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

nature.com

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

#331

Post by jabberwcky »

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.

> effeminate male

> gay son

This is a dangerous stereotype that is equally harmful to people of any sexuality, I'd encourage you to correct it. Most of the gay folk I know personally tend towards the athletic end of the spectrum

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

#332

Post by wyldfire »

ohduran wrote: post #2

Not an expert here but, IF a gay gene existed, wouldn't have it been evolved into extinction?

If homosexuality provided a species or community benefit, it could be selected for in that way.

Perhaps akin to aging phenomena that benefit the species through mortality.

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

#333

Post by coldtea »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #252
BurningFrog wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't measure the worth of a person by their reproductive success. We don't measure human worth that way, but evolution measures nothing else!

Nature does not measure things, has no purpose and no goals, success nor failure. Imagining success, failure, and purpose is psychological projection.

On the other hand, the extiction of our species for not-reproducing would be quite a failure even on our own metrics.

So it's not like we're some higher-dimensional ethereal beings, not tied to evolution and our natural fitness, with relation to our successes and failures as a species (and even as individuals).

To reverse the "psychological projection" trope, it's just that we learned throu psychological denial to ignore those aspects most of the time...

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

#334

Post by Itsdijital »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #309
drocer88 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the link: "Research from the 1990s2 showed that identical twins are more likely to share a sexual orientation than are fraternal twins or adopted siblings." Study here : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9549243/ "We present an overview of behavioral genetics research on homosexual and heterosexual orientation. Family, twin, and adoptee studies indicate that homosexuality and thus heterosexuality run in families.…

This thread seems very insistent on pushing the environmental case when presented with evidence to the contrary. It’s like I stumbled into a Republican convention in the 90s. Baseless theories: people do this to feel better about LGBT discrimination or the idea of sexuality being out of our control is too scary for dudes who haven’t come to terms with their own masculinity. The latter isn’t necessarily shade, I’m not…

It goes beyond that. The fear is that genetics will show that people are in fact not blank slates, and even further that there advantageous and disadvantageous traits common to groups of people.

I'm sure you can surmise the implications of this. Evolutionary biology has been making steady gains in the "nature not nurture" department and it has become an absolute lighting rod to discuss.

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

#335

Post by xivzgrev »

I found the conclusion to be misleading, based on this “ The researchers split their study participants into two groups — those who reported having had sex with someone of the same sex, and those who didn’t. ”

So apparently you are gay if you have had sex one time with someone of same sex sometime, anytime in your life. Bisexual, bicurious, some one straight who experimented, etc would all then be “gay”, which are all more prevalent than being strictly gay.

That’s like looking for genes that predict left handedness by selecting people who at some point in their lives have written with their left hand. No wonder they got confusing / weak signals. They should have limited to including only people who actually identified as being gay.

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

#336

Post by abeppu »

krapp wrote: post #199
abeppu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others are pointing out that non-genetic biological factors (e.g. prenatal hormones) can still mean that a person's sexuality could still be determined (or significantly predisposed) at birth. And others are pointing out that gay people shouldn't need to argue that they were born gay, with the implication that if a choice were possible there would be a right or a wrong choice justifying marginalization or shaming or…

> What is the source of some people's persistent desire to legislate, regulate, punish, mock or vilify other people's loving relationships? Western morals are still primarily rooted in Judeo-Christian beliefs which see any sexual expression other than heterosexual, monogamous sex within Christian marriage to be sinful, or at least taboo. The Bible condemns homosexual sex but in theory not homosexuality itself, as the…

Yeah, but the bible also is disapproving of premarital sex between straight people, but I don't remember seeing people fight over whether fornicators should be allowed in the military, or could adopt children.

The Bible also disapproves of people who contact swine, but no one fights for the rights of employers to fire pork-eaters based on their religious convictions. Or people wearing clothing of mixed fibers, etc.

And Jesus said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god, but no one really debates whether Christians in the bible belt would be willing to vote for a rich guy.

All this is to say, I don't think "the Bible condemns it" is a sufficient explanation for some straight people's fixation with gay sex. That preoccupation seems downright unhealthy. Maybe someone should put it in the DSM.

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

#337

Post by monkeypizza »

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.

When the population base rate is low, and being genetically identical increases the rate to 40%, that is a strong argument that it's highly genetic. The effect only gets stronger to the extent the 40% is from environments where people would be reluctant to admit to homosexual experiences.

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

#338

Post by gbrown »

iguy wrote: post #100
coding123 wrote: post #39

I'm curious if they instead focused on a simple neural net that is fed genes + gay/straight flag if the NN would actually successfully predict it.... in other words, NN's don't care about "finding" that specific gene, they kinda include everything and it "finds" the gene without actually pointing it out. That's very different from the human approach which is to try to find something specific. I mean compare it to blo…

For complex traits, I believe people think that linear effects dominate. Which is another way of saying that they see no advantage to adding a hidden layer, which encodes interactions, compared to adding up individual effects. The caveat here "for complex traits" means things like height, for which we know there are hundreds to thousands of common variants which matter. Some things aren't like that, e.g. simple reces…

Yeah, you see a lot of penalized regression techniques applied in that field. With that said, identifying useful non-linearity might just require moar samples.

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

#339

Post by throwaway2-718 »

ridaj wrote: post #292
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it were an easily changeable characteristic, we should consider it wrong for any society to threaten harm or punishment or ostracization for this. That the characteristic is or isn’t easily changed is not relevant. It’s not a question of moral relativism. You’d have to argue that any behavior is a crime in order for it to be legitimate for perpetrators to suffer consequences. Otherwise, it is wrong that someo…

Assuming that there are some actions that it is morally just to punish, if not the individual's ability to exert free will to avoid them, then what (in your mind) sets apart those actions from those that it is not morally just to punish? Or are you making the claim that it is never morally justified for any action to be punished?

>Or are you making the claim that it is never morally justified for any action to be punished? I'm sorry, but are you terminally stupid? Of course they didn't make that claim, that's why the choose the example of Nachos.

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

#340

Post by psychometry »

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...

It's extremely likely. This is literally what epigenetics is all about (among other things).
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