(Chuck Grimes)
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. ^^^^ CB: Cool !
See below Heterosexual instinct would be the phenotype for the genotype heterosexual, the gene or genes being located at the XX/XY allele.
^^^^^ Let's start with the idea that sexual reproduction has an evolutionary advantage over asexual reproduction. 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
^^^^ CB: The first forms of life on earth ( I think 5 billion years ago) reproduced asexually, i.e. by cloning or an individual organism reproducing itself. I think ( from a Gould essay) sexual reproduction originated 2 billion years ago. The adaptive advantage was creation of more variety in offspring in that new varieties arose because each parent contributed half to the offspring's make up.
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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.
^^^ CB: I'm saying there _is_ gene for heterosexuality. It's phenotype is heterosexual instinct. It would be at the sex gene locus, XX or XY. I think there probably is a queer gene too, probably a "bisexual" gene. However, not _all_ heterosexual or homosexual activity is genetically determined, because social determination, learning, nurture, culture _co-determines_ sexual practice, custom.
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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.)
^^^ CB: This is the distinction between qualitative and quantitative difference. The on/off of computers is an elemental qualitative distinction. The qualitative distinction is also the binary opposition of structural linguistics and anthropology. Also, here is the dialectical issues of quantitative change turning into qualitative change and the reverse. The quantity of hormone chemical in the process you describe above "turns into" a qualitative difference in at the next level of organization, i.e. at the biological level , the next level of organization up from the chemical.
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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.
^^^^ CB: Yes actually ,not mechanical, but chemical. The biological whole, its qualities, cannot be reduced to the chemical quantities, as there are emergent qualities in the biological level relative to the chemical level.
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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.
^^^^ CB: This Carrol's "tautology" . However, contra Carrol's implication, this tautology is profound , not trivial.
The whole effort to dismiss as "unimportant" sex and the so-called hetero aspect as a necessary aspect of fertile sex is a dodge. It is part of the philosophical idealist tactic of dodging materialist determinations in human society. It is the fancy game of dismissing "vulgar" materialist determinations as "unworthy" , "obvious", "uninteresting", "trivially obvious", "trivially tautological". In other words, not worth the time of our high intellects. We've got better things to do than talk about this trivia and these vulgarities.
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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.
^^^^ CB: What you say is true. However, the categories male/female are still valid for explaining a huge section of the population. More than that, they are fundamental and logically necessary , AND TRUE ( tautologically true) concepts for describing sexual reproduction as opposed to asexual reproduction. The concept of opposite sex in biology is as logically tight and empirically universal/absolute as anything in physics. _ Only sexual unions of members of the opposite sexes can be fertile_. Non-heterosexual, sexual unions are 0% fertile. This is absolutely true. Only the union of the gamete cells of opposite sexual individuals can result in a viable new individual human.
That there are actually existing individuals whose bodies do not fit into these categories does not invalidate the categories for purposes of describing the necessary conditions for fertile unions and the production of offspring.
^^^^^ 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?
^^^^^ CB: They aren't exactly "equal" in the sense of identical. They are _complements_, opposites or differents which each have exclusively certain different elements that the other complement does not have, different elements that are necessary for a union to the produce a viable offspring. It's like in adventure movies or novels where both of two different keys are necessary to open some safety deposit box. The two keys are _comple_ments. The whole can't be _completed_ with out both _comple_ment.
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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. ^^^^ CB: Yes, complementary sexes, two different, necessary parts of the whole ( and this whole consists of only two parts)
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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.
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