I didn’t realize this thread was still going. I’ll answer you in the other thread because it is more apropriate. We are probably lucky that Dr. Throckmorton didn’t throw us out because this thread is about the APA. 😎

Religion isn’t the reason I question the “what” and “why” of homosexuality. It doesn’t have to be immoral or something to condemn. If you believe that every cell in your body is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection an exclusive homosexual orientation doesn’t make rational sense.

So now Darwinian evolution is something you feel in your bones? Who has ever said a homosexual orientation has to be exclusive? Whether a moralistic or religious determination, your emotionalism is not making a scientific determination there.

Drowssap (26722):

A lot of hypothesis have been put forward to explain how a gene could survive inspite of this. I have read them all and they are all silly. The latest is the increased fertility hypothesis. Somehow the gene that causes homosexuality in men also increases a woman’s fertility. I won’t waste a page debunking that kind of illogical silliness, unless someone wants to read it.

Please do…. Gavrilets and Rice in “Genetic models of homosexuality: generating testable predictions.” (Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2006) 273, 3031-3038) say you’re wrong. Rice has said, “I think that it is too early to decide which of our models (or one yet to be formulated) is most feasible. However, based on the abundance of sexually antagonistic variation found in fruit flies, the sexually antagonistic variation seems like a probable candidate process leading to polymorphism for homosexuality.” [see: http://www.physorg.com/news84720662.html%5D. Sexually antagonistic traits are those that are advantageous in one sex, but may cause a nonadvantageous trait (such as homosexuality) in the other sex. Thus fertility in females vs homosexuality in males would qualify as those possible sexually antagonistic traits.

Well, I had to throw that in here….

…

And while we are at it, there is no evidence that proves that homosexuality does NOT contribute some sort of survival advantage in some OTHER way… In battle, perhaps some gay soldiers help the other troops survive. Maybe a gay doctor discovers a cure for cancer. Maybe gays bring skills, viewpoints, talents, perspectives — a variety of important cultural and scientific contributions that might actually ADD to the general fund of knowledge of the species? Maybe a wide variety of viewpoints and experiences is ESSENTIAL to the survival of the HUMAN species? Isn’t that possible? I believe so. It is not just the strongest who survive and reproduce, but the smartest and the most adaptible.

I think that humanity is much more than a genetic rat race where only the genetically superior prevail. There is anthropological evidence that many wandering nomadic tribes would actually carry those who were too old or sick to hunt (slowing the tribe down and putting them at risk) — because these weak ones and elders were SPECIAL to the community. They needed their wisdom and their love. Not every culture drowned them in streams or pushed them off on an ice flow — as a strict “survial of the species” narrative would suggest.