Hello, here’s something I have been wondering about for some time now:
If evolution is all about passing gene’s by creating children, and in my perhaps simplistic view , the only gene’s that would be passed down would be the one’s that helped with making sure the child at least survived until he or she was old enough to reproduce and actually made sure he or she would find a mate reproduce with …Then what’s the deal with Homosexuals , how come these “evolutionary dead ends” keep getting back in the gene pool….could this be an argument for a creationistic alternative for Darwin? i.e. maybe its god’s master plan to have not all his children go and forth and multiply?
I never really believed in god, but it seems that to me that I just might have stumbled on to some kind of proof of some kind of proof of a higher power then the all mighty survival of the fittest, not sure any the mayor religions are ready to use this to get Darwin out of schoolbooks in Kansas.
It might be suggestive of it in some world views, but it’s nothing that plain ol’ evolutionary theory can’t handle.
Humans survive best when there are multiple adults looking out for one kid. If a person was born with no desire to reproduce, his energy as an adult might be put into keeping his sister’s kids alive to breed. His genetic line is still passed down through her, and perhaps at a greater rate than his neighbors who are all busy chasing after their individual kids and perhaps losing one or two to mastadon attacks when there’s not a spare grown-up to keep an eye on them.
Some scientific research has suggested that women with gay brothers tend to have more children, suggesting that there’s a “horny for men” gene or gene grouping, that expresses itself in women by inducing them to have more sex, and expresses itself in men by making them gay. This gene in a family would be protected and passed down by the sister, with her kids kept alive to breed with her brother’s help.
What if the gene were to make sure that one was especially attracted to men? Women who had it might make babies like mad and men who had it might be gay. Then it would passed on regularly.
(so as no one mistakes me, I have no idea how this stuff works. I’m not saying that is how it happens, I’m positing a theory on how it could happen.)
We’ve been over this quite a few times here. This is where you’re making your mistake:
Homosexuals do reproduce. It happens all the time. It’s a fallacy to call them evolutionary dead ends.
Homosexuality isn’t an either/or proposition. It’s estimated that only a fraction of the people that we call “gay” are exclusively homosexual. So even if “pure” homosexuals didn’t reproduce, those that aren’t exclusively homosexual still do.
We don’t even know that homosexuality is genetic (although it looks like it is at least partly genetic). But it could just as well be a secondary effect of genes that are crucial for our survival (eg, the genes the promote bonding between individuals). Genes often don’t work on a simple “one gene = one charactersitc” scenario. Often severla genes work in concert to produce certain traits, or one gene works to produce more than one trait.
Most gays just pretend to be straight and still end up reproducing.
Besides, many issues that are bad for human survival pop up in 1-2% of the population. Bi polar disorder, sociopathy, schizophrenia, asexuality, homosexuality, etc. These all put one at a disadvantage for survival but people still get them.
Right. Overall there’s no evidence for a “gay gene” - while there are genes that appear to make it more likely that one is gay, there’s no single gene or set of genes that causes the bearer to be gay. In fact, if one identical twin is gay, the other only has about a 50% chance of being gay - far higher than chance would predict, suggesting some genetic involvement, but if homosexuality were entirely predictable from genome, then if one identical twin is gay then the other one should be as well.
In fact, one might more reasonably apply that hypothesis to any number of genetic diseases that actually do cause people to be unable to reproduce (either they are infertile or they die before puberty). But we often know exaclty why those genes persist in the population and it isn’t because “God did it”.
No, the same gene can have different penetrance in different individuals - you would only expect a gay male’s genetically identical twin to be gay around 50% of the time given this factor.
Even if homosexuality or anything else was proven to be artificial, that would hardly be evidence for God. An alien race would be far more plausible, or even sentient dinosaurs; they don’t require anything outside of the normal physical world. And even if it was of “supernatural” origin, why God and not elves or djinn or the Purple Wizards of Atlantis ?
I always feel like I have to make some clarifications in this debate that seems to come up every .2 weeks but I am getting weary and will keep it short. The neuroscience of sexual differentiation was my field in graduate school.
I don’t know how many times I am going to have to say this. Biologically determined <> genetic. The fact that anyone is a male or female does not have much to do in a direct sense with their genes. It is only indirect. It is the sex hormones that determine the vast majority of sexual differentiation in the body and brain. Genes play a role in determining the gonads (testicles or ovaries) that get formed and kick off the processes but they are not the whole thing. Genetic males can develop as females if their body isn’t responsive to their own sex hormones. There are many disorders that happen more frequently than you might think where genetic males develop as females ans vice versa or even something in between as a result of problems in differentiation process. The body and brain go through many sex differentiation windows and they tend to open for a brief time and close mostly forever. Anything can happen and an individual may pass though one window with characteristics of the opposite sex.
Again, this doesn’t necessarily have much to do with genetics but it is still biologically permanent. The biological cause of homosexuality is still up in the air but much evidence points to a developmental glitch in parts of the hypothalamus. That fits in well will sexual differention theory.
Everyone reading this, place make a note that sexual differentiation <> genetics directly. A mad scientist could easily produce males as females and females as males with hormone treatment during development and variations on this are done every day in labs across the world. I have don them myself.
None of this necessarily has to with genetics or God and it can explain why one twin is gay and the other is not.
I always feel like I have to make some clarifications in this debate that seems to come up every .2 weeks but I am getting weary and will keep it short. The neuroscience of sexual differentiation was my field in graduate school.
I don’t know how many times I am going to have to say this. Biologically determined <> genetic. The fact that anyone is a male or female does not have much to do in a direct sense with their genes. It is only indirect. It is the sex hormones that determine the vast majority of sexual differentiation in the body and brain. Genes play a role in determining the gonads (testicles or ovaries) that get formed and kick off the processes but they are not the whole thing. Genetic males can develop as females if their body isn’t responsive to their own sex hormones. There are many disorders that happen more frequently than you might think where genetic males develop as females ans vice versa or even something in between as a result of problems in differentiation process. The body and brain go through many sex differentiation windows and they tend to open for a brief time and close mostly forever. Anything can happen and an individual may pass though one window with characteristics of the opposite sex.
Again, this doesn’t necessarily have much to do with genetics but it is still biologically permanent. The biological cause of homosexuality is still up in the air but much evidence points to a developmental glitch in parts of the hypothalamus. That fits in well will sexual differention theory.
Everyone reading this, place make a note that sexual differentiation <> genetics directly. A mad scientist could easily produce males as females and females as males with hormone treatment during development and variations on this are done every day in labs across the world. I have don them myself.
None of this necessarily has to with genetics or God and it can explain why one twin is gay and the other is not.
Explain the problem with my statement. I said that if sexual orientation was entirely predictable from one’s genome, then two people with identical genomes would have the same sexual orientation. It’s a tautology, really. I’m not entirely sure what you mean when you argue with the statement.
Anyhow, Shagnasty obviously makes a relevant point - there’s no reason to think that even if being gay is entirely biologically determined that it’s genetically determined. Boys who have older brothers are apparently more likely to be gay, which has led some at least to speculate that prenatal environment plays a role in determining sexuality (though obviously other potential explanations exist as well.)
Anyway, don’t we have this discussion like five times a week? V’neef Massoud: learn more about the question of what determine’s a person’s sexual orientation. Also, you don’t need an apostrophe in forming plural nouns like “genes”. Stop that right now.
Thats interesting. And what does <> mean, is that meant to imply ‘not equal to’? This explanation seems to apply more to transsexual people than to gay people. Are you saying that numerous different aspects of male/female traits can go awry? For example, some gay guys consider themselves men but are attracted to other men while some guys consider themselves women in men’s bodies, and some of those are attracted to men, some to women. Are there just endless degrees of variance in how a persons body and mind will be out of sync due to these windows?
I think so, but I don’t consider it necessarily “awry”, especially in humans. I would consider being gay to be a quirk, not a mistake in humans. The same goes for being a “tomboy” in the case of girls exposed to fetal testosterone.
Ah, I misread your statement as effectively “if the gene is there in both genomes, both will be gay”. I see now that you’re simply saying that we can’t predict the penetrance of a given gene, to which I agree entirely.
