You’re the one who wants to punish some genetic tendencies and not others. You explain the difference.
Diogenes, nice of you to jump in. Tell me, if I have a tendency to steal, do you think it should be punished? If you want to keep to the op, then don’t go down this line. If you want to start a thread about whether the Bible says homosexuality is a sin, then check in the history, as it’s been done. Why am I explaining this to you?
Stealing isn’t going to be proven to be genetic so I think it’s a ridiculous analogy but just to play along I would say that no, it should not be punished. We would have to find a way to deal with such people that was non-punative but which made it harder for them to steal.
The most obvious problem with your analogy, though, is that stealing negatively affects other people and homosexuality doesn’t.
I think the homosexualaity/left-handedness analogy is more accurate in that both are congential traits which vary from the majority, both traits are perfectly benign and both traits have been accorded unfavorable moralistic connotations by the ignorant. Also individuals with both traits have met with pressure from the larger society to conform with the majority in their behavior no matter how forced or unnatural it is for them.
Ah well, I thought I was making a useful point a few hours ago. I ought to be less obscure, if I only knew how.
Dio, I would love to know how you get to be so sure that there isn’t a genetic predisposition to steal. Dishonesty could even be a survival characteristic and hence selectable for, yanno?
The obvious problem with your obvious problem is that, if God has said homosexuality is a no-no, the fact that it doesn’t harm your neighbour is not of paramount importance. Defying God is. (Did I draw enough attention to the qualifier: “if”?)
Re: sterile insects. Since insects breed by the myriad, a large volume of steriles does the population at large no harm whatever. A few breeders will soon make up the numbers. Meanwhile, the steriles get to run the gauntlet of all the predators and help keep the heat off the breeders. Hence there’s not necessarily a propensity to select out a tendency to produce sterile offspring.
Off to practice being left-handed now…
By “God says…” I suppose you mean the Bible. If that’s the case then “God says” the sun revolves around the earth and that the sky is a solid dome. Do you believe that stuff too?
(BTW, it’s very debatable as to whether the Bible condemns homosexality…very debatable*)
Dio, did I not make the word “if” plain enough after all?
~sigh~
Diogenes, the belief that homosexuality has been proven to be congenital is another issue, but that said lying is congenital, in that I never had to teach my son to do it, no program he watches teaches him either. So is it then safe to say because he has a congenital disposition to lie, that I should punish him the same as his being left handed, which he is? Or is the issue that some use to think it was bad to be left handed?
Now that said, “Also individuals with both traits have met with pressure from the larger society to conform with the majority in their behavior no matter how forced or unnatural it is for them.” doesn’t make an action right or wrong. You are taking saying because this happened to left handed people, and it was bad, and because homosexuality had the same thing happen, and it was bad, then homosexuality is the same as being left handed, which goes back to the fact that I don’t believe homosexuality has been shown to be genetic. Now you’ve used the term congenital instead of genetic, but the only difference is a congenital trait don’t take into acount the cause, which may be genetic… which goes back to the original op.
oops, just ignore the ‘taking’ in ‘taking saying’ as I was talking on the phone, and didn’t read my post, which is also why there’s bad grammer. Next time I’ll try and do it all without trying to chew gum.
First of all, “myriad” is an adjective, not a noun.
Secondly, your understanding of the “sterile insect” question is minimal.
The sterile insects’ DNA is crucially important to the population as a whole. Their value is not just as decoys for predators.
Since they are sisters to the breeders, they share a great deal of DNA with them. Therefore, it behooves them to work for the survival of their siblings and their siblings’ offspring: by doing so they are helping to ensure the reproduction of genetic material that is largely identical to their own. They are thereby passing on their genes by proxy.
Since homosexuality is not actively detrimental to a population, there’s no reason for it to be selected against. And since it can be argued that unattached males (or females) in an early human society might fill their own unique niches and thus contribute to the population in a positive way, there is quite possibly a real evolutionary benefit to their inclusion in the early human clans.
In other words, taking the insects again as a model, if your DNA included the possibility of producing 1 in 10 offspring that might end up being non-reproductive (ignoring for now the fact that many non-100%-heterosexuals procreate all the time), multiple generations might bring about a population that had a ready supply of “extra parents” that removed some of the childcare burdern, for example, from parents who needed to hunt and gather as well as raise children. And further paralleling the insects, if your parents had such genes, and you were a breeder with a homosexual sibling, it would benefit that sibling genetically to contribute to the care and rearing of your children, because they would have some DNA in common.
Well, lissener, I’ve seen “myriad” used very recently as an exact synonym for “ten thousand”, but if you want to nitpick about it, fine. Just don’t fancy that it invalidates the whole of my argument.
You didn’t invalidate my argument about insects having sterile offspring, either.To maintain population levels, one pair of breeding insects needs to bring to breeding maturity one and only one more pair. Their strategy for this is to accept, oh, about 99.998% redundancy. The whole point is that if you’re producing a vast excess of breeders in every generation, it does not matter if these have an even vaster number of sterile siblings.
I didn’t say one way or the other about whether homosexuality could be selected for or against in humans, so don’t get sniffy with me. What I did say is that sterility in insects can be shown not to be selected against. That’s all. I’d get rid of this homophobia tag mighty quickly if only certain people would listen to what I actually say. :rolleyes:
Further to your point about homosexual human siblings: of course. I’ll assume for now that homosexuals do not themselves breed, although as you point out, this isn’t necessarily so. So taking a look at humans:
Again, a pair of breeders needs to ensure that they bring a pair of breeders to maturity. If the parents pass on recessive homosexual genes, resulting in some non-breeder offspring that promote the welfare of their breeder siblings, then those genes can actually be a good thing.
How far can we push this, though? Does, say, a tribal unit with a certain number of non-breeders successfully give rise to more descendants than another tribal unit identical but for having breeders alone? If not, we cannot call gay genes beneficial, although:
If those same recessive genes give rise to non-breeders that, while not contributing one whit to the survival of their siblings, are self-supporting and don’t harm the survival prospects of same, then the genes are neutral and won’t be bred out. Neutral recessive genes can kick around more or less indefinitely.
This doesn’t prove that gayness is genetic, of course, or that a genetic predisposition must be acted upon - if that’s relevant - but it does show that it’s perfectly possible for it not to be selected against.
How does it start to look in modern society with few children per generation? The non-breeding would-be foster-parent then has too few siblings to promote the survival of - that is, nurturing, say, your one brother or his putative two children doesn’t carry more than half your genes forward to the next generation, on average. Ditto, with extra emphasis, if one of his children is also a non-breeder. This reasoning is very much on the fly, so feel free to pull it apart, but it looks as though non-breeder genes weed 'emselves out pretty quickly when birth-rates are low.
I’m curious—what will you do if your son grows up to be gay?
Again, this is pointless.
Even if it were somehow determined that genetics have so effect on homosexuality, that wouldn’t eliminate the possibility that it’s biologically determined and innate.
Mal, you’re writing little arias about how many angels COULD dance on the head of a pin IF the pin was EXACTly yadda yadda yadda . . .
Nothing you’re saying about your understanding of likelihoods or possibilities or trends or potentialities is wrong. Likewise none of it makes one bit of difference and is not at all in opposition to the way things actually are. You’re trying to invalidate one trend merely by pointing out that it is a trend and a not a law. Well, can I get a DUH?
I get sick and goddamn tired of people thinking they can invalidate an argument utterly just by saying, in essence, “there’s an exception to every rule.”
That doesn’t invalidate anything.
To say that one pair of organisms must produce one more pair before they die is A) elemental to the point of absurdity, and B) doesn’t mean that that is the only strategy of reproductive survival. It’s the minimum, over time, and like there is no such thing as an average human being, that exact 1:1 outcome is probably rarely achieved with perfect mathematical accuracy.
And TVAA, what’s pointless?
Eve’s question is one that I have asked many homophobes, and never gotten a satisfactory answer.
New thread.
Oh well, now I’m thoroughly confused, lissener. I thought I was, more or less, agreeing with you on the topic of non-breeding siblings of breeders, and you come back at me with that little diatribe which I’m having trouble responding to because I’m having trouble parsing it.
Just one point:
Concerning point B, and on average, it is the only strategy of reproductive survival. More than one pair of breeding offspring per breeder pair, on average, means a population explosion. Less means a population crash. But it’s true that any individual set of parents can produce fewer. It’s just that their share of the gene pool in future generations gets to be smaller.
Not Eve’s question – although her implication (that Svt4Him’s position would change if Svt had a personal interest in the issue) presumes quite a lot.
This entire debate is pointless. It doesn’t matter one whit whether sexual identity is genetic or not, since the debate centers on the biology of homosexuality, not its genetics.
That was not my implication at all, sadly.
Not intended, certainly, but it was still implied.
No, no it was not.
Quite the opposite, in fact: I have found too many parents of gays try to “save” them and wind uip driving them from home.
Trying to “save” someone from being gay is not going to help them any more than throwing them out (the “tough love” approach). The end result is almost always the same.