Evan,

Please check that sentence. What are you really saying there? Also, please provide the full reference.

Thanks

This whole debate over small details of what makes the needle point one way or the other will be probably outshined by a more general one in the not-so-distant future. Catherine Dulac of Harvard Medical School already pointed out that sexual dimorphism in the mammalian brain of the rat is insignificant in determining mating behaviour — actually both male and female have very similar neural wiring for mating and reproduction (I have seen the same conclusion drawn by Drosophila researchers). Based on what homology teaches us in relation to humans, let’s say we expect something along the same lines, but in relation to the visual system. We are not from a different class, after all, so we have a significant legacy bequeathed from the ancient biological paths.

We have no device to measure attractions, still we have research indicating at least 32.8% for men and 65.4% for women support for same-sex attractions in the general population (Santtila et al., 2007). I think that’s underreported, due to reasons that pertain to self-concept and gender identity (especially in the case of men). The same human faculty that decides what to report also decides what attractions to act upon. But report is ‘cheaper’, in moral terms…

So I am expecting research to reveal some kind of a bi-sex wiring base that gets activated more or less on one side or the other according to some variables that we’re playing with right now when we study the extremes of the interval of sexual attractions (levels of aggression and activity, gender nonconformism, hormonal influences). Some of them might have links with pathologies (mood disorders, anxiety), others might not, but clearly that information will be coded in some genes, be they deficient or not (it’s hard to think that there might be dedicated genes for same-sex attractions). There must be an internal image of the gendered body in the brain which connects with a use-it-or-lose-it faculty which might get lost in the sex atypical story (observation first stated by LeVay and confirmed by other people I have been talking to), however that may not be the common path for all cases of same-sex attractions.

As a general word of warning, we should not acquiesce to geneticists’ tendency to overstress the importance of genetic markers — it’s only natural for them to do just that :). But I am still waiting for them to look for heterosexual markers: will that mean that social and political concerns determine what we look for in a genome or that we found something REAL?

You want to hear about bias, read my last post!

Please make your point and move on.

My point is you are so biased against this study you have made false and misleading statements about it. And for whatever reason, you dislike this study so much you can not even see how your bias is affecting your judgment in this matter.