homosexuality
gregladen | November 18, 2014Of course they do. To the extent that genes make you anything in particular, though the role of genetics in human behavior is pretty limited.
You've probably heard about the newly reported research in which a genetic link was found to homosexuality in a study of gay brothers. Kelly Servick has a good writeup on it here. The study looked at 409 pairs of gay brothers, and found a region on the X chromosome that was similar across the sample. This sort of shotgun approach, comparing a trait (in this case, gayness) with a bunch of DNA (I oversimplify) is very likely to get results that look real…
oracknows | April 5, 2013Over the years this blog's been in existence, I've fallen into a habit in which I tend to like to finish off the week taking on a bit of science (well, usually pseudoscience) that is either really out there, really funny, or in general not as heavy as, for example, writing about someone like Stanislaw Burzysnki. Indeed, for nearly two years, I even turned into a feature, Your Friday Dose of Woo. Eventually, I got a bit tired of being straitjacketed into having to find something kooky or wacky every Friday, and I let the feature lapse. That doesn't mean that I don't still deliver an occasional…
gregladen | July 8, 2011Humans appear to have a reasonable amount of diversity in their sexual orientations, in what is often referred to as "gender" and in adult behavior generally. When convenient, people will point to "genes" as the "cause" of any particular subset of th is diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to "culture" as the "cause" of ... whatever. The "real" story is more complicated, less clear, and very interesting. And, starting now, I promise to stop using so many "scare" quotes.
Prior to birth there are a number of factors than can influence things like gender or sexuality…
sa smith | October 11, 2010Today is National Coming Out Day.
Last week, a young man from Norman OK killed himself, a few days after listening to hours of hateful comments at a Norman City Council meeting.
Watch it.
Comments start at ~min 43.
I picked a time-point at random-- ~ 1 hour in. I got to see a comment by Fred Pope, a hateful, disgusting piece of shit.
Fred Pope said he and his family moved to Norman 15 years ago looking for a place that didn't necessarily embrace the GLBT community.
"We moved here so we could raise a family in a great location," Pope said. "And what this does tonight is begin to undermine…
grrlscientist | July 10, 2010tags: Stephen Fry on Catholicism, Intelligence Squared Debate, religion, catholicism, Catholic Church, poverty, sexuality,homosexuality, AIDS, HIV, condoms, pedophilia, child rape, culture, Stephen Fry, streaming video
Stephen Fry provides his very articulate and thoughtful opinion on Catholicism and the Catholic Church at the Intelligence Squared Debate.
rskloot | July 1, 2010A press release landed in my inbox today with this headline, which raised my eyebrows (as it was obviously intended to do): "First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb." It starts with this quote from Alice Dreger, a Northwestern University bioethicist: "This is the first we know in the history of medicine that clinicians are actively trying to prevent homosexuality." The release was announcing the publication of a piece at the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum titled, "Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb? -- it was written by the same authors that…
razib | February 23, 2010Two posts for your consideration.
On the Less Wrong weblog, Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych. I am not one to make blanket dismissals of "evolutionary psychology." But, there are structural problems with the strong incentives toward generating hypotheses at the equipoise of novelty and intuitive plausibility. In other words, much of the evo-psych which penetrates the broader public mindspace is driven by demand-side forces.
Over at EconLog Bryan Caplan has a post, Born Gay, where the newly famous Ryan Sorba is shown to be pretty close to a total behavior genetics denialist. Until…
grrlscientist | August 28, 2009tags: coming out, sex advice, homosexuality, evangelical families, Dan Savage, streaming video
Dan Savage moved to Seattle while I lived there and began writing a sex advice column for The Stranger. I never missed reading his column because he was honest and accurate and entertaining. Regardless of where in the world I've been since, I have followed his career. This video clip features Dan at University of Maryland, speaking on the tough subject of coming out to a very Christian family. It gives you a little perspective when you hear the story he tells of the abuse that a boyfriend of his…
razib | May 14, 2009I heard on the radio several times in the past few weeks commentators refer to minority opposition to gay marriage, specifically the fact that New York and California have large numbers of blacks and Latinos who are voters. I was curious if Latinos really are notably more opposed to gay marriage than non-Hispanic whites. So I looked in the GSS. I limited the data to the years 2006 and 2008 for the variable MARHOMO, which asks:
Do you agree or disagree? j. Homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another.
The sample sizes for the groups are as follows:
Non-Hispanic whites = 2,292…
razib | April 26, 2009One of the arguments of some younger social conservatives (e.g., Ross Douthat) is that while the abortion wars are in stasis, the Right is losing ground when it comes to opposition to gay marriage. Is this true? Below are charts from the GSS with each column representing a year, from the mid-1970s to the 2000s (not necessarily every year, but every few years).
Looks like Ross is right.
gregladen | February 18, 2009Nature, the publishing group, not the Mother, has taken Darwin's 200th as an opportunity to play the race card (which always sells copy) and went ahead and published two opposing views on this question: "Should scientists study race and IQ?
The answers are Yes, argued by Stephen Cici and Wendy Williams of the Dept of Human Development at Cornell, and No, argued by Steven Rose, a neuroscientist at Open University.
I would like to weigh in.
The real answer, as is so often the case, is "You dumbass, what kind of question is that? Think about it further and rephrase the question!"
But I don't…
palmd | February 17, 2009I'm getting really tired of this nature vs. nurture debate when discussing homosexual rights. It's always interesting to investigate the origins of human behavior, and occasionally something is found to be purely genetic, but I suspect that sexuality, like many human attributes, has a complex mix of biological and non-biological causes. That doesn't piss me off. What pisses me off is the insistence by right wing religious cults on "proving" that homosexuality is a choice.
Sexuality phenotype is a tough concept if you really think about it. The harder you try to nail down the difference…
sb admin | January 16, 2009
As some sharp-eyed reader may have already spotted, the SciencePunk blog has relocated to the Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs. Let's take a moment to absorb these new surroundings.
OK, done? Those of you who have already run back to check sciencepunk.com will find it too has changed substantially. Drama abounds!
From today, the whole SciencePunk caboodle is getting cranked up a notch. Wave goodbye to the version 5 we all knew and loved, and say hello to version 6. (Ah, you always wondered what that stray /v5 signified, didn't you? Why not check out v4? Web 1.0-tastic!) The site has…
cwilcox | December 1, 2008A few years ago, there was a lot of debate around a penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo. The couple were clearly very much in love - at least as much as any penguin couple can be, and had been for years. They spent their days making love, singing sweet penguin nothings, and cuddling. They even raised a child - and did a "great job", according to their primary keeper, Rob Gramzay (as quoted in the San Fransisco Chronicle). But still people felt they should not be together, and even tried to ban the book in the gift store about their life. Why? Because Roy and Silo are both males.
Read The…
bleimanb | December 1, 2008A pair of gay penguins at Polar Land in Harbin, north east China has taken to stealing the eggs of straight couples and leaving rocks in place to fool their victims. The penguins, named Anderson Cooper and Clay*** by the zoo keepers, have been outed by their fellow penmates and have since been ostracized by the flock. Fearing for the stress levels of the flock, keepers have taken Anderson and Clay out of their enclosure and segrated them alone in a pen of their own.
"Did you see little miss happy feet the other day? That new beak gloss was a travesty against all things good in this world…