[lbo-talk] Re: Instinct

[boddi satva]

What's clear is that given people who have inherited identical genes,
if one is gay, the other is, let's say, approximately 30% (plus or
minus as much as 15%) likely to also be gay. This means that a person
with a gay identical twin is somewhere between, let's call it  40% and
400%, more likely to be gay than a member of the general population
(if we use the well-known 10% number forwarded by proponents of the
fearul GAY AGENDA - kidding). I think it's also pretty well
established that gay brothers and gay sisters are more likely to have
gay brothers and sisters, respectively, than would be expected by
random chance.

These numbers aren't strong enough to prove any hypothesis I know
about. A genetic heritability hypothesis would demand stronger
correlation and a hypothesis that homosexuality is independent of
genetics would demand a smaller correlation. So the best we can say is
that it's seems likely that homosexuality corresponds to some unknown
mechanism which has a heritable component, which is not saying much.

What's more interesting is that homosexuality is consistently
expressed in both humans and our close relatives much more often than
in most higher vertebrates. This suggests that homosexuality has
probably been with us and our recent ancestors for hundreds of
thousands of years. That does suggest that homosexuality may well be
associated with something that is positively adaptive or positively
adaptive in itself. It's clear that homosexuality COULD have a
negative effect on reproductive success. It hasn't. In fact, at the
time when we and our close ancestors were having phenomenal
reproductive and survival success, we were probably expressing, as a
population, this homosexual behavior.

One simple "explaination" for homosexuality ****might**** be our
hypersexuality. In a slow-reproducing species with offspring that take
a long time to develop, hypersexuality woud tend to insure maximum
fecundity and encourage increased social bonding between males and
females. If hypersexuality also produced homosexual behavior, this
might increase same-sex bonding.

This theory has the fun sociological implication that sex-positivity
is positively adaptive and sex-negative ideas are negative and
atavistic in a real sense.

boddi