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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)

#461

Post by damnyou »

rayiner wrote: post #430
damnyou wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liberal gender and sexual norms are very clearly better for humanity and it is a moral imperative that the rest of the world adopt them. Social conservatism of the sort practiced in most of the world, including but not remotely limited to the Muslim world, is incompatible with basic human rights and freedoms. To be very clear: social conservatism is bad and social liberalism is good . As someone not from the west, I…

There is no reason to treat "social liberalism" as practiced in western countries in 2020 as some inextricable bundle, where each change must be considered "progress" independently. For example, while the sexual revolution tries to ride the coat tails of equal legal rights for women, there is no reason a society can't have equal rights for women without embracing the premises of the sexual revolution. (Don’t forget t…

The low rates of physical teenage sex in the west today are a result of a generation of social liberalism along with technological progress (enabling virtual means to explore one's sexuality). Social liberalism means having a healthy attitude towards sex and gender and being able to talk about them freely, not treating them as taboo subjects.

Low birth rates in the US and EU are a direct result of socially conservative public policy, where having kids generally means one's standard of living goes down. France has the best child support and consequently the highest birth rates in the EU.

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

#462

Post by throwaway2245 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #156
readams wrote: post #53

It's unlikely there's a gene that codes for being gay. Homosexuality instead is better thought of as more like why men have nipples. Obviously the nipples are not useful to the reproductive success of men, but genetics and natural selection are messy and there's likely no easy path to not having them in men while maintaining their function in women. For homosexuality, the systems of sexual attraction in the brain nee…

> 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!

No - evolution doesn't place a value (or worth) on reproduction at all.

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

#463

Post by damnyou »

rayiner wrote: post #444
rayiner wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to treat "social liberalism" as practiced in western countries in 2020 as some inextricable bundle, where each change must be considered "progress" independently. For example, while the sexual revolution tries to ride the coat tails of equal legal rights for women, there is no reason a society can't have equal rights for women without embracing the premises of the sexual revolution. (Don’t forget t…

I'll also add a striking data point--even in the United States, conservatives are happier than liberals: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/conservati... > Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids. In Bangladesh, where I'm from, it's taken for granted that getting married,…

I wonder how happy the queer kids of those parents, both Americans and Bangladeshis, are.

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

#464

Post by ravi-delia »

kabirgoel wrote: post #195
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…

Tangential to your point, but I enjoy the comparison you draw between DNA mechanisms and Rube Goldberg machines. It’s an apt metaphor because DNA, and the body as a whole, is constructed quite randomly according to the demands of the environment.

Oh absolutely! I can remember being so confused for so long about how DNA could possibly code for everything in an animal until I learned how convoluted and indirect the effect is. So much of what genes do is totally mediated by the process of development, emergent interactions between cells. No wonder we so rarely find clean correspondences between genes and traits, its honestly a miracle even polygenetic statistics find anything.

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

#465

Post by revicon »

renewiltord wrote: post #353
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.

From the wikipedia article:

The mechanism is thought to be a maternal immune response to male fetuses, whereby antibodies neutralize male Y-proteins thought to play a role in sexual differentiation during development. This would leave some regions of the brain associated with sexual orientation in the 'female typical' arrangement – or attracted to men. Biochemical evidence for this hypothesis was identified in 2017, finding mothers with a gay son, particularly those with older brothers, had heightened levels of antibodies to the NLGN4Y Y-protein than mothers with heterosexual sons

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

#466

Post by valarauko »

rcoveson wrote: post #448
drdeca wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you mean more in that direction than a typical male? Because I’m pretty sure that homosexual men aren’t overall more like heterosexual women than they are like heterosexual men, at least in terms of appearance.

By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men. In N-dimensional space, they are biased slightly away from dead center of the male cluster towards the female cluster because of the female bias of the attracted-to-men trait. You could say the same thing about long-haired men. It doesn’t mean you’re implying that any other traits are more feminine, becaus…

I suppose this is true along the dimension labelled "attracted to dudes". There are probably many many more dimensions where homosexual men are not biased towards the female cluster, while many heterosexual men are.

> By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men

In some ways, homosexual men might very well cluster away from females, even more so than heterosexual men.

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

#467

Post by valarauko »

MaximumYComb wrote: post #413
kepler1 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're really swinging to the opposite end of credibility, bending over backwards to put on blinders and assert that gayness has absolutely no relation to some effeminate qualities. It goes against people's own ability to observe facts and undermines your position. Maybe it's not true for every gay male, but it is certainly an observable phenomenon.

I'm really masculine. I'm tall, reasonably heavily muscled, assertive, hyper competitive, dominant, etc. I've still had some friends tell me that they wouldn't have been surprised if I was gay/bi. The only explanation I have is that they struggle to understand my refusal to conform to norms and I'm interpreted as "different".

> I'm really masculine. I'm tall, reasonably heavily muscled, assertive, hyper competitive, dominant, etc.

Yup, sounds like a Grindr bio all right.

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

#468

Post by valarauko »

Inufu wrote: post #434
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…

This sort of approach is known as Genome Wide Association study, finding the correlation of hundreds or thousands of genes that will predict a trait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study If you are interested in the topic, I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueprint_(book)

Gay-WAS

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

#469

Post by valarauko »

godmode2019 wrote: post #379

Everyone is looking for a environmental factors this could be one. Sexual Assault Risks among Gay and Bisexual Men - NCBI - NIH "One half of men (50.8%) reported childhood sexual assault" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4117833 Similar: https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/3949087/Abused-more-likely-to... Here is the speculation part: the more older brothers one has the older they will be from you and entering…

I suppose it depends on causality - do otherwise "str8" men who experiment with other men "turn" gay, or do "queer" men self select themselves for such experimentation?

Regarding your hypothesis, I'd suggest that perhaps queer kids are more likely to be targeted by older male relatives for sexual abuse.

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

#470

Post by bostonsre »

throwanem wrote: post #188
bostonsre wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason. Completely agreed. I don't think we should shy away from trying to understand and explain it though. It's been a puzzling question that people have tried to grapple with for a long time now. I think it would be interesting to understand humans better. And.. if it is definitively proven that it is nature and not nurture, it might make…

If people changed their minds in the face of the science, we'd have been putting real work into decarbonization since 10 years ago at least.

Not saying all or even a majority of people would or do change their minds based on research, but I would expect there to be at least some open minded people that are just on the other side of the fence on the issue that would change their minds given evidence supporting the opposing viewpoint.
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