Genetic Sexual Orientation

[burgs]

It seems clear to me that we (as a society) are nowhere near understanding the science of homosexuality. People have been "breeding" for thousands of years, and if you read books like John Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe and others that trace homosexuality through the ages, it's been around for as long as people have been breeding.

That, to me, is (anecdotal) evidence that the gene, or whatever it is that triggers homosexuality, isn't something that can be bred out of a population.

Thinking that parents will someday be making choices for their children before they're born is terrifying. Parents (sometimes) do enough damage to their children with the choices they make after they're born.

Who's to say that changing the child's hair or eye color to what the parents think is best is going to be what's best for the child? It's conceivable to me that a guy and a girl who might have met up, had a great relationship, many children, grandchildren, etc., might not meet up because of changes the parents made to their children's physicality. Then again, the reverse could be true. The changes they make could keep two horribly inept people who would sadly reproduce a litter of losers, from ever meeting.

The above paragraph overly simplifies how changes can affect fetuses, and the person they become, but it's just to serve as an example.

But the gay question. If you're a parent, and you find out that your child will be gay, what do you do? No parent, even the most liberal, open-minded parent, *wants* their child to be gay, simply because being gay means that their child is likely due for a fair amount of difficulty, adjusting to society's expectations, and it will likely last their entire life, especially toward the end of their life (as it was, oddly enough, in the beginning). An 80-year-old homosexual has even fewer social outlets than a fourteen-year-old homosexual. Unless they're extremely luck and have a wonderful, large, supportive family.

[wayfriend]

The fact that homosexuals don't reproduce to further this genetic disposition points more to genetic anomaly than it does to evolutionary benefit.

It's worth repeating: heterosexuality is not passed on from your parents!

The children of heterosexuals are neither more nor less likely to have homosexual children than homsexual parents. (AFAIK)

So the whole question about who reproduces and who doesn't is moot! You don't get homosexuality from your parents. So it doesn't matter if homosexuals become parents or not - makes no difference whatsoever on how many children become homosexuals.

If its gene-linked, it's gene-linked in a more complicated way than direct inheritance.

And the argument that it must be a detriment to the species because it passes on a tendancy to not reproduce is ... dare I say ... specious. If you want to show it is a detriment, you need another argument.

[The Laughing Man]

I've been very careful not to define it in any way as a detriment, thank you very much. And thats why I agree, it isn't a genetically passed on trait for the purpose of preservation, the fact that it is self defeating alone is enough to support this, heh. Thats why I say it is an anomaly, or divergence, and a very specific one hence it's presence historically. It doesn't keep happening because the gene wants to preserve itself, I don't believe there is a gay gene, it happens because at some point in the "genetic communication matrix" signals get sent, via some "anomaly", that are counter-sex oriented. Instead of telling the body "make a boy", it "shorts out" and starts sending conflicting sexual information. This I believe is the predominant aspect of research at this point, trying to pinpoint where and when this occurs, if in fact it does occur.