Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 495 posts

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

#351

Post by abhorrence »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #301
meibo wrote: post #177

Makes me wonder if there was a lot of thought given to ethics when planning this study. If we've learned anything, we should know that people will be terrible enough to want to "cure" homosexuality or detect it before birth, like trisomy 21, if it ever will become possible - and research like this will lead to that.

Tangentially related; question to those who are pro-choice: why is regular abortion okay but sex-selective abortion, aborting downsies, etc. not? My understanding of the pro-choice argument is that if a fetus is not yet a person, it's not wrong to kill it. Why is it more wrong to abort a fetus because it is a boy/girl? I am pro-life and so view this differently, hence not understanding the reasoning here.

I think you'll find that pro-choice folks are split (perhaps many different ways) on this question. Personally the way I view the problem is through the lens of minimizing harm to all parties involved -- and as such, I wouldn't say that it's "not wrong" to kill a fetus, just that in most cases it is the lesser harm than forcing a woman to carry an unwanted child and to bear the life long responsibilities that it entails.

In that lens, imagine a scenario where a woman is happy to be pregnant and excited about becoming a parent. Then she learns the child will be male, and she decides to abort it. There's a wide gulf between between the harm of "didn't want to be a parent" and the disappointment of "didn't want a son". It may help to imagine this with even more trivial features: "oh the baby is going to have blue eyes? never mind then...".

For something like trisomy-21, I find myself of mixed mind. On one hand, there are many things that can happen to a child through their life that could end up posing a similar impediment to the child and burden on their parent. On the other hand, since we're able to detect it so early, perhaps it is the best way to minimize harm.

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

#352

Post by spodek »

jabberwcky wrote: post #331
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

Is there some law of the internet that when someone corrects someone, they often commit the error they're pointing out?

Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic?

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

#353

Post by renewiltord »

Animats wrote: post #167

It's known that birth order matters. "The more older brothers a male has from the same mother, the greater the probability he will have a homosexual orientation."[1] Interestingly, this occurs only in right-handed males. See [2]: "Mothers of gay sons, particularly those with older brothers, had significantly higher anti-NLGN4Y levels than did the control samples of women, including mothers of heterosexual sons." Ther…

That weird caveat about right handedness actually makes me think this is a spurious correlation.

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

#354

Post by robocat »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #147
lultimouomo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If there was a genetic cause for shortsightedness, why is it still around?" - because myopia doesn't significantly affect your chances to produce offsprings. It seems reasonable that being gay does significantly reduce your ability to have children; therefore it is reasonable to expect that if it was an inheritable trait it would have been selected against.

Everyone keeps saying that, but it's simply not true. We have understood how this is not true for decades or even hundreds of years, and it's not even some impossible concept to grasp. All that's required for a trait to persist, is for it to benefit the pool, not the individual. The only way the seemingly obvious but incorrect idea you descibed applies is, a trait which is good for the group at the expense of the ind…

> All that's required for a trait to persist, is for it to benefit the pool, not the individual.

This is a well debunked belief. Genes are selfish, and they only reproduce to the benefit of the gene.

Group selection does not occur.

An example is evolutionary stable strategies, where cheaters persist in the population, even though the pool would be better off if all individuals in a pool were selfishly altruistic towards pool members.

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

#355

Post by rootusrootus »

xvedejas wrote: post #316
rootusrootus wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean mirror image twins. Approximately 25% of all identical twins are mirror image twins. Or mirror twins, or opposite twins. There are a few different terms for the same phenomenon. The exact cause is unknown but it's theorized that mirror image twins happen when the zygote splits a few days later than 'normal'.

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

#356

Post by dragonwriter »

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...

> 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 doesn't require a tally, it just requires that the body stores something that correlates with number and gender of previous children. Like, say, indefinitely retaining genetic material from each of them. Which, you know, mother's bodies do:

“Not only fetal cells, but also fragments of fetal DNA can be present in the maternal circulation indefinitely after pregnancy. This finding has practical implications for non-invasive prenatal diagnoses based on maternal blood, and may be considered for possible pathophysiological correlations.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12107445/#:~:text=Not%20only....

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

#357

Post by runsWphotons »

abeppu wrote: post #336
krapp wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. A…

Just because you don't remember doesn't mean it didn't happen. The conversation needs more specification here. Are we talking about the US? Europe? I'm not faulting your comment, the whole chain seems totally mixed up. Like the Bible has been brought into it, but in a weird way---just because something is condemned somewhere in the Bible doesn't tell us the teaching for Christians. The rule about wearing of mixed fibres has an underlying symbolism and purpose. Christians are exempt from most dietary laws in the Bible. Adultery is technically punishable by dishonourable discharge in the modern US military (idk how often it's enforced). They don't seem to worry about fornication now, but in some places and times that debate has been had. Allowing "fornicators" to adopt children is probably very new (and even difficult still). I am commenting just to express my confusion at this change and to say that I think there is a coherent way to make an argument based on Christian tradition and teaching which is not sunk by the supposed inconsistencies pointed out here. If you want to fight the idea that some of the opposition is truly religious (as opposed to some underlying disorder), it would be more interesting to fight a stronger argument. [edit: change --->charge].

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

#358

Post by scythe »

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.

>To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter

But if that were true, it must succeed sometimes. Evolution doesn't select for things that don't work. We should see an equally strong correlation with sex of offspring and birth order. We don't.

One possibility is that the effect reduces the harmful effects of sibling rivalry by making second sons more empathetic. However, this is basically a random guess — there are so many variables in biology that it could be a million other things instead.

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

#359

Post by transthrow123 »

Udik wrote: post #180
frant-hartm wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked gay wasn't a gender. So they likely excluded transsexual men (biological women) who are attracted to men and vice versa.

The text I quoted says " sexual and gender minorities (the LGBTQ community)". The G in LGBTQ stands for "gay". It also says "people whose biological sex and self-identified gender did not match" which seems to include biological males who identify as women. (But maybe you're right and the article is imprecise, and what they meant is just that they excluded F to M transsexuals). Then we could also question whether the…

> Then we could also question whether there is or not a a higher probability for gays to also initiate a gender transition- my hunch is that there is, although of course being gay doesn't per se imply a desire to transition to the opposite sex.

While there's probably a slightly higher probability, the perils and feelings that most trans persons will describe are not something that will match with the experience of someone who is gay.

Imagine you suffered serious injury to most of your body, disfiguring you and making it hard or painful for you to recognize yourself in the mirror. That's effectively what puberty was to me. As a young child, I was aware that I was different, but I was mostly okay until my body started changing in the wrong way.

I've found that most (though certainly not all) trans persons I've talked to resonate with that description. Interestingly, among transwomen in America studies have shown that roughly 60% report experiencing attraction to women, and it's only around 20% that report exclusively feeling attracted to men.

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

#360

Post by neaanopri »

Sebb767 wrote: post #348

This may be a stupid question, but I'll ask it anyway: How did gay people live in pre-historic times? Arguably, in our current culture, it is pretty obvious that gay people will produce less offspring than heterosexuals. However, looking on an evolutionary timescale, this culture is rather young. In tribal times, most males did not reproduce - lessening the impact of homosexuality. Maybe the higher female-to-male-gen…

You can view homosexuality as an identity or as a behavior.

Recently the identity option has been emphasized. Part of those is because it offers more legitimacy: if I can convince you that:

1. Gay people exist 2. I am gay

Then, my homosexual behavior is more legitimate. Without the identity, Western legal codes were able to ban homosexual behavior.

Post reply on HN