91–100 of 495 posts
Does it mean people are socialized into being gay ?
Some people probably do have agency over their sexuality, or respond to incentives other than gender/sex. And part of that’s probably social.
Kind of hopeful we can stop using genetics as a way of justifying queer peoples' existence. Whether it's conditioning, a choice, or genetics, shouldn't really be a factor in how you treat queer people.
Whenever I hear a news article that there is no X gene, I am completely unsurprised. The idea that a single gene would uniquely determine a particular trait, as if it were a variable in a program like "bool has_blue_eyes", seems oversimplified and unrealistic.
But that's always been a fucked up idea. It shouldn't matter whether it was predetermined or otherwise not in your control. If it's constructed then it's constructed. If it's not then it's not. People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason.
I think the idea of genetic predestination might have been a short-term useful crutch in the past but I hope that we've begun to progress beyond needing people to explain themselves.
Not an expert here but, IF a gay gene existed, wouldn't have it been evolved into extinction?
A common analogy here is that in lots of insects, you see whole groups of non-reproductive members, and yet the idea of a "non-reproductive worker insect" hasn't "evolved into extinction." (I'm not commenting on whether being gay has a genetic basis or whether it's an example of kin selection, because honestly, I have no idea.)
"Ganna and his colleagues also used the analysis to estimate that up to 25% of sexual behaviour can be explained by genetics, with the rest influenced by environmental and cultural factors — a figure similar to the findings of smaller studies." An argument for gay rights has been that people are "born that way". That appears to be false. Does this suggest that it may be possible to shape the environment to reduce the…
> An argument for gay rights has been that people are "born that way". That appears to be false Only if you take the strict literal definition of the phrase "born that way" to mean your genetic make-up. A person has little to no control over their environmental factors during their upbringing. Everything from average air temperature, food nutrient makeup, airborne particles, etc are environmental factors that we know…
I think research has found that people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see others doing the same. For example, someone who would not ordinarily shoplift may do so during a riot where many people are looting stores. A 2019 survey found that "U.S. adults estimate that 23.6% of Americans are gay or lesbian", while Gallup estimates the fraction to be 4.5%. Link: https://news.gallup.com/poll/259571/americans-greatly-overes... . I think this overestimation may influence some behavior at the margin.
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…
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…
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 recessive gene effects are interactions! And, with more data, this may change.