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I am just going to ramble tonight. I am tired and loaded and mellow.
So Charles, you don't have to emphasize anything for me. I am very interested in this general subject or interface: sexuality, human culture, social construction, evolution, biology, neuroscience... and just about other place we could locate for information, insight, etc...
When I was wondering around the `innate' and `heterosexual' concepts, what I am doing was a kind of preliminary check-list. I am trying to narrow this broad conceptual realm into some biological constellation of features or phenomenon of the human animal that is concretely accessible to biological methods. Lots of stuff is going to be left out.
Since I presume that sexuality in its broad sense is at least one significant source of understanding the human mind, society and culture, I am definitely on the side of SOME deternimism here. I just don't know where or what that deterministic domain is and what's its relationship is to what most of us would label `sexual'.
Let's start with the idea that sexual reproduction has an evolutionary advantage over asexual reproducton. As an absolute, this distinction may be false. Here's why. It's called the two-fold cost of sex. If each individual were to contribute to the same number of offspring (two), the sexual population remains the same size each generation, where the asexual population doubles in size each generation. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sex
If someone told me they found a `queer' gene, I wouldn't believe it. I would be extremely skeptical and go over such findings with a very fine tooth comb. Likewise with a `heterosexual' gene.
What is going on here is a question of concepts that appear to a naive realist to be almost self-evident. This is why I am always interested in reading theories of human sexuality---well and also hoping for dirty pictures.
What's the source of all this skepticism about biological determinism and sexuality? This is very difficult to deconstruct and it probably sounds absurdly nik-picky but... Starting at the top, our language is overladen with nouns and names for things. Our very first impulse is to name somthing we see, and we automatically assume it has the same the object features as any other object. The most significant feature in this context is discrete spatial location and a gestalt, closure, i.e. it can be separated from other objects. This closure principle is almost identitical to an Aristotelian concept.
In my experience working under a biophysicist (friend) we were never dealing with anything like an Aristotelian object. We were studying a living process and trying make a mathematical model and test the model. The project failed. While the computer model worked with both simulated and observationally obtained data, in fact the model depended on locating the flow of a plant growth hormone in a particular region of the plant's primary root. The hormone's presence was indicated through an intermediate uptake facilitator, Ca2+ (an ion of Calicum). Ca2+ is a chemical signal to the cell membrane to either open or close an ion channel on the membrane, which in turn depends on the relative concentrations outside or inside the membrane. It is also called an ion pump. High concentrations of Ca2+ in our experiments would indicate the growth hormon was present in higher concentrations. Over the area of cells we looked at, we could never find this damned Ca2+ marker located where is was supposed to be. The theory was wrong, somewhere.
It turned out for me (as a tech) this was a tremendous intellectual experience. I was full of questions. But the most fundamental question of all, in my mind, was did we concieve the process as a phenomenon, when, it maybe there was no phenomenon? What we were looking for was a humanly contrived artifact (named in the literature as a gravitropism) that we had imposed in our very conceptualization.
I think we definitely had the wrong headed ideas about what was going on in the first place. We read the literature and decided to figure out a more sophisticated method to test the general idea of how this tropism worked. I think the problem was the accepted model was wrong. We only tested a piece of the general theory of how this tropism worked so the failure was considered mostly irrelevant. Althought the PI got his name on an article that proved the converse, i.e. higher concentratoons of the hormone were not localized in the putative tropic region where it should have been.
The whole project left me with the impression that anything that has to do with chemical signaling and communication is likely very much more complex that it appears to be at first glance.
Now getting back to people and sex. Hormones are chemical signal communication systems that coordinate functions of a global sort. Even their mode of action is complex. For example, the particular hormone we were looking for had a mode of action that was called `superoptimal'. Too little quantity and nothing happened, too much quantity nothing more happened (cell growth in this case). The cells only responded to a very narrow range of quantity, so it turns out that there was an optimal magnitude of effectiveness. This is termed super-optimal. You have to think of this sort of phenomenon something like a trigger. If you pull too lightly, nothing happens, if you pull much harder than necessary you do not get more effect. It is a threshold phenomenon. (The concept of super-optimal is barrowed from the mathematics of stochastic processes.)
Notice there is something counter-intitutive here. The intuition here is that, more is more and less is less. We are used to thinking in mechanical magnitudes, like the Galilean addition of velocities. You can add velocity 1:1 and get a direct proporitional effect.
So we are in a world where our most intitutive concepts of how things work usually doesn't apply. For me, that's a warning signal. Always look to your preconceptions.
It is trivially obvious that we reproduce through sexual reproduction. We have preassigned the words male and female on the two types of reproducing pairs. It is a shock to discover that in the real world, in fact there are non-reproducing intermediate combinations of our category of male and female. These intermediate individuals do not reproduce. However they do spontaneously and routinely appear in some small percentage of the population. Their overt physical features usually indicate a crude identitification as male or female. However, their genetics maybe different. So, you can have what appears to be male expression with female genes and female expression with male genes. What's going on here? It also raises questions on how we have constructed our biological assumptions around the concepts for male and female.
One of the more intriguing possible directions of thought here is that maybe the `female' is a `neutral' body type modified by `male' imputs. For example the fertilized egg contains all the cytoplasm, its organelles and all the RNA that will be reproduced asexually by cell division, and development into either a male or female or intermediate individual. So, almost all of the cell contents in the later individual are female in origin.
What does this do to our concept of sexual pairs which in pure genetic terms are supposed to be equal? What does this do to our concept of male and female?
What does heterosexuality mean when viewed from the female population? What does it mean when viewed from the male population? What does the concept of heterosexual mean to the spectrum of the transgendered?
In its simplest definition, heterosexual means attraction to the opposite sex. On the other hand it also implies an equal and reciprocal relation in that females are attracted to males, and males are attracted to females. That is the attractor relation is assumed to be the same or an equivalent relation. There is an identity relation that does not seem at all likely to be concretely identical as the concept would imply. More simply, women do not seem to be attracted to men, in the same way that men are attracted to women. The attractor relation is different, and dependent on its given source of origin. How much of the apparent difference in this attractor relation is due to social construction and how much maybe attributed to some physiological source?
What does that mean to the concept of heterosexuality? For example, most female mammals go into heat. Most male mammals go into some form of competitive behavior for mating. So in this sense hetersexuality seems to have a wide range of variance. But let's look at this pattern a little differently. It seems from animal sex shows like Nature that most female mammals are successful in baring young, while most males are not successful in contributing anything to the reproductive process. This leads to the idea that most male lines fail and most female lines succeed. What does such an embalance do to the supposed homogeneous concept of hetersexual?
>From a developmental physiological point of view there seems to be
nothing like an equal and reciprocal contribution under
heterosexuality.
In my current martinis soaked state, I am not at all sure hetersexuality is a stable category. In fact it seems to me that hetersexuality has been designed through natural selection to privilage females---which is exactly contrary to our social construction of the concept of heterosexuality.