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The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

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Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#311

Post by rootusrootus »

hajile wrote: post #136
ravi-delia wrote: post #58

I'd definitely be surprised if a significant portion of homosexuality wasn't environmental, but to my knowledge there is a degree of heritability shown in twin studies. Actually reading the article shows that they found several genes that each contribute, but no single gene. That shouldn't be surprising to anyone, considering that almost every complex trait is somewhat affected by a huge number of genes each tweaking…

Identical twin studies point away from genetics very hard. Pretty much all genetic anomalies will affect both identical twins 100% of the time. The fact that it's less than 40% points much more to environmental effects rather than genes.

My nephews are monozygotic twins. One is very straight, and the other is very gay. They happen to be mirror image twins. This points towards genetics.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#313

Post by [deleted] »

rootusrootus wrote: post #311
hajile wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Identical twin studies point away from genetics very hard. Pretty much all genetic anomalies will affect both identical twins 100% of the time. The fact that it's less than 40% points much more to environmental effects rather than genes.

My nephews are monozygotic twins. One is very straight, and the other is very gay. They happen to be mirror image twins. This points towards genetics.

[deleted]

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#314

Post by rootusrootus »

jm__87 wrote: post #202
rickdeveloper wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting idea. I wonder if we could then use something like [0] to trace back "gay-ness" as well as other "personality features" (I'm not sure what the correct term is here) to the exact genes. One potential issue I see is that the DNA of any person has an arbitrary length, which poses some challenges in the design of a neural network. Traditionally, this has been solved with LSTMs or RNNs, but as far I…

Or.. there is no such thing as a gayness gene. Genetics are generally not a strong predictor for human behavior. Gestational environment, what sort of environment you grew up in, whether or not you've suffered any head injuries or have another developmental disorder, internal hormonal environment, the culture you live in... these are all much better predictors.

There are enough twin studies out there to rule out environmental factors as the sole cause.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#315

Post by klmadfejno »

xxpor wrote: post #265
klmadfejno wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cheating. A person is only a homicidal psychopath after they have committed homicide. Locking up a psychopath who has committed no crimes is just as fucked up as locking up someone for being gay.

I've got bad news for you then, that's basically what the Baker act does.

Google suggests its mostly used to remove unruly kids from school. So... yeah... that does sound bad.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#316

Post by xvedejas »

rootusrootus wrote: post #311
hajile wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Identical twin studies point away from genetics very hard. Pretty much all genetic anomalies will affect both identical twins 100% of the time. The fact that it's less than 40% points much more to environmental effects rather than genes.

My nephews are monozygotic twins. One is very straight, and the other is very gay. They happen to be mirror image twins. This points towards genetics.

By "mirror image", do you mean very identical looking, or do they also have different handedness or something? I could go 50/50 on this being some term for twins I haven't heard before.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#317

Post by hansvm »

mc32 wrote: post #308
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #272

Fascinating! To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter after several sons, but sometimes the process "fails" and produces an effeminate male instead - a gay son. Alternatively, some kind of meta-level mechanism to reduce competition over women in the community, ultimately improving its collective health and well-being.

That... seems unlikely. That implies a woman's reproductive system knows and remembers or at least keeps a tallies of the sex of the offspring it has produced...

Or that exposure to a fetus for prolonged periods of time has a measurable effect. You can reliably tell the sex of a fetus with a mother's blood test a couple months after conception.

I still think it's a bit unlikely that there's a meaningful connection to be had there, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if I were proven wrong.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#318

Post by [deleted] »

robin21 wrote: post #304

I wonder if anyway has attempted a more qualitative study on this. Asking exactly what attributes attract and what the person is thinking when they look at images of men and women. Do gay men think the same as women? Is it a spectrum? For straight men it seems mostly tied to women’s ability to carry children, coupled with a genderless beauty evaluation (e.g. symmetry) and then some measure of femininity (which is kin…

[deleted]

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#319

Post by jgalt212 »

peteretep wrote: post #306
robin21 wrote: post #304

I wonder if anyway has attempted a more qualitative study on this. Asking exactly what attributes attract and what the person is thinking when they look at images of men and women. Do gay men think the same as women? Is it a spectrum? For straight men it seems mostly tied to women’s ability to carry children, coupled with a genderless beauty evaluation (e.g. symmetry) and then some measure of femininity (which is kin…

> For straight men it seems mostly tied to women’s ability to carry children I think this is far from clear

Yes, more directly I'd say it's the ability to create an event which would necessitate the ability to carry a baby to term.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#320

Post by rayiner »

aphyr wrote: post #262
rayiner wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're collapsing a huge societal design space into a narrow, ultra-individualistic western viewpoint. Your point only makes sense in societies that take it as a given that individual autonomy trumps the right of society to enforce behavioral, moral, and social norms. That approach is not morally required and almost no non-western society embraces that viewpoint. Almost all of Asia and Africa accepts that requiring c…

As a gay person who periodically wades past the dialectical peat bog that is Hacker News, I am begging you to stop digging. I cannot tell you how disheartening it is to find comments like this at the top of a thread, let alone anywhere . Perceived mutability is one aspect that affects perceptions of marginalized groups. Neither perceived nor actual mutability justifies discrimination. A world in which gender transiti…

Nobody here is saying that discrimination isn't wrong. But why that discrimination is wrong matters. In the west, you can appeal to notions of individual self-determination: "We shouldn't care about peoples' consenting sexual conduct." Those rationales have little meaning in Asian or African societies. That's why the fact that sexual orientation is not a choice people make one day, but is instead something they are born with, is critical to point out.

I’m not “armchair designing” anything. I’m from a Muslim country that does not accept western notions of individualism or sexual permissiveness. So it’s important that, even then, LGBT rights have a solid justification in the fact that it’s biology, not choice. That’s something you can educate people about and improve things. Invoking fallacious hypotheticals like “what if sexual orientation was a choice”—which is the exact opposite of what LGBT advocates believe to be true—undermines that. Instead, it seems like a pretext for universalizing western sexual morality more broadly. That’s imperious—there is no reason why protecting LGBT rights should require embracing western ideas about sexual morality directed to voluntary choices. And ultimately, it’s actively harmful for the hundreds of millions of LGBT people who live outside the west.

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