Scientists Discover Evolutionary Advantage For Homosexuality

a reply to: schuyler

That experiment sounds fine and all, but nowhere in my link did any scientist try to correlate sexual identity with IQ.

In fact, IQ is entirely subjective.

That is all.

a reply to: yuppa

That's why I wish gay people would stop the IVF/Donor parent BS and adopt children in need.

Call me bigoted but I believe you forego the right to bear children when you prefer the same-sex....plus plenty of children who need loving parents, whether those parents are the same sex of not.

originally posted by: ColdWisdom
a reply to: schuyler

That experiment sounds fine and all, but nowhere in my link did any scientist try to correlate sexual identity with IQ.

In fact, IQ is entirely subjective.

That is all.

Is there a facepalm symbol here? I need it. Good Lord! How could you POSSIBLY get it so entirely wrong? It's NOT about IQ, OK? Forget about IQ. I never said or intimated in any way that you were trying to correlate sexual identity with IQ. Somehow you managed to jump to that conclusion.

You cited a so-called "study" that correlated homosexuality with hair patterns. I cited a "study" that correlated thumbprint patterns with IQ. They are TWO DIFFERENT studies about TWO DIFFERENT issues. Now what's common between the two studies? BOTH purport to show a correlation between two things that are highly unlikely to really be correlated. THAT'S why I suggested anyone can come up with a stupid hypothesis. In fact, they are almost as stupid as suggesting homosexuality is a survival characteristic.

Cheese & Crackers, Got all muddy. I wonder about ATS sometimes.

originally posted by: yuppa

originally posted by: RobotBomb
If two individuals can't breed and produce offspring there is ZERO evolutionary advantage.

ever though tthat MAYBE being gay was specifically natures way of controlling the population?

That's actually a really interesting thought, Nature does always try to find a balance and an increasing number of homosexuals in a population would keep the numbers down, that is if we disregard surrogacy which is an increasingly popular trend.

a reply to: LightAssassin

Call me bigoted but I believe you forego the right to bear children when you prefer the same-sex....

I won't call you bigoted, but I will call you ignorant.

Adopting children is a wonderful and rewarding thing to do as a parent whether gay or straight.

But being gay, isn't a choice. Just like being heterosexual isn't a choice.

If someone wants to give birth to a child IVF who are you to tell them it is wrong?

If you were gay and you wanted to have a child and pass your genes on wouldn't you want to make use of IVF?

a reply to: schuyler

That was only one page in the entire study. I didn't think it would be fair of me to hijack this thread with 7 pages of quotes from the article.

But the hair whorl is just one example. If you cared to read the entire article (which is 7 pages of scientific experiments) you would realize that the personal experience that you shared is entirely irrelevant to the point that I was trying to make.

a reply to: ColdWisdom

It's not ignorace....

It's not even bigotry....

Same sex couples will only ever be able to produce children who have only 50% of one parents DNA, and the other 50% is a total stranger, or friend....fact is that child will never be actually 100% genetically theirs.....so why bother? Instead adopt a child from birth.

It's far more efficient and useful, and surely the result is the same with parents having a gorgeous child they can call their own.

originally posted by: Tardacus
but if they have offspring then they aren`t homosexual, they are bi-sexual fruit flies.

Yup, I am going to agree with you on this. I suppose the male fruitfly gets to go bed with two bi females and he's all excited by the threesome. That's why the reproduction went up.

a reply to: ColdWisdom

IQ is subjective, are you kidding me.

IQ test and its correlatives like the ACT/SAT and PISA scores have real predictive powers. They are measuring something. At aggregate/population levels it can correlate with a ridiculous amount of things. Unemployment, Divorce rates, income, etc.
At country level average IQ can predict crime rates, corruption, number of scientist, life expectancy, level of democracy, poverty. 97 is considered the minimum average IQ for a modern society. Below 90 and democracy falls apart.

srry for offtopic. Just cant let people read that without a counterpoint.

originally posted by: schuyler

originally posted by: ColdWisdom
Some people believe that homosexuality in nature is a way for a species to curb it's overpopulation.

Yuppa just said that 5 posts up. And not to put too fine a point on it, but if that's the strategy, it didn't work.

Could it maybe, just maybe, be because of religions?

a reply to: NthOther

I see you’ve got a lot of stars from the rest of the can’t-face-the-truth gang.

"Scientists" publish garbage like this and then expect us to take them seriously? How can organisms who do not reproduce--by definition, if homosexual--have an evolutionary advantage?

The mistake is to imagine that natural selection operates on individuals.

In fact, it operates on genes. This has been widely accepted in evoutionary biology since the 1970s.

The homosexual organism need not reproduce personally in order to obtain an evolutionary advantage. All it needs to do is improve the chances of its relatives surviving and reproducing, because they share the same genes.

The ‘gay uncle hypothesis’ is not new. This study is evidence that the hypothesis is true.

The same argument, by the way, explains altruism in nature. The greater the degree of kinship, the greater the advantage in helping another member of the same species, even (in the case of a parent or sibling) to the point of self-sacrifice.

a reply to: LightAssassin

Then I guess you'd be in favor of banning IVF treatment for straight couple as well if they cannot conceive naturally.

originally posted by: NthOther
"Scientists" publish garbage like this and then expect us to take them seriously?

How can organisms who do not reproduce--by definition, if homosexual--have an evolutionary advantage?

It defies common sense, and is so obviously politically motivated.

Idiocy like this makes my eyes glaze over and roll back in my head until they start bleeding.

Total, 100%, grade-A, unadulterated bulls#.

every post you make is religiously motivated and you wallow in spreading hoerse########

Man,people get mad over gay fruit flies,and believe the data as well,and then......assume it applies to humans.. Ahh.... Ok

a reply to: jellyrev

READ

There is absolutely nothing empirical about Intelligence Quotient.

I don't want to derail the thread but,

Do you even know who created the first IQ test, and what purpose it was created for? Look it up for yourself and come back with your findings.

IQ test and its correlatives like the ACT/SAT and PISA scores have real predictive powers.

What kind of predictive powers?

They are measuring something.

Yes, they are indeed measuring something, do you know what it is?

At aggregate/population levels it can correlate with a ridiculous amount of things. Unemployment, Divorce rates, income, etc.
At country level average IQ can predict crime rates, corruption, number of scientist, life expectancy, level of democracy, poverty. 97 is considered the minimum average IQ for a modern society. Below 90 and democracy falls apart

Statistics & correlations with crimes and behavior are just that, statistics

There is nothing scientifically empirical about IQ. Show me just one source, any at all, that defines IQ as being anything inherently objective.

P.S. I'll save you the time, you can't. Because it isn't. This has already been debated on this forum many times and the fact that you would tout that paragraph the same way the OP touts his signature tells me you haven't a solid understanding on cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and or behavioral psychology.

Intelligence Quotient is a sociological construct created to determine what your intelligence is (intelligence as defined by the test makers, remember) in the moment.

ACT/PSAT etc are standardized tests designed to test your reading comprehension levels with application to problem solving skills. Never do these tests actually measure your capacity to learn.

There is much a difference between what you know and can memorize, and how capable you are at applying what you know to real situations.

I'll dig up one of the older threads if I need to but the link at the beginning of this post sums it all up.

a reply to: ColdWisdom

I don't want to derail the thread but

Then please don’t. Thank you in advance.

a reply to: Astyanax

Alright, I'll bite.

These are all links relating to the OP and homosexuality in nature:

Homosexuality is Genetic: Strongest Evidence Yet

Scientists have found even more evidence that sexual orientation is largely determined by genetics, not choice. That can undermine a major argument against the LBGT community that claims that these people are choosing to live "unnaturally."

That's at least according to a new and groundbreaking study recently published in the journal Psychological Medicine, which details how a study of more than 800 gay participants shared notable patterns in two regions of the human genome - one on the X chromosome and one on chromosome 8.
While many previous studies have looked into potential genetic drivers of homosexuality, these studies often boasted a significantly smaller sample size or lacked common controls. This is the first study of its kind to boast such a robust sample size and also be published in a scientific peer-reviewed paper.

Scientists find DNA differences between gay men & their straight twin brothers

On Thursday, UCLA molecular biologist Tuck C. Ngun reported that in studying the genetic material of 47 pairs of identical male twins, he has identified "epigenetic marks" in nine areas of the human genome that are strongly linked to male homosexuality.

In individuals, said Ngun, the presence of these distinct molecular marks can predict homosexuality with an accuracy of close to 70%.

Is homosexuality inherited?

Historians of homosexuality will judge much twentieth-century "science" harshly when they come to reflect on the prejudice, myth, and downright dishonesty that litter modern academic research on sexuality.

Shang-Ding Zhang and Ward F. Odenwald found that what they took to be homosexual behavior among male fruit flies--touching male partners with forelegs, licking their genitalia, and curling their bodies to allow genital contact--could be induced by techniques that abnormally activated a gene called w (for "white," so called because of its effect on eye color). Widespread activation (or "expression") of the white gene in Drosophila produced male-to-male rituals that took place in chains or circles of five or more flies. If female fruit flies lurked nearby, male flies would only rarely be tempted away from their male companions. These findings, which have apparently been reproduced by others, have led the investigators to conclude that "w misexpression has a profound effect on male sexual behavior."

Homosexuality may be caused by chemical modifications to DNA

Indeed, over the past 2 decades, researchers have turned up considerable evidence that homosexuality isn't a lifestyle choice, but is rooted in a person's biology and at least in part determined by genetics. Yet actual “gay genes” have been elusive.

A new study of male twins, scheduled for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) in Baltimore, Maryland, today, could help explain that paradox. It finds that epigenetic effects, chemical modifications of the human genome that alter gene activity without changing the DNA sequence, may have a major influence on sexual orientation.

Researchers thought they were hot on the trail of “gay genes” in 1993, when a team led by geneticist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute reported in Science that one or more genes for homosexuality had to reside on Xq28, a large region on the X chromosome. The discovery generated worldwide headlines, but some teams were unable to replicate the findings and the actual genes have not been found—not even by a team that vindicated Hamer's identification of Xq28 in a sample size 10 times larger than his last year. Twin studies suggested, moreover, that gene sequences can't be the full explanation. For example, the identical twin of a gay man, despite having the same genome, only has a 20% to 50% chance of being gay himself.

That should be enough substance for your thread.

a reply to: ColdWisdom

1. It isn’t my thread.

2. You’re still off topic.

I understand that some backward people still think of homosexual behaviour as unnatural and sinful. That is not the subject of discussion here. Neither are we debating whether homosexuality is hereditary or conditioned.

Accepting that homosexuality is hereditary, we are discussing the first evidence for a long-proposed explanation for why this is so. It is very exciting news from a scientific point of view.

Since, given what you have posted, you believe homosexuality to be hereditary, I suggest that you try to absorb the importance of this discovery. It outdates and makes irrelevant all the theorizing in those articles you posted.

a reply to: Astyanax

For the record, I never explicitly stated anywhere in this thread that I believe homosexuality to be hereditary.

One thing that homosexuality as phenomenon is teaching scientists is that human sexuality is far more complex than we ever thought. There are a myriad of influences on the development of a person ranging from genetics, epigenetics, pre natal, environmental, psychosocial, behavioral etc.

And then what is sexuality? How does one define that?

It could be that the true nature of human sexuality transcends the limitations of biology.

Any paradigm of acceptance among society relating to 'gender/sexuality' should be seen as a sociological construct that does not exist independent of itself.

There are evolutionary advantages to forcefully mating with any female of your species you come across as well. And to killing off all your male rivals.