> ...I don't understand the stubborn
> allegiance to the assertion (and it is an assertion -- there is
> precious little science to back it up) that sexual orientation is
> genetically determined.
>
> Why is this such an appealing prospect to so many?
Because many people -- including some practicing scientists who should know better -- have trouble distinguishing a real scientific claim from a metaphor that uses scientific language. This is especially true when the scientific language refers to a theory that is chic, but hard to understand.
A few examples of this kind of rhetoric:
(1) Social Darwinism, of course.
(2) Some doctors at the turn of the century warned that if women went to college, the brain-work involved would draw energy away from their uteri (or, if you prefer, their uteruses), leaving them infertile or worse. At the time, the Laws of Thermodynamics were newly-discovered and widely talked about.
(3) Brad DeLong has pointed out that in the early days of the automobile, some intellectuals wanted to remake society in the image of the Ford Motor Company.
(4) Sociobiology, of course. Philip Kitcher spent a whole book (_Vaulting Ambition_) analyzing and critiquing sociobiology, because in order to really understand why it's wrong, you need to understand a few things about evolutionary theory in the first place.
I think that many people making the "gay genes" assertions fall into the same sort of trap. Your genes are *mostly* immutable and *in a certain sense* fundamental to what kind of person you are. If you take this as a metaphor rather than as a carefully qualified scientific model, you can observe that your sexuality feels like a fundamental part of your identity and leap to the conclusion that it *must* be in your genes.
Or (based on the same sort of faulty reasoning) you can claim that if sexuality is in the genes, then it's unfair to use it as the basis for discrimination ... but if it's *not*, then les/bi/gays *must* be capable of making themselves straight, and therefore, any discrimination they suffer is the consequence of their "choice" and not society's problem.
So why is discrimination on the basis of religion so widely condemned? Perhaps because there are so many religious sects in the US, and therefore everyone belongs to a potentially-discriminated-against minority sect.
-- perl -le"for(@w=(q[dm='r 0rJaa,u0cksthe';dc=967150;dz=~s/d/substrdm,\ (di+=dc%2?4:1)%=16,1ordi-2?'no':'Perl h'/e whiledc>>=1;printdz]))\ {s/d/chr(36)/eg;eval;}#In Windows type this all on 1 line w/o '\'s" == seth gordon == sgordon at kenan.com == standard disclaimer == == documentation group, kenan systems corp., cambridge, ma ==