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rfmcdonaldThis post was inspired by a tweet by @osirius: "If homosexuality is genetic, will there be fewer gays born as fewer of us masquerade as (breeding) straight people and pass on our genes?" I took this over to my Facebook status, and talked about some recent studies which suggest that queer orientations among men are a by-product of genes correlating with elevated fertility among his sisters. (No word on queer women, sadly. Ideas, anyone?) If that's the case, and--as Bryn pointed out on Facebook--women are the carriers of the genes which produce queer sons, then it wouldn't necessarily matter if queer men stopped contributing to the gene pool.
In a December 2008 [FORUM] I wondered--and many people agreed with me--that when tests to determine the future sexual orientations of embryos come into play, there's going to be a lot of abortions or in vitro genetic editing. I'm not so sure that would be the case now, not only because decreasing stigma, with technological and legal innovations, make it easier than before for same-sex couples to become parents and so relieving their own parents, but because queerness could have many different origins. don't see any reason why different mechanisms couldn't lead to queer orientations, to different places on the Kinsey scale and to different behaviours (gay accent, anyone?), or, whatever. Is it genes? Is it environmental influence on the fetus? Is it social influences? Is it a combination of the three, or the two, and in what proportions? Are there other factors? As always, thinking about homosexualitity strikes me as less of a useful thing than talking about homosexualities.
The data's murky, and confusing. As Stephen points out in his own follow-up blog post, the fact that heterosexuality has happily coexisted alongside homosexuality in any number of different bird and mammal species indicates either that homosexuality doesn't have a deleterious effect evolutionarily or, maybe, that it has some kind of positive impact. Increased intra-gender sociability, maybe? It doesn't help that the data regarding human sexuality isn't necessarily all that good. The studies reporting that 2-3% of men are queer along with half that proportion of women depend on the honesty of the participants, and considering the continued if lessen stigma, even in anonymous studies like the ones that produced these percentages some people with same-sex activity in their past--never mind same-sex interest--may well respond falsely in the negative.
Without good data on the proportions of queer people in the general population and the nature of their orientations--Kinsey scale, Klein grid, you name it--it's going to be hard to come up with a model for the current situation. Determining what's going to happen in a generation's time is going to be even more difficult: what impact, precisely, will openness towards out queers and same-sex families have on the proportion of queers in the general population? That, as Stephen also notes, is the great question. Who knows? Maybe the proportion of non-heterosexuals might increase over the next generation if it turns out that queerness is associated with some sort of reproductive advantage?
In a December 2008 [FORUM] I wondered--and many people agreed with me--that when tests to determine the future sexual orientations of embryos come into play, there's going to be a lot of abortions or in vitro genetic editing. I'm not so sure that would be the case now, not only because decreasing stigma, with technological and legal innovations, make it easier than before for same-sex couples to become parents and so relieving their own parents, but because queerness could have many different origins. don't see any reason why different mechanisms couldn't lead to queer orientations, to different places on the Kinsey scale and to different behaviours (gay accent, anyone?), or, whatever. Is it genes? Is it environmental influence on the fetus? Is it social influences? Is it a combination of the three, or the two, and in what proportions? Are there other factors? As always, thinking about homosexualitity strikes me as less of a useful thing than talking about homosexualities.
The data's murky, and confusing. As Stephen points out in his own follow-up blog post, the fact that heterosexuality has happily coexisted alongside homosexuality in any number of different bird and mammal species indicates either that homosexuality doesn't have a deleterious effect evolutionarily or, maybe, that it has some kind of positive impact. Increased intra-gender sociability, maybe? It doesn't help that the data regarding human sexuality isn't necessarily all that good. The studies reporting that 2-3% of men are queer along with half that proportion of women depend on the honesty of the participants, and considering the continued if lessen stigma, even in anonymous studies like the ones that produced these percentages some people with same-sex activity in their past--never mind same-sex interest--may well respond falsely in the negative.
Without good data on the proportions of queer people in the general population and the nature of their orientations--Kinsey scale, Klein grid, you name it--it's going to be hard to come up with a model for the current situation. Determining what's going to happen in a generation's time is going to be even more difficult: what impact, precisely, will openness towards out queers and same-sex families have on the proportion of queers in the general population? That, as Stephen also notes, is the great question. Who knows? Maybe the proportion of non-heterosexuals might increase over the next generation if it turns out that queerness is associated with some sort of reproductive advantage?
