London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA- Page 3
London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
dreaming
Broadway Legend Joined: 4/24/09
#50London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
Posted: 2/19/14 at 2:30pmBecause lesbians what? What's that supposed to mean?
#51London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
Posted: 2/19/14 at 2:36pm
I don't think I have any control over who I am attracted to, but I absolutely chose which of those attractions I pursued. I could have chosen(and almost did) to marry my high school boyfriend and have a few kids, doing the "normal" thing. Thank God I didn't. I CHOSE not to use gender as a consideration when looking for love. I easily, due to what I guess is bisexuality, if one must label, could have said I would only consider one gender or the other. That's my truth. Some of it was a choice.
Cynthia Nixon is one of the women Namo speaks of, who CHOSE to be with a woman. She said that for her, it was 100% a choice.
#52London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
Posted: 2/19/14 at 2:46pmAnd remember the sh*tstorm that churned up? If our sense of self is so rigidly attached to one 'truth,' then anyone who comes to their life by another means is outside that orthodoxy, and therefore either wrong or an enemy. I'm not saying that's how anyone in this particular thread would view Nixon...but I did hear comments along those lines. Even more insidious were the comments that her remarks weren't 'helpful.'
#53London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
Posted: 2/19/14 at 2:49pm#54London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
Posted: 2/19/14 at 3:01pmOh, yay! I'm consistent!!!
FindingNamo
Broadway Legend Joined: 7/22/03
#55London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
Posted: 2/19/14 at 3:05pmThank you for linking that, erik. Maybe people will see that nuanced discussions HAVE happened here and if they take the time to read that thread they will see why writing "WE all know it to be true" about the genetic predetermination argument is simply, very very simply, not the case.
#56London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
Posted: 2/19/14 at 3:11pmWhat a great thread that was! I sounded like I graduated from college...which I did. Barely.
#57London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
Posted: 2/19/14 at 3:24pm
That was indeed a great thread.
We used to have a lot of good discussions like that before the trolls took over.
Liza's Headband
Broadway Legend Joined: 5/28/13
#58London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
Posted: 2/19/14 at 3:44pm
What might be the origin of biological differences underlying male sexual preference? In 1993 Dean Hamer and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute discovered a preliminary but nevertheless tantalizing clue.[9] Hamer began his painstaking search for a genetic contribution to sexual behavior by studying the rates of homosexuality among male relatives of seventy-six known gay men. He found that the incidence of homosexual preference in these family members was strikingly higher (13.5 percent) than the rate of homosexuality among the whole sample (2 percent). When he looked at the patterns of sexual orientation among these families, he discovered more gay relatives on the maternal side. Homosexuality seemed, at least, to be passed from generation to generation through women.
Maternal inheritance could be explained if there was a gene influencing sexual orientation on the X chromosome, one of the two human sex chromosomes that bear genes determining the sex of offspring.[10] Men have both X and Y chromosomes, while women have two X chromosomes. A male sex-determining gene, called SRY, is found on the Y chromosome. Indeed, the Y chromosome is the most obvious site for defining male sexuality since it is the only one of the forty-six human chromosomes to be found in men alone. The SRY gene is the most likely candidate both to turn on a gene that prevents female development and to trigger testosterone production. Since the female has no Y chromosome, she lacks this masculinizing gene. In forty pairs of homosexual brothers, Hamer and his team looked for associations between the DNA on the X chromosome and the homosexual trait. They found that thirty-three pairs of brothers shared the same five X chromosomal DNA "markers," or genetic signatures, at a region near the end of the long arm of the X chromosome designated Xq28.[11] The possibility that this observation could have occurred by chance was only 1 in 10,000.
Richard Horton, British Medical Journal
#59London Times: Scientists Claim to Have Discovered Gay DNA
Posted: 2/19/14 at 3:59pm
I don't have time to dive into this thread repeatedly today. I just wanted to add something that I believe was clear, but I'll state explicitly just in case. And, I say this with no intended ill will to Liza, or anyone else for that matter.
I was never arguing in this thread that the origin of a person's sexual orientation has been determined to be 100% genetic. The science thus far suggests that sexual orientation develops from a combination of factors, including, but not limited to genetics. And from what I've read it seems that even as the underlying genetic factors continue to be discovered, those genetic factors will be indications of the likelihood of a person's eventual sexual orientation, not the sole determining factor of that orientation.
My argument was far less important and one of semantics, frankly, but it was driving me nuts. In this thread I was reading (or misreading) a conflation of sexual orientation and sexual behavior. We've since cleared that all up. Anyway, carry on.
Videos