will create, whatever the findings.
Three points: 1. As noted, this assumes a large genetic component (large enough to see a difference in phenotype ratios after relatively small genotype percentage changes); 2. This assumes that the theorized homosexual genes do not also have a balancing positive benefit (similar to, for instance, the sickle-cell gene in malarial regions);Yllaria suggested one possible one, but the positive benefit could easily be in some element of development completely unrelated to sexuality. 3. “multiple generations” is more than just a few; maybe 1000 years is enough time to see a change if selection pressure is strong, but a couple hundred years is almost certainly not.
[quote=“Sage_Rat, post:23, topic:751923”]
a) You say all of this like it is a particularly hard problem to mitigate. It isn’t./QUOTE]True, the issue of individual variation among a group is what statistics and multiple data points is designed to solve, though the variation could well turn out to be big enough that getting enough data to be reliable is infeasible.
But for sexuality, I think more important is the difference between groups. Even if you can reliably identify what an average college-educated Canadian woman in 2016 finds sexy, will that line up with what an average contemporary of Pompeia Caesar founds sexy? Or what an average Ghanian woman in 2016 finds sexy? I’m not saying there can’t be a test of attraction that gives consistent results across people from all cultures, but it’s not clear that there is one and there may not really be one. (I don’t think most modern men think stone age ‘venus’ statutes are particularly sexy…)
Let’s say that it’s roughly equal parts genetic, pre-birth environment, and post-birth environment. That’d still be enough to see some effect.
No, it doesn’t assume that, and in fact the existence of a genetic component is very strong evidence that there’s such a balancing benefit. But a benefit without a drawback, or with a mitigated drawback, is going to be more favored than a benefit with an unmitigated drawback.
That depends on how much of a change you’re looking for. Of course, even now it’s very difficult to get accurate numbers, and in the very recent past, it was significantly harder. Likely, even if you managed to completely eliminate all of the “gay genes” overnight, the change in incidence rates would still be lost in the noise. But the real rate is there, whether we can measure it or not, and there would still be some change in it.