Evan said – “So it can be a mutual distancing of unintentional nature. This type of familially transmitted genetic-based dynamics is already documented for some behaviours.”
Can you name the behaviors you are referring to?

Yeah
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070302111100.htm
Not a behaviour per se, but common genetic stuff making both parents and children predisposed to the same thing.The difference is in how they adapted. A parent’s wrong or maladapted behaviour is felt by the developing kid who is impacted by his parent’s maladaptation. The lame father -lame kid hypothesis in all its glory.
There you go, doctor, it’s documented. 😀

Evan wrote… They didn’t approach sexual orientation, they focused on clarifying what creates gender-specific behaviours

Yeah, I more less said that. I was commenting on the idea that their research was in tune with my own thinking. Nothing you can say will dispell my thinking in that matter.

Evan wrote… And what they discovered puts the hormonal dogma to rest, at least in mice (but it’s bound to be confirmed in other mammals). It’s not hormones that cement gender sense, because both genders could have circuitry for both sexes, it’s a switch which turns on only one part of the network and keeps the other one reserved.

No… what they said was, “new advances in molecular and genetic strategies demonstrate that gonadal hormones are not the sole factor responsible for the emergence of sex-specific brain function.” You seem to want them to say something they did not. It doesn’t mean these hormones have absolutely no play in the meaning.

Evan wrote… There’s a whole class of pro-male, pro-female, anti-male and anti-female genes which work in complicated ways to determine gender or a particular variation of gender. It’s plausible that homosexuality has to do with gender recognition, because gay men’s brains respond to certain stimuli like straight women’s brains and they also have some structural similarities. The documented sex atypicality of most gay people also points in this direction, that gender sense has to do with sexual orientation.

Yeah to the first, totally with you, except it may not be all there is. Not so sure about the second (gender recognition or whatever) being the entirety of the “bio-genetic” arguement about why some men are homosexual.

Evan wrote… You say it must be instincts biologically programmed to feel one way, but I don’t see how biology would program a brain to use organs which have developed as adaptations for reproduction to be used in a non-reproductive way.

Huh? You make no sense. One, I was speaking about humans in general not homosexuals in the specific. Two, you just said above that gender recognition might be a part of why men are gay, their brains being more like a woman. Thus they would have a woman’s instinct, would they not? The why it happens is gene-expression, not a gene, but an expression of genes which in men should be methylated, “turned off,” which are not.

Evan wrote… It doesn’t look like instinct, we are just using the concept from animals which are 100% instinctual and which have a limited range of behaviours, like mounting, thrusting or lordosis.

Which is to say, why is it always about gonadal sex with so many of you people. I’ve never said anything about human sexual contact being necessarily instinctual. If it’s the brain that is different, then the brain in the sex organ, gonads are just sensory extensions of the brain….. geesh.

Evan wrote… Why do humans need almost 20 years to grow up emotionally? Did we go through a special and harsh selection in the past for neotenous phenotypes which develop a lot slower than any other primates, learn more and live longer, given the proper environment? Could this come at a cost in the variability of gender determination, because longer development of the emotional brain depends a lot more on environment than in other species? My answer was one conjecture among others. We’ll see what the genetic studies come up with.

It is my understanding that adolescence began about 750,000 years back probably within our ancestor Homo heidelbergensis and was also present in our brother species H. neanderthalensis. That is based in tooth growth and the rate of enamal where, I think. Why? Adolescence is important for learning, humans have a lot to teach. Why you think we have to teach people to know what gender they are is beyond me. Have you read Glenn Weisfeld’s book on the subject? I don’t know what he has to say.

Evan wrote… Genes work with environment, therefore whatever practices work with the environment are likely to have a word in development.

Our brain gets in the way of that though.

Evan wrote… Then why didn’t dolphins, elephants or chimpanzees build empires, go to the moon and discover electricity? What about marriage or masochism, are they instinctually programmed or cultural/developmental? We can’t fully explain humans using other animals’ behaviour, something is always missing

Ehhh….. red herrings stink. I was commenting upon social structures in animal (and human) societies and comparing them. You aren’t….

Evan wrote… They might have basic animal substrates, just as Daryl Bem asserted about the development of sexual orientation starting from differences in aggressiveness and activity levels, but they need a lot of human conditioning to reach a certain outcome. Remember that ancient Greece men who practiced same-sex behaviour did not engage in anal intercourse, but in intercrural intercourse, so the behaviour was not instinctual like lordosis in mice.

*sigh* dang terms, what’s wrong with frotting. Greeks weren’t necessarily homosexual, it was institutionallized pederasty. They considered anal intercourse demeaning for the receiver. On the other hand I consider it to be dang exciting. So…. what does that get us?
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Evan wrote… I think this debate comes down to a few questions. Do humans have programmed instincts? Do genes dictate sexual orientation?

Yes, we do have instincts. I’m like Dr T, I don’t quite know what sexual orientation – I prefer gender orientation – is. I think there is a complex of items in the brain which are controlled by our genes which may add up to gender orientation.

Evan wrote… I think many would agree that it would be odd in natural terms if genes would program someone to be exclusively homosexual. It would be a biological contradiction.

I totally agree. There is no gene for a same-gender orientation. It’s the same genes that produce an opposite gender orientation in women which create a same-gender orientation in men.

Evan wrote… Could domestication, enclosed environments and agricultural factors lead to hormonal or genetic changes which would create homosexuality? Coincidentally, we only have historical sources to document homosexual behaviours among humans since people have been living in cities, in enclosed and clustered environments and mainly in agricultural civilisations. Could stress and certain environmental factors lead to organic changes that produce homosexuality?

Pure bull. Homosexuality only shows up in more urbane human cultures because the concentration of peoples allows those with homosexual orienations to find each other. Otherwise human taboos keep homosexuality at bay in less populated areas. It’s the whole thing about the habiru (Hebrews) being disgusted with cities that the Canaanites inhabited. It’s why the Bible spoke out against cities and kings for so long.

Evan wrote… After the psychodynamic fashion failed to explain human homosexuality, so seems to fail molecular biology after a few decades of research. The answer may be more in the environment, if we look at the latest Swedish study.

Who is that environment working upon? And what is that environment? The womb? Is it working on the mother or the individual?
Again I say eh….

So, the idea that gay men are attuned to the smell of men rather than women would not be derivative of the instinctual sense? More likely to then be an environmental change in the brain? Or did we gay men “dig up” the lost sense? Or…..? They seem to be in agreement with what I would propose…..

Savic used a very high concentration of “putative pheromones” in that study to determine that. You couldn’t find that in an ordinary environment. It shows something, but no one knows exactly what right now. It could be a conditioned preference. Or it could be a variation in perception as a result of different amygdala functioning. There is one study which showed that anxiety changes olfactory perception. Savic also reported this year that gay men’s amygdala has connections similar to women’s and greater regional cerebral blood flow in the same area than straight men.
But what Dulac proved about the gender-switching role of the vomeronasal organ cannot be translated in any way to humans or primates. Therefore, I don’t see how it could be made an argument about human pheromones and sexual orientation or gender recognition.

I think Dulac & Kimchi would agree that there may thus be multivariant biological pathways to homosexuality, primarily gene expression or hormonal causes, and anything which might “institute” those causes, such as environmental factors causing the proper stress which is a part of the older brother hypothesis.

They didn’t approach sexual orientation, they focused on clarifying what creates gender-specific behaviours. And what they discovered puts the hormonal dogma to rest, at least in mice (but it’s bound to be confirmed in other mammals). It’s not hormones that cement gender sense, because both genders could have circuitry for both sexes, it’s a switch which turns on only one part of the network and keeps the other one reserved. Of course, the brain still needs to go through hormonisation to have what to switch on or off (that’s why those early experiments with hormonal manipulation showed that hormones can mess with sex behaviours, which made researchers erroneously conclude hormones have the final word), but it’s not hormones which decide gender in the species we discussed. In the last years, more researchers have been going back to genetics to understand sex determination. They no longer believe that female foetuses are the default template and there is just one gene for testosterone which masculinises the brain. There’s a whole class of pro-male, pro-female, anti-male and anti-female genes which work in complicated ways to determine gender or a particular variation of gender. It’s plausible that homosexuality has to do with gender recognition, because gay men’s brains respond to certain stimuli like straight women’s brains and they also have some structural similarities. The documented sex atypicality of most gay people also points in this direction, that gender sense has to do with sexual orientation. You say it must be instincts biologically programmed to feel one way, but I don’t see how biology would program a brain to use organs which have developed as adaptations for reproduction to be used in a non-reproductive way. It doesn’t look like instinct, we are just using the concept from animals which are 100% instinctual and which have a limited range of behaviours, like mounting, thrusting or lordosis. Why do humans need almost 20 years to grow up emotionally? Did we go through a special and harsh selection in the past for neotenous phenotypes which develop a lot slower than any other primates, learn more and live longer, given the proper environment? Could this come at a cost in the variability of gender determination, because longer development of the emotional brain depends a lot more on environment than in other species? My answer was one conjecture among others. We’ll see what the genetic studies come up with.

Just because we have certain cultural practices which emphasize gender doesn’t mean we rely upon them.

Genes work with environment, therefore whatever practices work with the environment are likely to have a word in development.

Man suddenly woke up one day from an instinctual stupor and realized he wasn’t being manly or womanly enough? Were we rampantly bisexual like the bonobo?

Maybe they noticed that boys who grew up with girls didn’t pursue them as much when they became adults.

If so much of our social structure derives from extra-somatic learning then we must necessarily also say the same for elephants, dolphins, wolves, baboons, chimps, and apes among other social animals.

Conversely, could our cultural practices be the product of genes and hormones? Then why didn’t dolphins, elephants or chimpanzees build empires, go to the moon and discover electricity? What about marriage or masochism, are they instinctually programmed or cultural/developmental? We can’t fully explain humans using other animals’ behaviour, something is always missing.

And feral children don’t seem to tell us much. They are mentally ill due to their deprevation, not necessarily working solely on instinct. Just doesn’t fit.

What mental illness do they have? Some children in the town of Chernobyl in Ukraine, where the nuclear plant exploded, were left without parents in early age. They gone missing and continued to live in the ghost town together with dogs, eating the same things as them and learning the same behaviour. They were normal kids before their parents died according to their relatives’ accounts, but they did not develop like the other children during a critical period. Later, when some of them were retrieved, they did show difficulty in adapting to the new environment, especially in learning language. They didn’t have symptoms of mental illness, otherwise they were treated for that. Instead they were placed in their relatives’ families in order to adapt to human behaviours under professional supervision. Psychologists did have some success in conditioning them to learn human behaviours, like using a spoon to eat or playing with other children, but these kids still didn’t know how to channelise aggressiveness in a human way, they defaulted on animal display of aggression. Unfortunately, these cases were not studied seriously, so one cannot use this as empirical proof, but there are some documentaries and they do indicate that the early formative period in children is critical for appropriation of human behaviours, that these behaviours are not instinctual. They might have basic animal substrates, just as Daryl Bem asserted about the development of sexual orientation starting from differences in aggressiveness and activity levels, but they need a lot of human conditioning to reach a certain outcome. Remember that ancient Greece men who practiced same-sex behaviour did not engage in anal intercourse, but in intercrural intercourse, so the behaviour was not instinctual like lordosis in mice.