@Reckoner: Tolerating slave owners was the norm in the days leading up to the Civil War. The various compromises showed the enormous tension this issue generated, and of course, the devastation of the war meant that the slavery issue had to be settled once and for all.
"Separate but equal": Oh boy, this one took its time to be repealed.
The pro-gay fighters still have to fight their war in the days ahead. Seems that America is not quite ready in this aspect.
as long as it is between consenting adults and behind close doors. I don't care.
No need for closed doors from me, actually (at least, not more than what I'd politely ask others in terms of keeping their PDA under control), although society at large probably won't be nearly as tolerant.
But yes, the key lies in the consenting adults part. Things get really sticky (no pun intended) when it's youngsters in the household.
I seriously don't, though I would advise against the couple having kids. It has been mentioned in the forums somewhere that the risks are often overstated, but my advice for them would be not to take that risk.
As for the closed doors part, well if they don't mind me watching, I might hang around. If they do, I'll excuse myself.
So you would do mom or sister as long as they closed the door behind them?
I can't believe what I'm reading...
I think he meant to say that since he's not the one doing it, he doesn't care. Same with me. I won't do it. But, if a colleague and her brother decided to do it over at my apartment, I'll ask them not to mess up the place too much.
So you would do mom or sister as long as they closed the door behind them?
I can't believe what I'm reading...
it is not something i would do, but if someone else wants to. where do i come of saying you can't, when it is between consenting adults? what gives me that kind of authority.
To those with heavy science background, pls prove me wrong. I hope to be proved wrong about the general belief that homosexuality is just a choice/preference. Is there a serious study that proves there really is a"gay" gene? And is it social-driven?
If yes, I (can) accept.......... that homosexuality is not preference, it's a minor disorder, and they’re welcome to get government benefits/handouts/vouchers.......... for the purpose of controlling the urges and curing it by taking medications.
First off, I wasn't talking exclusively about California, I was referring to the U.S. as a whole. Second: source, please? Because the article I cited had this to say:
297. (a) Domestic partners are two adults who have chosen to share
one another's lives in an intimate and committed relationship of
mutual caring.
(b) A domestic partnership shall be established in California when
both persons file a Declaration of Domestic Partnership with the
Secretary of State pursuant to this division, and, at the time of
filing, all of the following requirements are met:
(1) Both persons have a common residence.
(2) Neither person is married to someone else or is a member of
another domestic partnership with someone else that has not been
terminated, dissolved, or adjudged a nullity.
(3) The two persons are not related by blood in a way that would
prevent them from being married to each other in this state.
(4) Both persons are at least 18 years of age.
(5) Either of the following:
(A) Both persons are members of the same sex.
(B) One or both of the persons meet the eligibility criteria under
Title II of the Social Security Act as defined in 42 U.S.C. Section
402(a) for old-age insurance benefits or Title XVI of the Social
Security Act as defined in 42 U.S.C. Section 1381 for aged
individuals. Notwithstanding any other provision of this section,
persons of opposite sexes may not constitute a domestic partnership
unless one or both of the persons are over the age of 62.
(6) Both persons are capable of consenting to the domestic
partnership.
(c) "Have a common residence" means that both domestic partners
share the same residence. It is not necessary that the legal right
to possess the common residence be in both of their names. Two
people have a common residence even if one or both have additional
residences. Domestic partners do not cease to have a common
residence if one leaves the common residence but intends to return.
297.5. (a) Registered domestic partners shall have the same rights,
protections, and benefits, and shall be subject to the same
responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether they
derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules,
government policies, common law, or any other provisions or sources
of law, as are granted to and imposed upon spouses.
(b) Former registered domestic partners shall have the same
rights, protections, and benefits, and shall be subject to the same
responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether they
derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules,
government policies, common law, or any other provisions or sources
of law, as are granted to and imposed upon former spouses.
(c) A surviving registered domestic partner, following the death
of the other partner, shall have the same rights, protections, and
benefits, and shall be subject to the same responsibilities,
obligations, and duties under law, whether they derive from statutes,
administrative regulations, court rules, government policies, common
law, or any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to
and imposed upon a widow or a widower.
(d) The rights and obligations of registered domestic partners
with respect to a child of either of them shall be the same as those
of spouses. The rights and obligations of former or surviving
registered domestic partners with respect to a child of either of
them shall be the same as those of former or surviving spouses.
(e) To the extent that provisions of California law adopt, refer
to, or rely upon, provisions of federal law in a way that otherwise
would cause registered domestic partners to be treated differently
than spouses, registered domestic partners shall be treated by
California law as if federal law recognized a domestic partnership in
the same manner as California law.
(f) Registered domestic partners shall have the same rights
regarding nondiscrimination as those provided to spouses. (g) No public agency in this state may discriminate against any
person or couple on the ground that the person is a registered
domestic partner rather than a spouse or that the couple are
registered domestic partners rather than spouses, except that nothing
in this section applies to modify eligibility for long-term care
plans pursuant to Chapter 15 (commencing with Section 21660) of Part
3 of Division 5 of Title 2 of the Government Code.
(h) This act does not preclude any state or local agency from
exercising its regulatory authority to implement statutes providing
rights to, or imposing responsibilities upon, domestic partners.
(i) This section does not amend or modify any provision of the
California Constitution or any provision of any statute that was
adopted by initiative.
(j) Where necessary to implement the rights of registered domestic
partners under this act, gender-specific terms referring to spouses
shall be construed to include domestic partners.
(k) (1) For purposes of the statutes, administrative regulations,
court rules, government policies, common law, and any other provision
or source of law governing the rights, protections, and benefits,
and the responsibilities, obligations, and duties of registered
domestic partners in this state, as effectuated by this section, with
respect to community property, mutual responsibility for debts to
third parties, the right in particular circumstances of either
partner to seek financial support from the other following the
dissolution of the partnership, and other rights and duties as
between the partners concerning ownership of property, any reference
to the date of a marriage shall be deemed to refer to the date of
registration of a domestic partnership with the state.
(2) Notwithstanding paragraph (1), for domestic partnerships
registered with the state before January 1, 2005, an agreement
between the domestic partners that the partners intend to be governed
by the requirements set forth in Sections 1600 to 1620, inclusive,
and which complies with those sections, except for the agreement's
effective date, shall be enforceable as provided by Sections 1600 to
1620, inclusive, if that agreement was fully executed and in force as
of June 30, 2005.
Another one. To clarify the ones that are unclear up there.
Maybe the mods should split this into its own thread?
Yes, please. -_-
Spoiler for off topicness:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vexx
Please stop foisting pseudo-science and misinformation into the discussion like that link. Your very use of the phrase "gay gene" tells me you really don't understand the topic nor how the brain gets gender-assigned during the fetal process.
Gay gene lol Would I make more sense if I say that noone has found the gene that causes homosexuality? Was that site really promoting misinformation? It didn't hit me that way, so, pardon me for the half-heartedness. I went out of my way for these articles and I'm not doing this tedious stuff again. Hopefully, these are enough sources. There's more articles out there but people can do their own search.
Spoiler for 3 articles.:
Kunzig R. FINDING THE SWITCH. Psychology Today [serial online]. May 2008;41(3):88-93. Available from: Academic Search Premier, Ipswich, MA. Accessed November 8, 2008.
HOMOSEXUALITY MAY PERSIST BECAUSE THE ASSOCIATED GENES CONVEY SURPRISING ADVANTAGES ON HOMOSEXUALS FAMILY MEMBERS
IF THERE IS one thing that has always seemed obvious about homosexuality, it's that it just doesn't make sense. Evolution favors traits that aid reproduction, and being gay clearly doesn't do that. The existence of homosexuality amounts to a profound evolutionary mystery, since failing to pass on your genes means that your genetic fitness is a resounding zero. "Homosexuality is effectively like sterilization," says psychobiologist Qazi Rahman of Queen Mary College in London. "You'd think evolution would get rid of it." Yet as far as historians can tell, homosexuality has always been with us. So the question remains: If it's such a disadvantage in the evolutionary rat race, why was it not selected into oblivion millennia ago?
Twentieth-century psychiatry had an answer for this Darwinian paradox: Homosexuality was not a biological trait at all but a psychological defect. It was a mistake, one that was always being created anew, in each generation, by bad parenting Freud considered homosexuality a form of arrested development stamped on a child by a distant father or an overprotective mother. Homosexuality was even listed by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder, and the idea that gays could and should be "cured" was widely accepted. But modern scientific research has not been kind to that idea. It turns out that parents of gay men are no better or worse than those of heterosexuals. And homosexual behavior is common in the animal kingdom, as well--among sheep, for instance. It arises naturally and does not seem to be a matter of aloof rams or overbearing ewes.
More is known about homosexuality in men than in women, whose sexuality appears more fluid. The consensus now is that people are "born gay," as the title of a recent book by Rahman and British psychologist Glenn Wilson puts it. But for decades, researchers have sought to identify the mechanism that makes a person gay.
SOMETHING SEEMS TO flip the sexuality switch before birth--but what? In many cases, homosexuality appears to be genetic. The best scientific surveys put the number of gays in the general population between 2 and 6 percent, with most estimates near the low end of that range--contrary to the 10 percent figure that is often reported in the popular media. But we know gayness is not entirely genetic, because in pairs of identical twins, it's often the case that one is gay and the other is not. Studies suggest there is a genetic basis for homosexuality in only 50 percent of gay men.
No one has yet identified a particular gay gene, but Brian Mustanski, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is examining a gene that helps time the release of testosterone from the testes of a male fetus. Testosterone masculinizes the fetal genitalia--and presumably also the brain. Without it, the fetus stays female. It may be that the brains of gay men don't feel the full effects of testosterone at the right time during fetal development, and so are insufficiently masculinized.
But if that gene does prove to be a gay gene, it's unlikely to be the only one. Whatever brain structures are responsible for sexual orientation must emerge from a complex chain of molecular events, one that can be disrupted at many links. Gay genes could be genes for hormones, enzymes that modify hormones, or receptors on the surface of brain cells that bind to those hormones. A mutation in any one of those genes might make a person gay.
More likely it will take mutations in more than one gene. And that, as Rahman and Wilson and other researchers have suggested, is one solution to the Darwinian paradox: Gay genes might survive because so long as a man doesn't have enough of them to make him gay, they increase the reproductive success of the woman he mates with. Biologists call it "sexually antagonistic selection," meaning a trait survives in one sex only because it is useful to the other. Nipples--useless to men, vital to women--are one example, and homosexuality may be another. By interfering with the masculinization of the brain, gay genes might promote feminine behavior traits, making men who carry them kinder, gentler, more nurturing--"less aggressive and psychopathic than the typical male," as Rahman and Wilson put it. Such men may be more likely to help raise children rather than kill them--or each other--and as a result, women may be more likely to choose them as mates.
In this way, over thousands of generations of sexual selection, feminizing genes may have spread through the male population. When the number of such genes exceeds a certain threshold in a man, they may flip the switch and make him want to have sex with other men. Evolutionarily speaking, that is bad for him. But for the women who are doing the selecting, the loss of a small number of potential mates may be a small price to pay for creating a much larger number of the kind of men they want.
SOME GAY GENES may benefit women more directly--to the detriment of their own sons. The evidence comes from groundbreaking studies by Andrea Camperio-Ciani, a researcher at the University of Padua in Italy. Camperio was interested in understanding the evolutionary paradox and began by replicating a family-tree study done in the early 1990s by geneticist Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health. Hamer had concluded that some cases of homosexuality are passed down on the X chromosome, which a boy receives from his mother. Camperio and his colleagues compared the family trees of gay men to those of straight men, and confirmed that homosexuals had more gay male relatives on their mother's side than on their father's side--which suggests an X-linked trait. But the Italian researchers also found something more intriguing: Compared with the straight men, the gay men had more relatives, period.
Camperio did not quite know at first what to make of these results--or how they might help him understand the Darwinian paradox of homosexuality. Then one day, he was driving through the forest with his daughter, on the way to their country house. Their tradition was to play mathematical games to keep themselves entertained. This time, he began talking about a different puzzle. "I began explaining my research," Camperio recalls. "I explained to her that we found out that homosexuals come from large families. I told her that there is an inheritance from the mother--she's giving the homosexual genes to her son. I said, 'This is impossible--how can they be surviving?'"
His daughter, 15, replied, "But Dad, did you check if this factor that makes sons homosexual is not the same factor that makes the mother produce more children and have big families?"
Camperio stopped the car, looked her in the eyes, and said, "Shit! What is this? It's a great suggestion?"
The next day he left his daughter in the country and went back to the lab to investigate the idea. Sure enough, the mothers of homosexuals in the study did indeed have between a quarter and a third more children than the mothers of heterosexuals. Camperio also uncovered another dramatic finding: In families with gay sons, the aunts from the mother's side had many more children than the aunts on the father's side--the large families, in other words, were on the maternal side. Camperio realized his daughter was right. "There was something in the genes that, in the male, changed his sexual orientation, and in the female, increased her probability of having children," he says.
What could it be? Camperio spent the next few years going to gay men and begging them to let him interview their mothers and aunts--a daunting task in deeply Catholic Italy. In the end, it took him three years to get 30 subjects. When he interviewed the women, though, he found they had fewer miscarriages, fewer infections, and used fewer contraceptives than the mothers and aunts of heterosexuals, though the differences were only slight. One difference, though, was not slight at all: The homosexuals' mothers and aunts had had between three and four times as many sexual partners. They seemed to really like having sex with men.
Camperio's explanation for all this relies, like Rahman and Wilson's hypothesis, on sexually antagonistic selection. Perhaps, he suggests, the mothers of some homosexuals have a "man-loving" gene. In women, it would be adaptive, causing them to have more sex and more children. But in men, the "man-loving" gene would be expressed differently, causing homosexuality. To the gay sons, that would be an evolutionary disadvantage--but one outweighed by the advantage to the mothers, who would have more than enough other children to compensate. And so gayness in men would persist in these families--as a side effect of a trait that is beneficial to the women.
But even Camperio says his results can explain no more than 20 percent of the incidence of homosexuality. "The more we study, the more we find there will be other mechanisms," he says. His research confirms that there are many ways to become gay--including, perhaps, one way that is much stranger than the rest.
THE GAY MEN in Camperio's study didn't just have larger families than the straight men. They also had more older brothers--and not just because they came from larger families. It's true across the board: The more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay. The "fraternal birth order effect" was first uncovered by Ray Blanchard and Anthony Bogaert of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and has since been replicated by a dozen other studies.
For every older brother a man has, his chances of being gay go up by around a third. In other words, if you have two older brothers, you're nearly twice as likely to be gay--regardless of whether the older brothers are themselves gay. It is not possible to explain that as an effect of genetics.
Some researchers have tried to explain it as an effect the older brothers have on their sibling's environment. Perhaps a boy grows up homosexual, one argument goes, because the presence of older brothers means more incestuous sex play early in life. Or perhaps their presence makes his parents treat him differently.
But in another study, Bogaert found that it was only biological older brothers that contributed to the effect. Men who grew up with older stepbrothers or adopted brothers--brothers born of different wombs--were no more likely to become gay. Meanwhile, men with biological older brothers who died in infancy or who were raised separately--including brothers they had never even met and sometimes didn't even know about--did manifest the effect. In other words, the effect could not be explained through upbringing.
If it wasn't genetic and it wasn't upbringing, then what could it possibly be? The answer is the prenatal environment--the result of something that occurs as the fetus develops in the womb.
So what happens in the womb to make a fetus gay? Researchers can only speculate, but Blanchard and Bogaert suggest the older-brother effect could result from a mother's immune reaction against her male fetuses. During her first male pregnancy, the mother's body reacts against some factor related to male fetal development. Her immune system detects male-specific proteins produced by the boy's Y chromosome--perhaps proteins located on the surface of his brain cells--and deems them foreign invaders. As a result, her body generates antibodies against them. Each successive male pregnancy strengthens this immune response. The next time she's pregnant, the anti-male antibodies cross through the placenta and influence the fetus's brain, interfering with the masculinization of his brain and making him gay.
It may even be that women with strong immune systems are more likely to produce gay sons. The reproductive advantages to her of having such a healthy constitution might outweigh the disadvantages of occasionally producing a son who will have no kids himself. Even if the immunization scenario is true, however, it explains only 15 to 30 percent of the cases of male homosexuality. "My theory is not meant to explain homosexuality in all males--obviously not in firstborn males," says Blanchard. "And it does not explain homosexuality in women at all." It's really just a "working hypothesis," says Bogaert, for a strange and puzzling phenomenon.
Most recently, Bogaert, Blanchard, and their colleagues have found that older brothers increase the likelihood of homosexuality only in men who are right-handed--even though left-handed men are more likely to be gay in general. "We don't really know what that means," says Bogaert. It's one more piece of evidence, though, that homosexuality is determined biologically, before birth--just like handedness. As often happens with science, the mystery deepens and becomes more complicated before the ultimate pattern finally reveals itself.
SO HOW DO the pieces fit together? So far, they don't. Rather, they exist side by side. "There is no all-inclusive explanation for the variation in sexual orientation, at least none supported by actual evidence," says geneticist Alan Sanders of Northwestern University. It's one of the most consistent themes to emerge from the literature on homosexuality: the idea that there are many different mechanisms, not a single one, for producing homosexuality. Neither Camperio nor Bogaert sees much of a connection between the female-fecundity theory and the older-brother effect. "They are somewhat disparate," Bogaert says.
"But that is compatible with the idea that there are multiple biological pathways affecting sexual orientation."
The biggest gap in the science of homosexuality concerns lesbians: Much less research has been done on them than on men. That's because women's sexuality seems to be more complicated and fluid--women are much more likely to report fantasizing about both sexes, or to change how they report their sexual orientation over time--which makes it harder to study. "Maybe we're measuring sexual orientation totally wrong in women," says Mustanski. Rahman and Wilson suggest that lesbianism might result from "masculinizing" genes that, when not present to excess, make a woman a more aggressively protective and thus successful mother--just as feminizing genes might make a man a more caring father.
Right now, there is no one all-inclusive solution to the Darwinian mystery of why homosexuality survives, and no grand unified theory of how it arises in a given individual. Homosexuality seems to arise as a result of various perturbations in the flow from genes to hormones to brains to behavior--as the common end point of multiple biological paths, all of which seem to survive as side effects of various traits that help heterosexuals pass along their genes.
"It's the fundamental question for the next 10 years," says Mustanski. "How do these things interact? What is the model that explains all these things?"
------------------------------------
Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. Columbia, 1991. "A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America" (title page).
Hamer, Dean and Copeland, Peter. The Science of Desire. Simon & Schuster, 1994. "The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior" (subtitle).
Isay, Richard A. Being Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1989. The timing of awareness that one might be gay and effect on subsequent personal relationships.
Origins of Homosexuality
Gender identities and gender roles are highly complex phenomena, and there is no single cause for homosexuality. Male or female anatomical sex characteristics are determined at the time of conception, but environmental factors may influence the individual's later acceptance of his or her gender role. The homosexual may to all outward appearances enjoy the existing anatomical gender role and yet seek sexual gratification with members of his or her own sex.
Research prior to the 1990s generally supported the view that sexual orientation is learned, not genetically or physiologically determined. For example, chromosome counts and endocrine studies in homosexuals showed no more than the average number of deviations from the normal. In 1993, however, researchers at the National Cancer Institute reported preliminary evidence that many gay men shared a particular genetic marker in the X chromosome. A follow-up report (1995) also found evidence of the "gay gene," but results of a Canadian study published in 1999 offered no support for the existence of an X-linked gene related to male homosexuality.
Hunting the gay gene;
With the pendulum swinging back and forth between nature and nurture as explanations for sexual preference, critics argue that science is asking a simplistic and dangerous question
BYLINE: Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star
SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. ID03
LENGTH: 1070 words
Gay men believe their sexual orientation is inextricably bound up with their very being. It is not a choice - let alone the "wrong choice," as religious and political critics have counter-claimed for years.
Many believe they simply were "born that way," and long for proof that their sexual proclivity is biological or genetic, a variation, not a deviation, of human nature. And how can an innate instinct be the subject of discrimination?
But just as many gay men don't want to know. It's a predisposition, they say, what does it matter what kind? If science delves into the cause, then bet on it, someone will set about finding a "cure." More to the point, they argue, determining the why of homosexuality won't end prejudice.
"The emphasis on finding a biological cause is much more widespread among activists in the U.S. than in Canada," says political scientist David Rayside, director of the University of Toronto's Sexual Diversity Centre.
"Most people here don't care or think the fight for gay rights shouldn't hinge on finding a cause."
Theories have been floated for more than a century on what triggers homosexuality. Nurture - a psychologically troubled relationship between parents and child - held top billing until the start of the 1990s, when the tide shifted toward nature.
Two American scientists set the research and the debate in motion.
In 1991, Simon LeVay, a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in California, examined the brains of 41 individuals; 19 gay men who died of AIDS, 16 heterosexuals of drugs-related AIDS and six women, of whom one had died of the disease.
Already aware that certain areas of the brain are bigger in men than in women, LeVay checked to see if there was a size variation with the gay men.
To his surprise, he found that one grouping of cells associated with sexual activity was twice as large in straight men as it was in both gays and women.
LeVay emphasized that his work didn't show "how or when sexual orientation is determined, only that it is an aspect of human nature that can be studied by biologists." But the media ran with it, playing down widespread criticism that he hadn't factored in the effect of AIDS on the brain.
Princeton University psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover's reaction was typical:
"The discovery of brain difference per se is on a par with the discovery that athletes have bigger muscles than non-athletes. Though a genetic tendency toward larger muscles may make it easier to become an athlete, becoming an athlete will certainly give one bigger muscles."
LeVay still maintains, however, that exposure to one or more hormones at an early stage in male fetal development can permanently alter the brain and the pattern of later sexual behaviour. Gay himself, he has written that he wonders if "the positions taken by researchers are merely the expression of their own personal attitudes and prejudices, whether pro or anti-gay, that have been dressed up in academic language."
In 1993, a study of 76 gay men by geneticist Dean Hamer at the U.S. National Cancer Institute found that uncles and male cousins on the mother's side were more likely to be gay than those on the father's side. This suggested a "gay gene" might be located on the X chromosome, which boys get only from their mothers.
Hamer then studied 40 pairs of gay brothers, sampling their DNA and scouring their X chromosomes for any regions they had in common, and duly announced that such a site, shared by two-thirds of the brothers, had been found. The research would have to be replicated before the results could be confirmed, Hamer stressed. To no avail.
Because of the social, political, and cultural implications, his results - inevitably headlined "Gay gene found" - were hailed globally as a major breakthrough. Wrongly so, said the genetics community. The coverage was inflated, simplistic and misleading. No "gay gene" had been found, nor ever would be. Why? Because behavioural genetics is much more complex than "Mendelian" genetics. In other words, traits such as eye colour are 100 per cent inheritable but the genetic contribution to various behaviours, aggression, shyness, extroversion and so on, is considerably less, below 50 per cent.
Ruth Hubbard, Harvard emeritus professor of biology and biochemistry and author of Exploding the Gene Myth, has said that searching for a gay gene "is not even a worthwhile pursuit.
"I don't think there is any single gene that governs any complex human behaviour. There are genetic components in everything we do, and it is foolish to say genes are not involved, but I don't think they are decisive."
Together, LeVay and Hamer had made an intriguing case, certainly for the media, but far from a persuasive one.
By the end of the '90s, interest in the hunt for a gay gene had waned. Why, skeptics asked, would there be one when it plays no role in the evolutionary scheme of things?
Why, gay activists wondered, expend energy on finding a reason for their orientation when the fight for equal rights was still on the front burner?
Since then, the scientific consensus is that sexual proclivity is influenced, but not hardwired, by DNA. Geneticist Francis Collins, head of the international Human Genome Project, has written that "whatever genes are involved represent predispositions, not predeterminations."
To those with heavy science background, pls prove me wrong. I hope to be proved wrong about the general belief that homosexuality is just a choice/preference. Is there a serious study that proves there really is a"gay" gene? And is it social-driven?
If yes, I (can) accept.......... that homosexuality is not preference, it's a minor disorder, and they’re welcome to get government benefits/handouts/vouchers.......... for the purpose of controlling the urges and curing it by taking medications.
I believe there is a scientific study on mice that when placed in a confined environment they will start homosexuality and baby killing to contain the population within their confinements.
Humans are after all part of the animal kingdom so the reaction should be the same.
If yes, I (can) accept.......... that homosexuality is not preference, it's a minor disorder, and they’re welcome to get government benefits/handouts/vouchers.......... for the purpose of controlling the urges and curing it by taking medications.
Disorder? Shall we prepare the human ovens?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tri-ring
I believe there is a scientific study on mice that when placed in a confined environment they will start homosexuality and baby killing to contain the population within their confinements.
Humans are after all part of the animal kingdom so the reaction should be the same.
So, after being freed, do they continue the process, or do they change preference once again (unfaithful creatures!)?
OK where is the PROOF that gays are born rather than made? I've heard and read the arguments............. but I have seen NO PROOF, either way there just many CLAIMS.
AND what about the discovery by some English Scientist that they claimed was a cure for homo RAMS that so many sheep herders have been complaining about? (I Heard the Gays and Lesbians raised one hell of a commotion about it even being mentioned!) iirc Some Brit Scientist referred to a CHEMICAL imbalance? (guess I'll have to go find that article)
One more thing concerning Incests.
Although it is not popular idea, the bible does not condemn this since if they did then the whole dogma will fall apart not being able to explain how humans were able to propagate from one couple and again from a family after the great flood.
OK where is the PROOF that gays are born rather than made? I've heard and read the arguments............. but I have seen NO PROOF, either way there just many CLAIMS.
You have to live to understand. Until then wait for the results of researches.
And, if you have not seen any proof, why are you so eager to reject any kind of possibility (just to be fair to you, otherwise, my opinion on this issue is clear)?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tri-ring
One more thing concerning Incests.
Although it is not popular idea, the bible does not condemn this since if they did then the whole dogma will fall apart not being able to explain how humans were able to propagate from one couple and again from a family after the great flood.
How exactly? If two were created by the God, then he could have easily created more, if propagation were to fail. And, weren't they the same in essence, one being created from the other's ribs. Strange. The more you think about it, the more you admire the other creatures.
OK where is the PROOF that gays are born rather than made? I've heard and read the arguments............. but I have seen NO PROOF, either way there just many CLAIMS.
Is there proof that heteros are born rather than made? The truth is that there's much we don't know.
Does it matter, though? The question is, why should we discriminate against homosexuals? For the most part, they certainly didn't consciously choose to be so. You'd need a serious self-destructive streak for that. Also, did you consciously choose to be hetero? I didn't. Is there a form to file?
As for it being a chemical imbalance... We could say the same about anything. Being in love. Being Republican. Being muslim. You're going to medicate the hell out of those, too?
OK where is the PROOF that gays are born rather than made? I've heard and read the arguments............. but I have seen NO PROOF, either way there just many CLAIMS.
AND what about the discovery by some English Scientist that they claimed was a cure for homo RAMS that so many sheep herders have been complaining about? (I Heard the Gays and Lesbians raised one hell of a commotion about it even being mentioned!) iirc Some Brit Scientist referred to a CHEMICAL imbalance? (guess I'll have to go find that article)
If it is a chemical reaction triggered by stress then it means we may all show the same reaction.
Sea turtle's gender is dictated by temprature during incubation. You are just trying to deny the obvious.
Last edited by Tri-ring; 2008-11-08 at 04:02.
Reason: to give relative scientific reference
Gay gene lol Would I make more sense if I say that noone has found the gene that causes homosexuality? Was that site really promoting misinformation? It didn't hit me that way, so, pardon me for the half-heartedness. I went out of my way for these articles and I'm not doing this tedious stuff again. Hopefully, these are enough sources. There's more articles out there but people can do their own search.
Spoiler for 3 articles.:
Kunzig R. FINDING THE SWITCH. Psychology Today [serial online]. May 2008;41(3):88-93. Available from: Academic Search Premier, Ipswich, MA. Accessed November 8, 2008.
HOMOSEXUALITY MAY PERSIST BECAUSE THE ASSOCIATED GENES CONVEY SURPRISING ADVANTAGES ON HOMOSEXUALS FAMILY MEMBERS
IF THERE IS one thing that has always seemed obvious about homosexuality, it's that it just doesn't make sense. Evolution favors traits that aid reproduction, and being gay clearly doesn't do that. The existence of homosexuality amounts to a profound evolutionary mystery, since failing to pass on your genes means that your genetic fitness is a resounding zero. "Homosexuality is effectively like sterilization," says psychobiologist Qazi Rahman of Queen Mary College in London. "You'd think evolution would get rid of it." Yet as far as historians can tell, homosexuality has always been with us. So the question remains: If it's such a disadvantage in the evolutionary rat race, why was it not selected into oblivion millennia ago?
Twentieth-century psychiatry had an answer for this Darwinian paradox: Homosexuality was not a biological trait at all but a psychological defect. It was a mistake, one that was always being created anew, in each generation, by bad parenting Freud considered homosexuality a form of arrested development stamped on a child by a distant father or an overprotective mother. Homosexuality was even listed by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder, and the idea that gays could and should be "cured" was widely accepted. But modern scientific research has not been kind to that idea. It turns out that parents of gay men are no better or worse than those of heterosexuals. And homosexual behavior is common in the animal kingdom, as well--among sheep, for instance. It arises naturally and does not seem to be a matter of aloof rams or overbearing ewes.
More is known about homosexuality in men than in women, whose sexuality appears more fluid. The consensus now is that people are "born gay," as the title of a recent book by Rahman and British psychologist Glenn Wilson puts it. But for decades, researchers have sought to identify the mechanism that makes a person gay.
SOMETHING SEEMS TO flip the sexuality switch before birth--but what? In many cases, homosexuality appears to be genetic. The best scientific surveys put the number of gays in the general population between 2 and 6 percent, with most estimates near the low end of that range--contrary to the 10 percent figure that is often reported in the popular media. But we know gayness is not entirely genetic, because in pairs of identical twins, it's often the case that one is gay and the other is not. Studies suggest there is a genetic basis for homosexuality in only 50 percent of gay men.
No one has yet identified a particular gay gene, but Brian Mustanski, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is examining a gene that helps time the release of testosterone from the testes of a male fetus. Testosterone masculinizes the fetal genitalia--and presumably also the brain. Without it, the fetus stays female. It may be that the brains of gay men don't feel the full effects of testosterone at the right time during fetal development, and so are insufficiently masculinized.
But if that gene does prove to be a gay gene, it's unlikely to be the only one. Whatever brain structures are responsible for sexual orientation must emerge from a complex chain of molecular events, one that can be disrupted at many links. Gay genes could be genes for hormones, enzymes that modify hormones, or receptors on the surface of brain cells that bind to those hormones. A mutation in any one of those genes might make a person gay.
More likely it will take mutations in more than one gene. And that, as Rahman and Wilson and other researchers have suggested, is one solution to the Darwinian paradox: Gay genes might survive because so long as a man doesn't have enough of them to make him gay, they increase the reproductive success of the woman he mates with. Biologists call it "sexually antagonistic selection," meaning a trait survives in one sex only because it is useful to the other. Nipples--useless to men, vital to women--are one example, and homosexuality may be another. By interfering with the masculinization of the brain, gay genes might promote feminine behavior traits, making men who carry them kinder, gentler, more nurturing--"less aggressive and psychopathic than the typical male," as Rahman and Wilson put it. Such men may be more likely to help raise children rather than kill them--or each other--and as a result, women may be more likely to choose them as mates.
In this way, over thousands of generations of sexual selection, feminizing genes may have spread through the male population. When the number of such genes exceeds a certain threshold in a man, they may flip the switch and make him want to have sex with other men. Evolutionarily speaking, that is bad for him. But for the women who are doing the selecting, the loss of a small number of potential mates may be a small price to pay for creating a much larger number of the kind of men they want.
SOME GAY GENES may benefit women more directly--to the detriment of their own sons. The evidence comes from groundbreaking studies by Andrea Camperio-Ciani, a researcher at the University of Padua in Italy. Camperio was interested in understanding the evolutionary paradox and began by replicating a family-tree study done in the early 1990s by geneticist Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health. Hamer had concluded that some cases of homosexuality are passed down on the X chromosome, which a boy receives from his mother. Camperio and his colleagues compared the family trees of gay men to those of straight men, and confirmed that homosexuals had more gay male relatives on their mother's side than on their father's side--which suggests an X-linked trait. But the Italian researchers also found something more intriguing: Compared with the straight men, the gay men had more relatives, period.
Camperio did not quite know at first what to make of these results--or how they might help him understand the Darwinian paradox of homosexuality. Then one day, he was driving through the forest with his daughter, on the way to their country house. Their tradition was to play mathematical games to keep themselves entertained. This time, he began talking about a different puzzle. "I began explaining my research," Camperio recalls. "I explained to her that we found out that homosexuals come from large families. I told her that there is an inheritance from the mother--she's giving the homosexual genes to her son. I said, 'This is impossible--how can they be surviving?'"
His daughter, 15, replied, "But Dad, did you check if this factor that makes sons homosexual is not the same factor that makes the mother produce more children and have big families?"
Camperio stopped the car, looked her in the eyes, and said, "Shit! What is this? It's a great suggestion?"
The next day he left his daughter in the country and went back to the lab to investigate the idea. Sure enough, the mothers of homosexuals in the study did indeed have between a quarter and a third more children than the mothers of heterosexuals. Camperio also uncovered another dramatic finding: In families with gay sons, the aunts from the mother's side had many more children than the aunts on the father's side--the large families, in other words, were on the maternal side. Camperio realized his daughter was right. "There was something in the genes that, in the male, changed his sexual orientation, and in the female, increased her probability of having children," he says.
What could it be? Camperio spent the next few years going to gay men and begging them to let him interview their mothers and aunts--a daunting task in deeply Catholic Italy. In the end, it took him three years to get 30 subjects. When he interviewed the women, though, he found they had fewer miscarriages, fewer infections, and used fewer contraceptives than the mothers and aunts of heterosexuals, though the differences were only slight. One difference, though, was not slight at all: The homosexuals' mothers and aunts had had between three and four times as many sexual partners. They seemed to really like having sex with men.
Camperio's explanation for all this relies, like Rahman and Wilson's hypothesis, on sexually antagonistic selection. Perhaps, he suggests, the mothers of some homosexuals have a "man-loving" gene. In women, it would be adaptive, causing them to have more sex and more children. But in men, the "man-loving" gene would be expressed differently, causing homosexuality. To the gay sons, that would be an evolutionary disadvantage--but one outweighed by the advantage to the mothers, who would have more than enough other children to compensate. And so gayness in men would persist in these families--as a side effect of a trait that is beneficial to the women.
But even Camperio says his results can explain no more than 20 percent of the incidence of homosexuality. "The more we study, the more we find there will be other mechanisms," he says. His research confirms that there are many ways to become gay--including, perhaps, one way that is much stranger than the rest.
THE GAY MEN in Camperio's study didn't just have larger families than the straight men. They also had more older brothers--and not just because they came from larger families. It's true across the board: The more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay. The "fraternal birth order effect" was first uncovered by Ray Blanchard and Anthony Bogaert of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and has since been replicated by a dozen other studies.
For every older brother a man has, his chances of being gay go up by around a third. In other words, if you have two older brothers, you're nearly twice as likely to be gay--regardless of whether the older brothers are themselves gay. It is not possible to explain that as an effect of genetics.
Some researchers have tried to explain it as an effect the older brothers have on their sibling's environment. Perhaps a boy grows up homosexual, one argument goes, because the presence of older brothers means more incestuous sex play early in life. Or perhaps their presence makes his parents treat him differently.
But in another study, Bogaert found that it was only biological older brothers that contributed to the effect. Men who grew up with older stepbrothers or adopted brothers--brothers born of different wombs--were no more likely to become gay. Meanwhile, men with biological older brothers who died in infancy or who were raised separately--including brothers they had never even met and sometimes didn't even know about--did manifest the effect. In other words, the effect could not be explained through upbringing.
If it wasn't genetic and it wasn't upbringing, then what could it possibly be? The answer is the prenatal environment--the result of something that occurs as the fetus develops in the womb.
So what happens in the womb to make a fetus gay? Researchers can only speculate, but Blanchard and Bogaert suggest the older-brother effect could result from a mother's immune reaction against her male fetuses. During her first male pregnancy, the mother's body reacts against some factor related to male fetal development. Her immune system detects male-specific proteins produced by the boy's Y chromosome--perhaps proteins located on the surface of his brain cells--and deems them foreign invaders. As a result, her body generates antibodies against them. Each successive male pregnancy strengthens this immune response. The next time she's pregnant, the anti-male antibodies cross through the placenta and influence the fetus's brain, interfering with the masculinization of his brain and making him gay.
It may even be that women with strong immune systems are more likely to produce gay sons. The reproductive advantages to her of having such a healthy constitution might outweigh the disadvantages of occasionally producing a son who will have no kids himself. Even if the immunization scenario is true, however, it explains only 15 to 30 percent of the cases of male homosexuality. "My theory is not meant to explain homosexuality in all males--obviously not in firstborn males," says Blanchard. "And it does not explain homosexuality in women at all." It's really just a "working hypothesis," says Bogaert, for a strange and puzzling phenomenon.
Most recently, Bogaert, Blanchard, and their colleagues have found that older brothers increase the likelihood of homosexuality only in men who are right-handed--even though left-handed men are more likely to be gay in general. "We don't really know what that means," says Bogaert. It's one more piece of evidence, though, that homosexuality is determined biologically, before birth--just like handedness. As often happens with science, the mystery deepens and becomes more complicated before the ultimate pattern finally reveals itself.
SO HOW DO the pieces fit together? So far, they don't. Rather, they exist side by side. "There is no all-inclusive explanation for the variation in sexual orientation, at least none supported by actual evidence," says geneticist Alan Sanders of Northwestern University. It's one of the most consistent themes to emerge from the literature on homosexuality: the idea that there are many different mechanisms, not a single one, for producing homosexuality. Neither Camperio nor Bogaert sees much of a connection between the female-fecundity theory and the older-brother effect. "They are somewhat disparate," Bogaert says.
"But that is compatible with the idea that there are multiple biological pathways affecting sexual orientation."
The biggest gap in the science of homosexuality concerns lesbians: Much less research has been done on them than on men. That's because women's sexuality seems to be more complicated and fluid--women are much more likely to report fantasizing about both sexes, or to change how they report their sexual orientation over time--which makes it harder to study. "Maybe we're measuring sexual orientation totally wrong in women," says Mustanski. Rahman and Wilson suggest that lesbianism might result from "masculinizing" genes that, when not present to excess, make a woman a more aggressively protective and thus successful mother--just as feminizing genes might make a man a more caring father.
Right now, there is no one all-inclusive solution to the Darwinian mystery of why homosexuality survives, and no grand unified theory of how it arises in a given individual. Homosexuality seems to arise as a result of various perturbations in the flow from genes to hormones to brains to behavior--as the common end point of multiple biological paths, all of which seem to survive as side effects of various traits that help heterosexuals pass along their genes.
"It's the fundamental question for the next 10 years," says Mustanski. "How do these things interact? What is the model that explains all these things?"
------------------------------------
Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. Columbia, 1991. "A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America" (title page).
Hamer, Dean and Copeland, Peter. The Science of Desire. Simon & Schuster, 1994. "The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior" (subtitle).
Isay, Richard A. Being Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1989. The timing of awareness that one might be gay and effect on subsequent personal relationships.
Origins of Homosexuality
Gender identities and gender roles are highly complex phenomena, and there is no single cause for homosexuality. Male or female anatomical sex characteristics are determined at the time of conception, but environmental factors may influence the individual's later acceptance of his or her gender role. The homosexual may to all outward appearances enjoy the existing anatomical gender role and yet seek sexual gratification with members of his or her own sex.
Research prior to the 1990s generally supported the view that sexual orientation is learned, not genetically or physiologically determined. For example, chromosome counts and endocrine studies in homosexuals showed no more than the average number of deviations from the normal. In 1993, however, researchers at the National Cancer Institute reported preliminary evidence that many gay men shared a particular genetic marker in the X chromosome. A follow-up report (1995) also found evidence of the "gay gene," but results of a Canadian study published in 1999 offered no support for the existence of an X-linked gene related to male homosexuality.
Hunting the gay gene;
With the pendulum swinging back and forth between nature and nurture as explanations for sexual preference, critics argue that science is asking a simplistic and dangerous question
BYLINE: Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star
SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. ID03
LENGTH: 1070 words
Gay men believe their sexual orientation is inextricably bound up with their very being. It is not a choice - let alone the "wrong choice," as religious and political critics have counter-claimed for years.
Many believe they simply were "born that way," and long for proof that their sexual proclivity is biological or genetic, a variation, not a deviation, of human nature. And how can an innate instinct be the subject of discrimination?
But just as many gay men don't want to know. It's a predisposition, they say, what does it matter what kind? If science delves into the cause, then bet on it, someone will set about finding a "cure." More to the point, they argue, determining the why of homosexuality won't end prejudice.
"The emphasis on finding a biological cause is much more widespread among activists in the U.S. than in Canada," says political scientist David Rayside, director of the University of Toronto's Sexual Diversity Centre.
"Most people here don't care or think the fight for gay rights shouldn't hinge on finding a cause."
Theories have been floated for more than a century on what triggers homosexuality. Nurture - a psychologically troubled relationship between parents and child - held top billing until the start of the 1990s, when the tide shifted toward nature.
Two American scientists set the research and the debate in motion.
In 1991, Simon LeVay, a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in California, examined the brains of 41 individuals; 19 gay men who died of AIDS, 16 heterosexuals of drugs-related AIDS and six women, of whom one had died of the disease.
Already aware that certain areas of the brain are bigger in men than in women, LeVay checked to see if there was a size variation with the gay men.
To his surprise, he found that one grouping of cells associated with sexual activity was twice as large in straight men as it was in both gays and women.
LeVay emphasized that his work didn't show "how or when sexual orientation is determined, only that it is an aspect of human nature that can be studied by biologists." But the media ran with it, playing down widespread criticism that he hadn't factored in the effect of AIDS on the brain.
Princeton University psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover's reaction was typical:
"The discovery of brain difference per se is on a par with the discovery that athletes have bigger muscles than non-athletes. Though a genetic tendency toward larger muscles may make it easier to become an athlete, becoming an athlete will certainly give one bigger muscles."
LeVay still maintains, however, that exposure to one or more hormones at an early stage in male fetal development can permanently alter the brain and the pattern of later sexual behaviour. Gay himself, he has written that he wonders if "the positions taken by researchers are merely the expression of their own personal attitudes and prejudices, whether pro or anti-gay, that have been dressed up in academic language."
In 1993, a study of 76 gay men by geneticist Dean Hamer at the U.S. National Cancer Institute found that uncles and male cousins on the mother's side were more likely to be gay than those on the father's side. This suggested a "gay gene" might be located on the X chromosome, which boys get only from their mothers.
Hamer then studied 40 pairs of gay brothers, sampling their DNA and scouring their X chromosomes for any regions they had in common, and duly announced that such a site, shared by two-thirds of the brothers, had been found. The research would have to be replicated before the results could be confirmed, Hamer stressed. To no avail.
Because of the social, political, and cultural implications, his results - inevitably headlined "Gay gene found" - were hailed globally as a major breakthrough. Wrongly so, said the genetics community. The coverage was inflated, simplistic and misleading. No "gay gene" had been found, nor ever would be. Why? Because behavioural genetics is much more complex than "Mendelian" genetics. In other words, traits such as eye colour are 100 per cent inheritable but the genetic contribution to various behaviours, aggression, shyness, extroversion and so on, is considerably less, below 50 per cent.
Ruth Hubbard, Harvard emeritus professor of biology and biochemistry and author of Exploding the Gene Myth, has said that searching for a gay gene "is not even a worthwhile pursuit.
"I don't think there is any single gene that governs any complex human behaviour. There are genetic components in everything we do, and it is foolish to say genes are not involved, but I don't think they are decisive."
Together, LeVay and Hamer had made an intriguing case, certainly for the media, but far from a persuasive one.
By the end of the '90s, interest in the hunt for a gay gene had waned. Why, skeptics asked, would there be one when it plays no role in the evolutionary scheme of things?
Why, gay activists wondered, expend energy on finding a reason for their orientation when the fight for equal rights was still on the front burner?
Since then, the scientific consensus is that sexual proclivity is influenced, but not hardwired, by DNA. Geneticist Francis Collins, head of the international Human Genome Project, has written that "whatever genes are involved represent predispositions, not predeterminations."
Those articles are a lot more reliable than the nutjob site you first posted, so I took the time to read them for real, and...
Pardon me if I misunderstand your position (in which case ignore this post), but I think the articles in question support our position and not yours. The first one is from a popular magazine rather than a peer reviewed journal, but nonetheless I will treat it as credible enough. What it says is not that there are "no gay genes" but rather that the biological makeup of an individual that predisposes one towards homosexuality is complex. Not having a single clear-cut gay gene is not the same as not having a biological predisposition whatsoever, and the article in fact talks a lot about the various findings and attempts to establish correlation between the statistics and the tendency for homosexuality.
In other words, it implicitly declares that "nature" is definitely there, just not some easy "cha-ching!" answer some demand to hear. One of the key phrases in that article is the concept of multiple biological pathways affecting sexual orientation. Multiple, not none. The researches are so far inconclusive, and no theory dominates, but that doesn't mean the facts behind them are nonexistent, or that the theories themselves are wrong.
I cannot access the second article so I cannot give a full opinion of it, but the key phrase in the excerpt you posted is "Research prior to 1990." Which leads to your third article...
The Toronto Star is hardly an expert publication on psychology, but the article in question does primarily two things: first, it clarifies your second example, as it clearly points out that there has been major developments in the study of homosexuality and genetics after the 1990 date. And second, it questions the very purpose of the need to find the gay gene. The question it posts very much supports my and others' position in that it asks, quite clearly, on why must gays need to justify their orientation biologically to be able to achieve equal rights in the first place.
They don't. I don't need to figure out the Democratic gene to favor President-Elect Obama over Senator John McCain, right? Do I need to find out the magic anime gene to fight for my right to free expression involving this particular medium? No?*
Then why must gays go through all that crap just to be able to legally legitimize their relationship and enjoy the benefits that come with it like other people do?
Because of someone's prejudice?
[/Off Topic]
P.S. I find that one of the distinguishable aspects of people who really need to go back and understand science is when one demands absolute, irrefutable proof to accept the plausibility of something. Scientific knowledge doesn't work that way, sorry. To those who question this, go read Stephen Jay Gould. The late biologist/defender of scientific knowledge was a far more eloquent man than I can hope to be, and he explained himself and the sciences he work for very well indeed.
*These examples are somewhat far-fetched, and in fact a bit fallacious, though they contain the same idea and help illustrate the irrelevancy of the dilemma. A similar biological example also exists, though; is there a single introvert-extrovert gene? No, right? Are introversion and extroversion biologically predefined? No either, right? Are introversion and extroversion biologically predisposed? Many would say so. Interesting researches about the brain differences put the idea on the board, but it is likely that the predisposition results from more than one genetic influence. Can this natural tendency -- keyword being tendency -- be suppressed culturally, by "nurture?" Possibly.
Location: On the whole, I'd rather be in Kyoto ...
Age: 66
Quote:
Originally Posted by mg1942
To those with heavy science background, pls prove me wrong. I hope to be proved wrong about the general belief that homosexuality is just a choice/preference. Is there a serious study that proves there really is a"gay" gene? And is it social-driven?
If yes, I (can) accept.......... that homosexuality is not preference, it's a minor disorder, and they’re welcome to get government benefits/handouts/vouchers.......... for the purpose of controlling the urges and curing it by taking medications.
1) There is no "general belief" that homosexuality is a preference. That's a proposal pushed by religious groups that abhor homosexuality but the research no longer finds credible.
2) Stop using the term "gay gene". There was some speculation about there being some combination of DNA that led to homosexuality but its been found that DNA is simply the "BIOS" of an extremely complicated set of reactions expressed by RNA, enzymes, biomolecular reactions, and chemical processes that go into fetal development. All sorts of variation can occur during those processes.
3) It is noted in the animal kingdom that high population tends to exaggerate homosexual activity. Period. It is not known whether the stress factors trigger chemical changes or if so, whether the changes are fetal or later. That's why the scientists still study.
4) Many decades ago, psychologists labeled homosexuality as a disorder.... well, psychology is a soft science (unlike, say, neuroscience) and is prone to be tainted by social views of the day (like anthropology and sociology). They no longer list it as a disorder. Therefore, no "cure" is being sought. Obsession can be a disorder... there is medication for that.
5) There is research that indicates brain structure of homosexuals is different than that of heterosexuals. I've not followed up to see if that line of thought has been extended.
6) Science is an evolving model of the world based on research and data collection. A biology book of today makes the biology I took high school 30+ years ago look like stone tablets and voodoo. Its a good idea to keep up with the current model of reality.
The fun in Alaska continues as the left starts to suggest something more is going on... electoral fraud since the numbers don't add up?
(538 runs an estimated extrapolation and basically comes up with the answer: "It completely depends on how the remaining ballots split, but it should favor Begich.")
This all may not matter because the republicans are talking about getting rid of Stevens if he wins.
There is a 221 vote difference (<.01%) for the Minnesota senator spot between Coleman and Franken. Coleman is saying Franken should concede so that the state does not have to incur the expense of a recount. Your "democracy" at work.
There is just too much Palin stupidity to ignore this:
First the county where Palin gave her famous "real america" speech went blue...
Now she claims:
Quote:
“I know that I know that I know that there was nothing done wrong in the campaign,” she said. Palin complained that the other 49 states “aren’t quite there” like Alaska because they don’t allow the same “equal opportunities and equal treatment.”
After that Newsweek article, I can buy that McCain's campaign people are basically making her the scape-goat, but she really seems to have it coming to her.
2008-11-08, 02:38
Author
I went out of my way for these articles and I'm not doing this tedious stuff again. Hopefully, these are enough sources. There's more articles out there but people can do their own search.
