Post: #1

Is being gay in your DNA? Homosexual men share genetic similarities, study claims

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/articl...z33s6lUko7

New research supports previous claims that gay people share a 'gay gene'
There are probably many genes that affect human sexual orientation
When 'male loving' genes are found in women, they may cause them to mate early and have lots of children - in men they may cause homosexuality
When 'female loving' genes are found in men, they may cause them to have lots of children - in women they may cause them to be lesbians

The claim that homosexual men share a ‘gay gene’ created a furore in the 1990s. But new research two decades on supports this claim – and adds another candidate gene.

To an evolutionary geneticist, the idea that a person’s genetic makeup affects their mating preference is unsurprising. We see it in the animal world all the time. There are probably many genes that affect human sexual orientation.

But rather than thinking of them as ‘gay genes’, perhaps we should consider them ‘male-loving genes’. They may be common because these variant genes, in a female, predispose her to mate earlier and more often, and to have more children.

Likewise, it would be surprising if there were not ‘female-loving genes’ in lesbian women that, in a male, predispose him to mate earlier and have more children.

Evidence for ‘gay genes’

We can detect genetic variants that produce differences between people by tracking traits in families that display differences.

Patterns of inheritance reveal variants of genes (called ‘alleles’) that affect normal differences such as hair colour, or disease states such as sickle cell anaemia.

Quantitative traits, such as height, are affected by many different genes, as well as environmental factors.

It’s hard to use these techniques to detect genetic variants associated with male homosexuality, because many gay men prefer not to be open about their sexuality. It is even harder because twin studies show that shared genes are only part of the story; hormones, birth order and environment play roles too.

In 1993, American geneticist Dean Hamer found families with several gay males on the mother’s side, suggesting a gene on the X chromosome. He showed that pairs of brothers who were openly gay shared a small region at the tip of the X, and proposed that it contained a gene that predisposes a male to homosexuality.

Hamer’s conclusions were extremely controversial. He was challenged at every turn by people unwilling to accept that homosexuality is at least partly genetic, rather than a ‘lifestyle choice’.

Geneticists say it is no surprise that people's sexual preferences are determined by their genes

Geneticists say it is no surprise that people's sexual preferences are determined by their genes

Gay men were divided: it vindicated the oft-repeated claims that ‘I was born this way’ but also opened frightening new possibilities for detection and discrimination.

Similar studies gave contradictory results. A later search found associations with genes on three other chromosomes.


This year, a larger study of gay brothers, using the many genetic markers now available through the Human Genome Project, confirmed the original finding, and also detected another ‘gay gene’ on chromosome 8. This has unleashed a new flurry of comment.


But why such a furore when we know of gay gene variants in species from flies to mammals? Homosexuality is quite common throughout the animal kingdom. For instance, there are variants that influence mating preference in mice and a mutation in the fruit fly makes males court other males instead of females.


Is the ‘gay gene’ really a ‘male-loving allele’?


The puzzle is not whether ‘gay genes’ exist in humans, but why they are so common (estimates from five to 15 per cent). We know that gay men have fewer children on average, so shouldn’t these gene variants disappear?


There are several theories that account for the high frequency of homosexuality. A decade ago I wondered if gay gene variants have another effect that boosts the chances of leaving offspring (‘evolutionary fitness’), and passing the gay allele on.


This is a well-known situation (called ‘balanced polymorphism’) in which an allele is advantageous in one situation and not in another. The classic case is the blood disease sickle cell anaemia, which leads to disease and death if you have two alleles, but to malaria resistance if you have only one, making it common in malarial regions.


A special category is ‘sexually antagonistic genes’ that increase genetic fitness in one sex, but not in the other; some are even lethal. We have many examples across many species. Maybe the gay allele is just another of these.


Perhaps ‘male-loving’ alleles in a female predispose her to mate earlier and have more children. If their sisters, mother and aunts have more kids who share some of their genes, it would make up for the fewer children of gay males.


And they do. Lots more children. An Italian group showed that the female relatives of gay men have 1.3 times as many children as the female relatives of straight men. This is a huge selective advantage that a male-loving allele confers on women, and offsets the selective disadvantage that it confers on men.


I am surprised that this work is not better known, and its explanatory power is neglected in the whole debate about the ‘normality’ of homosexual behaviour.


How ‘normal’ are gay alleles?

We have no idea whether these genetic studies identified ‘gay alleles’ of the same or different genes.


It is interesting that Hamer detected the original ‘gay gene’ on the X, because this chromosome has more than its fair share of genes that affect reproduction, but I would expect that there are genes all over the genome that contribute to mate choice in humans (female-loving as well as male-loving).


If there are male-loving and female-loving alleles of tens or hundreds of genes battling it out in the population, everyone will inherit a mixture of different variants. Combined with environmental influences, it will be hard to detect individual genes.


It’s a bit like height, which is influenced by variants in thousands of genes, as well as the environment, and produces a ‘continuous distribution’ of people of different heights. At the two extremes are the very tall and the very short.


In the same way, at each end of a continuous distribution of human mating preference, we would expect the ‘very male-loving’ and the ‘very female-loving’ in both sexes.


Gay men and lesbian women may simply be the two ends of the same distribution.

Post: #2

Makes sense! Interesting article

Post: #3

As i've gotten older, the whole nature/nurture thing has really turned into more nature for me. I look at the blue pill life lessons that were given to me and I whole heartidly tossed them aside because of how limiting they were. I ended up rebuilding my wisdom step by step.

I look at gay men the same way. They're genetic oddities. They're common because we have over 7 billion people on the planet. Law of averages on our side.

I've said it before and i'll say it again, homosexuality is nature's way of culling the herd. You can try and "nurture" homosexuality into a child, but unless he is predisposed for it it won't work and will actively make the child resent his caretakers.

Post: #4

At first I thought the idea ludicrous, but recently I've come to think the most likely cause of male homosexuality is a pathogen. Arguments for this hypothesis are set out pretty well at this blog post.

Post: #5

Quote: pairs of brothers who were openly gay shared a small region at the tip of the X

heh.

Post: #6

(06-06-2014 10:23 AM)Col. Tigh Wrote:  At first I thought the idea ludicrous, but recently I've come to think the most likely cause of male homosexuality is a pathogen. Arguments for this hypothesis are set out pretty well at this blog post.

In the comments of this post, a fantastic article about a doctor at the forefront of the NYC gay community around the time of the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic and STD's in general. It discusses his experience as a researcher at the forefront of AIDS research at the time, and its coincidence along with other STDs and infections.

Quote:In the mid-seventies, Sonnabend's office was crowded with people suffering from syphilis and gonorrhea of the penis, the mouth, the anus. Chlamydia was also rampant in the gay community. But there was a lot more than the clap walking through Sonnabend's door. Hepatitis B was almost epidemic, and even tuberculosis was making a comeback. Oral and anal herpes were so common they barely were worth a mention to those infected. Sonnabend thought the gay population, at least the slice of it he was seeing in the Village, was clearly sicker, with stranger diseases, than the populace at large.

In the late seventies, a new wave of disease hit his community parasites. Amebiasis, giardia lamblia, shigellosis, and cryptosporidium, a parasite that usually inhabits the bowels of sheep. These enteric diseases are caused when certain organisms get into peoples, gastrointestinal tracts. How they were getting there was no mystery. The parasites are present in fecal matter.

Quote:It was extraordinary research: clear, simple, and the first of its kind. Sonnabend showed that the immune system of an entire community, the gay community, was under severe stress because of constant attack by syphilis gonorrhea, chlamydia, and other STDs. He showed that these diseases were wearing down an entire group's protection against infection.

Quote:The more research Sonnabend did, the more convinced he became that the breakdown in immunological function was due to simultaneous infection by at least two viruses, CMV and EBV, hitting people already weakened by previous exposure to a series of STDs. Until 1984, when the virus was found that was said to be the cause of AIDS, Sonnabend continued to believe in a multicausal theory for AIDS based on CMV and EBV. Even afterward, he remained convinced that HIV was not the sole cause of AIDS. It needed a cofactor, something else to trigger it off.

Quote:Then Sonnabend wrote the same warning in the New York Native. He said that the fast-lane gay lifestyle was killing people. He said they were going to have to stop being so promiscuous, that having hundreds if not thousands of sex partners was making them very sick and very vulnerable.

It was a message the gay community didn't want to hear at that time. After fighting for the freedom to be themselves, they didn't want to hear about restraint. Indeed, for a large part of the male gay community, freedom was not simply the ability to love other men without legal or social restraint; it was defined in terms of sexual promiscuity. For many, to be young and gay and liberated in New York City meant having anonymous sex with two, three, four partners a night, night after night, year after year, STD after STD.

Sonnabend began to preach to his practice. He told them to stop screwing dozens of men every week; to stop the crazy stuff, the fisting, the rimming, all the oral-anal sexual practices. He advocated condoms long before "safe sex" became fashionable. Condoms would reduce most of the venereal diseases afflicting his patients, both the old-fashioned ones and this new epidemic.

Sonnabend's Native article and his personal message to his patients provoked a tremendous storm of protest. He was perceived as agreeing with the most right-wing, religious moralizers of the new Reagan era in America, of blaming this new "gay disease" this "gay cancer" on the gays themselves. The victim was to blame, or at least the victim's lifestyle. In truth, Sonnabend was telling them they had some responsibility for this new epidemic.

For his efforts, Sonnabend was denounced by virtually all of the gay community's leaders. He was vilified in the community itself. It seemed that everyone, except perhaps the thirty patients who participated in the "sluts" research, was angry with Sonnabend. He couldn't quite understand it. It was simply logic. He had done an experiment and proved a point. He was trying to save their lives. Not only was the uproar baffling, it caused Sonnabend tremendous pain. His own community was turning on him. It was a betrayal.

Quote:Very few people in the gay community could accept the idea that the sexual freedoms they had fought so long to obtain were suspect.

http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/bnclapdoctor.htm

Post: #7

I hate that people always try and frame it as nature or nurture. It's almost always nature and nurture. Nature and nurture are intimately related and separating the two is very difficult.

Some people are almost certainly born gay. There are people seemed to know they liked the same gender since before they even know what sex was. I feel this way about girls. I've always loved looking at women - since my first memories. I'm sure some gay dudes feel that way about men. Then there are people are are gay because they suffered abuse as children - but not all kids who are abused go gay - so there may be some genetic predisposition that enabled that as a possibility. Furthermore it may very well be that certain genetic make ups make a kid more likely to be abused and thus more likely suffer the consequences of that abuse. Most people fight back or attempt to flee when they're being attacked but a few freeze. They're fight or flight reflex is like one of those fainting goats and thus they end up being the victims. Abusers groom their victims and seem to have a sixth sense for finding the kids who aren't going to fight back or report them.

It's a very difficult thing to talk about in today's PC society because everybody think it's a form of victim blaming. It's really quite the opposite but I think it'll be another 50 years before anybody can have an honest discussion about it.

Post: #8

I don't believe there's a gay gene. I believe in the pre-natal hormone theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_ho...rientation

Post: #9

(06-06-2014 10:44 AM)polar Wrote:  

(06-06-2014 10:23 AM)Col. Tigh Wrote:  At first I thought the idea ludicrous, but recently I've come to think the most likely cause of male homosexuality is a pathogen. Arguments for this hypothesis are set out pretty well at this blog post.

In the comments of this post, a fantastic article about a doctor at the forefront of the NYC gay community around the time of the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic and STD's in general. It discusses his experience as a researcher at the forefront of AIDS research at the time, and its coincidence along with other STDs and infections.

Quote:In the mid-seventies, Sonnabend's office was crowded with people suffering from syphilis and gonorrhea of the penis, the mouth, the anus. Chlamydia was also rampant in the gay community. But there was a lot more than the clap walking through Sonnabend's door. Hepatitis B was almost epidemic, and even tuberculosis was making a comeback. Oral and anal herpes were so common they barely were worth a mention to those infected. Sonnabend thought the gay population, at least the slice of it he was seeing in the Village, was clearly sicker, with stranger diseases, than the populace at large.

In the late seventies, a new wave of disease hit his community parasites. Amebiasis, giardia lamblia, shigellosis, and cryptosporidium, a parasite that usually inhabits the bowels of sheep. These enteric diseases are caused when certain organisms get into peoples, gastrointestinal tracts. How they were getting there was no mystery. The parasites are present in fecal matter.

Quote:It was extraordinary research: clear, simple, and the first of its kind. Sonnabend showed that the immune system of an entire community, the gay community, was under severe stress because of constant attack by syphilis gonorrhea, chlamydia, and other STDs. He showed that these diseases were wearing down an entire group's protection against infection.

Quote:The more research Sonnabend did, the more convinced he became that the breakdown in immunological function was due to simultaneous infection by at least two viruses, CMV and EBV, hitting people already weakened by previous exposure to a series of STDs. Until 1984, when the virus was found that was said to be the cause of AIDS, Sonnabend continued to believe in a multicausal theory for AIDS based on CMV and EBV. Even afterward, he remained convinced that HIV was not the sole cause of AIDS. It needed a cofactor, something else to trigger it off.

Quote:Then Sonnabend wrote the same warning in the New York Native. He said that the fast-lane gay lifestyle was killing people. He said they were going to have to stop being so promiscuous, that having hundreds if not thousands of sex partners was making them very sick and very vulnerable.

It was a message the gay community didn't want to hear at that time. After fighting for the freedom to be themselves, they didn't want to hear about restraint. Indeed, for a large part of the male gay community, freedom was not simply the ability to love other men without legal or social restraint; it was defined in terms of sexual promiscuity. For many, to be young and gay and liberated in New York City meant having anonymous sex with two, three, four partners a night, night after night, year after year, STD after STD.

Sonnabend began to preach to his practice. He told them to stop screwing dozens of men every week; to stop the crazy stuff, the fisting, the rimming, all the oral-anal sexual practices. He advocated condoms long before "safe sex" became fashionable. Condoms would reduce most of the venereal diseases afflicting his patients, both the old-fashioned ones and this new epidemic.

Sonnabend's Native article and his personal message to his patients provoked a tremendous storm of protest. He was perceived as agreeing with the most right-wing, religious moralizers of the new Reagan era in America, of blaming this new "gay disease" this "gay cancer" on the gays themselves. The victim was to blame, or at least the victim's lifestyle. In truth, Sonnabend was telling them they had some responsibility for this new epidemic.

For his efforts, Sonnabend was denounced by virtually all of the gay community's leaders. He was vilified in the community itself. It seemed that everyone, except perhaps the thirty patients who participated in the "sluts" research, was angry with Sonnabend. He couldn't quite understand it. It was simply logic. He had done an experiment and proved a point. He was trying to save their lives. Not only was the uproar baffling, it caused Sonnabend tremendous pain. His own community was turning on him. It was a betrayal.

Quote:Very few people in the gay community could accept the idea that the sexual freedoms they had fought so long to obtain were suspect.

http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/bnclapdoctor.htm

I had an interesting conversation with a woman (mid-late 60s) who was taught during her degree that gays, bisexuals and trans people were the highest risk sexual orientation group on the planet.

Their activities and behaviour is as destructive as hard drug users.

Condoms are all and well but the variety of things around then and now can get around it.

You have those who receive and those that give. One guy taking at least 10 guys a week is posing a serious biological threat to the hundreds of guys he is exposed too each year.

But because it isn't PC to label gays as a high risk group you have a tremendous ignorance surrounding these people.

And dont get me started on women who fuck these guys bareback and then sleep with straight men.

Post: #10

Fun fact: gays can use the "born that way" excuse to justify being gay beyond any reproach, but we can't use it for justifying that we're attracted to young, thin women.

Post: #11

I know a guy who's gay and he has an identical twin brother who isn't gay. Exact same nature, exact same nurture, and one of them is straighter than an arrow and the other is flamboyant as fuck. I really think it's totally random.

On Mark Manson's blog he wrote that sexuality is a sliding scale, not black and white. There is totally straight on one side, totally gay on the other, bisexual in the middle, with all sorts of weird offshoots in there too. I agree with this theory.

I don't see why they are doing research into this anyway. It's not like homosexuality is some disease that needs to be cured.

Post: #12

(06-06-2014 05:49 PM)Switch Wrote:  On Mark Manson's blog he wrote that sexuality is a sliding scale, not black and white. There is totally straight on one side, totally gay on the other, bisexual in the middle, with all sorts of weird offshoots in there too. I agree with this theory.

Not true. There is a study that shows that male sexuality tends to be more black and white (100% gay or straight) while female sexuality is more shades of grey (bisexual) based off of subconscious neurological responses to erotic imagery (blood flow to dick/wetness of vagina).

Here is a link to the PDF of the study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...X13001505. It costs money to have access to it though...

Also, I remember seeing that homosexuality is common (about 5-6% of the population) among a large variety of mammals and is not specific to humans. This leads me to believe that homosexuality has a genetic component to it.

Post: #13

The trouble with the question is that most people don't want to know the answer.

Post: #14

TL,DR (actually, just skimmed). are there manifested/expressed traits in women that genetically predispose their offspring to homosexuality? Things one can notice and look out for.

Post: #15

With any trait, a good default assumption for nature/nurture is about 50/50.

On the pro-nurture side, you can look at different cultures throughout history with drastically different ideas on sexuality.

Ancient Greeks of course did not even conceive of homosexuality/heterosexuality as we do. Nearly all of them would marry and have children. This would not preclude courting a pre-pubescent boy as a sexual companion.

Yet for the ancient Greeks, a grown man attracted to another grown man was seen as far more oddball than a grown man attracted to a teen boy. Also for them, sex with a man was considered "normal" as long as you were the one giving. A grown man giving it to a teen was seen as more or less typical, whereas a grown man wanting to take it from a grown man was seen as a sign of something off.

So clearly different cultures can affect sexuality a lot.

You can also look at Thailand for a modern example. Why are lady-boys so prominent there? Are Thais specifically carriers of a rare "ladyboy" gene? Perhaps its possible but more likely seems to be that Thai culture has something particular to it that causes this phenomenon that other cultures lack.

Or you could look at the huge jump in non-heteronormative sexual identities in the USA. Were there always this amount of homsexuals/transgendered/qia people in the USA? Certainly as our culture has become more accepting of different sexual identities, more people have identified as non heternormative. Gene-culture interaction in action, which is always the norm.

How many alcoholics are there in Saudi Arabia? Very few. Because alcohol consumption is so discouraged. Perhaps they have an average genetic likeliness to become alcoholics, but the environment doesnt allow that as much as cultures that are tolerant of alcohol.

Its all gene-culture interaction.

Post: #16

Males may tend toward more black and white sexuality, but if you know anyone who is gay, you know they mostly have fucked women.

I knew a gay guy and a lesban who fucked. They both woke up like "omg ew what did we just do..." right... you both definitely didnt want to do that... no way you got hard ans she got wet and male-female sex was satisfying...

Post: #17

I'm of the opinion that there are multiple reasons men and women are gay.

There's the:

1.) Pre natal hormone theory
2.) Estrogen's in the environment (plastics, pesticides) - similar to #1 that change the fetus
3.) Gay Gene
4.) Choice (I have heard two credible stories of men choosing to become gay.)
5.) Gender identity disorder (i.e. my brother is gay, but really feels that he should have been born a woman. No, he is actually becoming a "trans.")