>The paper is 25,000 words of very dense statistical reasoning; I often found myself struggling to read a paragraph, only to eventually realize it was saying something obvious in as many long words as possible.
Maybe science needs to be less hostile to comprehension
Eh, some people hate my writing too, there are lots of decisions along the lines of making it technically airtight / comprehensible to experts vs. comprehensible to laypeople. I was mostly griping but don't really want to blame them.
I can remember discussing FBOE several times with Blanchard 20+ years ago, and my surprise at my brain constantly getting bogged down by how hard it was for me to think rigorously about something that seemed mundane and mostly requiring simple arithmetic. I'd gone to Catholic school during the baby boom, so I was familiar with statements like "My friend Mike has two older brothers, one older sister, and two younger brothers." But trying to reason about this quotidian information in the aggregate routinely left me stumped after a few minutes. So I'm not surprised that working with the topic has continued to prove difficult even for people much smarter than myself.
For what it's worth: sometimes the people who go way more into things than seems to be necessary are genuinely smarter than you...but in my experience they usually aren't, or at least they're only smart in their bubble of expertise (which perhaps leads to an unusual desire to prove how smart they are when they can).
I think you've got an ideal balance of rigorousness and understandability. In fact that's the main thing I use when trying to convince people to read something you wrote; "dude I dropped out of high school and even I can understand it, it's not just a bunch of graphs and huge words :)"
As a non-expert who sometimes skims scientific papers out of curiosity, I've found myself wondering more than once whether some really verbose technical phrasing is genuinely optimized for unambiguous communication with other experts, or just an example of academic status signaling.
Or is it that writing about technical topics in a way that's short and easily understandable just takes a lot of extra effort, and researchers often can't be bothered?
You gotta remember that the median academic paper is written by some grad student or postdoc desperately trying to fit in with the big important people. When you're in that situation you adopt a "more sciencey" way of writing because you think that's the only way to do it.
Once you have the advantage and confidence of seniority you can start to write like a normal person again... if you actually still have the time to write your own papers, and if you can even remember how. It can become a habit that's tricky to break.
I think even the established researchers are scared what other researchers think. When I was publishing papers as a PhD student, I often tried to make my language more plain English and readable, and my supervisors pushed back surprisingly hard, telling me it's important to write in the standard style in the field.
(We must acknowledge the possibility that my supervisors were right, and my language was too informal, but I don't believe this was the case.)
In the social sciences, the convention is to employ the passive voice. So if you measure subject's anxiety using the XYZ test, you can't say "we assessed subject anxiety by administering the XYZ test." You have to say "subject intelligence was assessed by administering the XYZ test." I think people write that way because they believe it makes things sound more objective -- as though the assessment was done by God or Mother Nature, not by the experimentors. But that writing convention drives me crazy. I hate it because it makes the article duller, because it's such a lameass way of trying to sound Scientific, but mostly because switching from passive to active voice in a sentence is a goddam grammatical error. "Was assessed by" is passive voice. But "by administering" is a gerund in the active voice, and has an implied 'we' as subject. (As passive voice gerund would be 'by being administered.')
In my own work writing scientific papers, I’m often surprised how easy it is to accidentally say something that’s approximately right but technically not true unless I use more verbose technical language.
I think, without even adding malice and signaling on top of it, a lot of people who are good at research aren't necessarily good at writing in general, and still more not that good at writing well in English if it's not their first language.
Further, sometimes the jargon is specific and technical, and an expert will have a good idea of what the terminology means our if it makes sense, like "analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean parameterization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds."
I think this conflates status signaling with pride in eloquence. Was Shakespeare status-signaling? I say this as somebody who writes technically documents for consumption by technical experts (in the field). In a sense, it is showing off one's eloquence which is a signaling of sorts. However, I think calling it "status signaling," muddies the water and implies to most readers that the author is trying to impress their superiority upon lay people. I suspect (it's certainly true for myself) that the authors if given an opportunity to present to a broader audience would be no less eloquent but far more comprehensible.
I don't know what vicious direct insults you are referring to but Shakespeare's writing was absolutely not the way everyone spoke in the 1500s. Just look up how many of the turns of phrase we use today, were originally coined by him.
This tendency in people is exhausting and frankly needs a lot more mockery than it gets.
There's a blogger I read who does it on RPG topics. It is pretty clearly that this is the language they are surrounded with, and no one has told them repeatedly and loudly that this is fucking ridiculous and not to be done.
I find that the proofing of any of my technical arguments inevitably winds up adding more qualifiers. That's probably 75% a commentary on my writing skill, but the other 25% is related to the fact that it's almost impossible to make a complicated argument without somebody misconstruing what the argument actually is.
Anybody who's programmed a computer for-real, either as a scientific investigator or as a software engineer (key discriminant: whether they refer to their programs as "code" or "codes") gets into the habit of on-the-fly proofing for failure detection. When you find a weak spot, you fix it before you forget about it.
If only there were a try/throw/catch construct for English prose...¹
____________
¹I guess there sorta is. It's a footnote. But it improves readability even less than a catch block.
I think that at least some of it is overloaded terms. Like, a derivative in mathematics can mean a bunch of different things, and so if you are working with multiple meanings, you're going to have to start saying something like "discrete derivative." It's not really optimization at this point so much as it is that when a parallel thing is created, it's called by the same original name to make it clear that it's a parallel. Normally this gets solved at the start of math papers by saying "these are the exact objects we're using and what we're calling them, read more about them [here]." I imagine that other fields might be more careful not to overload terms, but still want them to be clearly related, resulting in ballooning verbosity.
Sometimes dumbing stuff down for the unwashed plebs actually hurts comprehension.
The xkcd guy wrote a book called "Thing Explainer", which explains scientific concepts using only the 1,000 most common English words. I found it nearly unreadable (Reddit's /r/ExplainLikeImFive sub has the same effect). Some things just can't be written about simply.
In another example of 'why we can't have nice things', Anglish (trying to write English without any foreign borrowings) is apparently a far-right thing. It's too bad as I genuinely liked a lot of their coinages.
"I’m posting a scientific paper written the way I think papers should be written: honest, fun, and open to all. People are hungry for a different way of doing and communicating science, and man does it taste good. ... [Its findings:] When people imagine how things could be *different*, they imagine things being *better*."
(Bonus: Scott's "Lizardman Constant" observation is mentioned in this paper.)
Non-stop puns such as "Although much research has been undertaken on electoral defeat, research on death is still in its infancy. Indeed, rather than staring death in the face, political scientists have buried the issue."
> They speculated that maybe (male) homosexuality came from genes for a sort of super-femininity which was bad for men but very good for women; under this model, female relatives of male homosexuals would have more children than normal. But in fact this study found the opposite: they had fewer.
At this point, it would probably be easier to make a list of the handful of human things where antagonistic pleiotropy is still a viable hypothesis than to list all the things like schizophrenia that someone has claimed might boost fertility in relatives (but never does approaching the necessary levels, if at all)...
I would have thought evolution already solved the issue of only expressing genes that benefit females in females. Admittedly, males still have nipples, but there doesn't seem to be much of a fitness cost for those.
More seriously still, as a designer of mass produced electronic devices, what we find is that everything has variability (normal distribution). We see from human variation that most genes express themselves by merely moving the center point of this distribution. It seems plausible that at most times, human populations have not been constrained by birth rate. At the times where they were, traits which are expressed by 100's or 1000's of genes (distributions affecting fertility or sex drive) are the most likely candidates to improve growth rate. It seems reasonable that genes with relatively small negative growth rate consequences might survive nearly indefinitely in populations where population growth rate did not create continuous [edit: evolutionary] pressure.
"More seriously still, as a designer of mass produced electronic devices, what we find is that everything has variability (normal distribution)."
Mostly agreed - though e.g. individual electrons or 12C nuclei have consistent properties. ( BTW, how many dopant ions per transistor channel setting the threshold voltage are we down to these days? )
"We see from human variation that most genes express themselves by merely moving the center point of this distribution."
True. Most parameters have lots of genes each having a small effect. It is kind of funny that what is fundamentally a discrete distribution in 4^N possibilities winds up behaving as a gaussian. And some things don't - probability of a person having a sickling cell crisis is rather bimodal (or trimodal if it can happen with just one copy of the gene).
"It seems reasonable that genes with relatively small negative growth rate consequences might survive nearly indefinitely in populations where population growth rate did not create continuous [edit: evolutionary] pressure."
I recall when the Female Fecundity Hypothesis came out. They asked gay men to name their relatives and they could, on average, name a lot more relatives on their mother's side than on their father's side.
But it struck me back then that 1) Mothers tend to talk about their relatives more than fathers talk about their relatives; and 2) Gay men tend to talk to their mothers more than to their fathers.
You'd need a less subjective source, like the giant family tree of Iceland.
Another problem, I hypothesized, is that gay men tend to be more "people persons" than straight men so they can remember who came to Thanksgiving that one time more than straight men could.
> At this point, it would probably be easier to make a list of the handful of human things where antagonistic pleiotropy is still a viable hypothesis
Height?
I'm pretty sure all of these are true:
- Height is beneficial to men.
- Height is harmful to women.
- Tall men have tall daughters.
- Tall women have tall sons.
There's a huge sex effect that makes women shorter / men taller, but it hasn't developed far enough that women are unaffected by their father's tallness or that men are unaffected by their mother's shortness.
Yeah color me skeptical of this one. I could see a potential fitness cost of a woman being taller than prospective mates, but for any *given* height the number of males is going to vastly exceed the number of females, and the countervailing benefits of (good nutrition + higher likelihood of tall offspring) has to have significant counterbalance potential there.
TBH I'm not sure that a woman being taller than prospective mates would be a fitness cost if women weren't shorter on average anyway. ISTM that people think it's funny when a man is shorter than his wife/girlfriend because it's so unusual; but then it follows that any fitness cost is a result, rather than a cause, of the average height difference.
I'm not sure I understand your last sentence -- the claim is that being taller allegedly imposes a fitness cost on women (i.e. it reduces their number of surviving offspring on average).
I think that the space of possible male mates interested in a woman taller than themselves is plausibly smaller than the space of male mates interested in a woman shorter than themselves. Conceivably this imposes a fitness cost by reducing the space of desirable couplings and/or by reducing the number of offspring among paired mates (e.g., the mechanism whereby attractive women produce more offspring presumably because they have more sex, but in reverse).
The question is whether this effect actually exists and, if so, whether it has a nontrivial magnitude that isn't outweighed by countervailing factors (e.g. men who think taller women are hot.) My priors are that I'm basically skeptical that height has a large effect and that it carries a fitness cost rather than a fitness benefit.
I'm suggesting that the reason the space of possible male mates interested in a woman taller than themselves is plausibly smaller than the space of male mates interested in a woman shorter than themselves is that most men are already taller than most women, so a man having a wife taller than himelf looks weird; and, since most people don't want to look weird, this results in men not being interested in taller women. But this only applies if sex-based differences in average height already exist, whereas in order to cause a fitness cost, male preference would have to pre-exist height differences.
There's a height advantage (reach, weight, more room for muscle) - up to a certain point for the human anatomy, and then you get problems, e.g. world's tallest man had difficulty standing up and died pretty young.
For women, you have a fairly large percentage of the body devoted to producing more humans (certainly compared to men).
So the harmful bit may kick in at a lower height for women?
I think the idea is something like this: since women prefer tall men (ie, taller than themselves), the further above average height a woman is, the smaller her pool of potential acceptable mates, and thus the lower expected fecundity.
Height is harmful generally, it always increases heart strain. It's still net beneficial for men in evopsych because increased height directly leads to increased strength and fighting capacity, but in peacetime short kings win.
That is only true in environments where it's common for people not to receive adequate nutrition.
Note that it's also a completely different phenomenon from genetic height; it is beneficial not to be malnourished, but that isn't related to your natural height. People who are stunted suffer in all kinds of ways that don't apply to people who are short.
> under this model, female relatives of male homosexuals would have more children than normal. But in fact this study found the opposite: they had fewer. This makes sense if they’re getting some of the gay genes and so have less interest in heterosexual sex than normal
Does this kind of conclusion really make sense in an environment with easily available birth control? Presumably the ancestral environment where these genes were selected for was quite different in that respect...
I also thought there wouldn’t be many unplanned pregnancies, especially in Holland. Had a look for some data and it’s higher than I imagined! Around 15% of babies born were unplanned between 2015-2019.
Anecdotally, lots of pregnancies are described as "unplanned" when what has actually happened is that a couple in a committed relationship that would welcome kids have stopped using birth control but aren't really thinking about it. ("We weren't trying, but we weren't trying not to").
I find this bizarre, but it seems a common pattern.
Three plausible-sounding reasons why evolution may support a non-zero level of being gay:
1) Gay uncles and aunts promote survival of their nieces and nephews - presumably more so in social animals.
2) In animals where sexual competition can be dangerous, the ability to defer the urge to procreate via gay sex may be pro-survival enough to outweigh the delayed or less-certain reproduction.
3) Bisexuality may be selected for for some reason (perhaps attracting more than one mate or child-raising partner), and people being purely gay is a side effect.
All of these seem somewhat testable by looking at animal species where homosexuality is observed, vs. biologically similar but socially different species where it's not observed, and checking the differences in social structure, investment in children, and mate competition.
Until these (and probably others) are ruled out, I'm going to think that there's no great evolutionary mystery in the existence of homosexuality. Absence of knowledge is very different from knowledge of absence.
Does homosexuality actually exist in hunter-gatherer societies?
If not, there's no evolutionary mystery to be solved. There's a whole lot more maladaptive behavior in modern people, which is to be expected as we did not evolve in modernity.
Homosexuality has existed for as long as we have recorded history. See ancient Greece and China. Assuming that gayness is a modern invention seems a little silly to me, sorry.
Men having sex with men has existed forever. Whether “gayness”, as in men who strongly identify as exclusively having sex with men, has historically been as common as it is today is a different question.
Do you mean that the argument is therefore obscure? If the obscure tribe is badly documented, then I could see the poor documentation weakening the argument. If the obscure tribe is well enough documented that we can be reasonably sure that they did whatever they were purported to have done, then the tribe is a valuable existence proof or counterexample, even if obscure.
Are there any characters in Shakespeare's plays who are clearly intended to be the kind of gay men we often meet in the present?
I'm sure there are Shakespearean characters who could be played like, say, Jack on "Will and Grace" (e.g., Richard Dreyfuss' flaming Richard III in "Goodbye Girl"), but are there any characters for whom that's the most obvious and least contrived way to play them?
Wouldn't Shakespeare have known a lot of gay men in the theater? Could he have resisted getting some easy laughs out of gay stereotypes ... if the gay stereotypes existed in 1600?
While I have no idea whether this theory is correct, it seems quite plausible to me that in a smaller and more strict society, homosexuals would have had to conform to standard gender roles, and would only be able to exercise their sexual preferences "in the margin", holding everything else equal. They might still have tendencies toward certain types of behavior, but the tendencies wouldn't be reinforced, but rather suppressed. Whereas in a larger, more accepting, and atomistic society, they'd be able to go off on their own, meet others like them, and develop their own sub-culture based on shared tendencies, producing what we think of as "gay".
But the London theater industry in Elizabethan times attracted ambitious and artistic young men from all over England, like Marlowe from Canterbury and Shakespeare from Stratford. It wasn't all that much different in this regard from Oscar Wilde's world 300 years later.
Camille Paglia theorizes that Wilde pretty much socially constructed the gay affect of the 20th Century.
Since women were forbidden from the stage during Shakespeare's lifetime, all the female characters were portrayed by young men. Perhaps it would have been too confusing to have gay characters while the audience is supposed to pretend all the males playing female roles were heterosexual females.
Of course recent gay Shakespeare scholars have argued that there is plenty of homoeroticism in Shakespeare: you just have to remember that the men playing women aren't really women but men.
I love that sort of “scholarship”! I love that feminist scholarship has unwittingly (!) unleashed the phenomenon of women being eg written out of Shakespeare, or as with drag, being written out of the universe.
In 'Taming of the Shrew' Grumio is discussing a meal to give his new wife Katherina (the demanding "shrew" he is trying to "tame"), and suggests beef and mustard, before having second thoughts about the mustard.
I _think_ mustard was a contemporary gay reference, perhaps (I'm guessing) because its tart taste was seen as comparable to camp sharpness or bitchiness versus the solid, supposedly heterosexual, virtues of beef on its own. And as others have mentioned, Katherina would have been played by a boy in the original performances. (Don't blame me for the stereotypes - It was four hundred years ago!) Of course the beef could also have been a metaphor for "c*ck" :-)
GRUMIO .. What say you to a piece of beef and mustard?
KATHARINA A dish that I do love to feed upon.
GRUMIO Ay, but the mustard is too hot a little.
KATHARINA Why then, the beef, and let the mustard rest.
GRUMIO Nay then, I will not: you shall have the mustard, Or else you get no beef of Grumio.
My assumption would just be that it's a humors reference. Katherina is already too fiery, therefore, you would want to feed her watery foods to try to make her more phlegmatic; a spicy food like mustard would be about the last thing you'd want to feed her, imbalancing her humors even further.
Shakespeare I doubt, but Kit Marlowe's plays have a lot (for the time anyway) of clear homosexual content that's plainly recognizable to us. Not in the limp-wristed flamer mode, but plenty of "if the Greeks and Romans did it, it can't be wrong"-type rhetoric. This is the major reason Marlowe himself has often been excoriated/extolled as a homosexual.
> Homosexuality has existed for as long as we have recorded history. See ancient Greece and China.
You are attempting to compare unlike things. Modern gays have a shortage of people willing to penetrate. Ancient Greece, and other ancient cultures with prominent male/male sexual relations, had a shortage of people willing to be penetrated.
Ancient China and Greece, probably. But what's interesting is that it then disappears from history for a long time before popping up again many centuries later. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_homosexuality there's a distinct lack of any convincing sources between "Antiquity" and "Early Modernity".
Of course yes, it was certainly likely to get you beheaded for most of that period, but where are the records of all the beheadings? This article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Catholic_Church_and_homosexuality says that the Spanish Inquisition managed to try about a thousand people for sodomy, but only half of those cases were between humans, and only a handful were between consenting adult males, which appears to mean that early modern Spaniards were roughly a hundred times more likely to be caught fucking an animal than another man.
Various Inquisitions; the famous one, the Spanish Inquisition, was as much a political tool of Ferdinand and Isabella for consolidating their newly-united realms as it had to do with religion. The overseers would have been the Dominicans, so yes Catholic religious order and yes some of them would have been ordained priests, no data on how many were gay.
"Initially, each of the tribunals included two inquisitors, calificadors (qualifiers), an alguacil (bailiff), and a fiscal (prosecutor); new positions were added as the institution matured. The inquisitors were preferably jurists more than theologians; in 1608 Philip III even stipulated that all inquisitors needed to have a background in law. The inquisitors did not typically remain in the position for a long time: for the Court of Valencia, for example, the average tenure in the position was about two years. Most of the inquisitors belonged to the secular clergy (priests who were not members of religious orders) and had a university education."
The hostility of Catholicism to homosexuality is exaggerated. It was there but Catholics also saw sex outside marriage, as sinful. And some between heterosexuals as being sinful.
Like you I don’t see much going on with regards to the persecution of homosexuality any more than adultery, o similar, in the records. That actually changes, in England at least with the reformation, where the Catholic Churches are actually accused of pederasty and the laws are hardened.
This is exported by the British Empire. To this day the Anglophone Caribbean has much harsher laws on homosexuality than the rest.
The amount of punishment you could get for sodomy varied wildly depending on the part of the medieval ages you were in. Sometimes it was castration, but also sometimes the punishment was to go do prayers. Based on my extremely limited understanding, it looks like the most common punishment was to have your property seized.
(Honestly, if I get to steal your stuff if I accuse you of sodomy, I'm surprised there weren't "more" sodomites.)
The Spanish inquisition numbers are consistent with the church thinking that bestiality is 100x worse that consenting adult homosexual sex.
Yeah I suspect the "seize your property" had more to do with someone with the means to demonstrate sodomy and get caught, tended to be what the English later termed "confirmed bachelor", i.e. shacked up with a lot of good-looking male servants.
The problem with claims about absence is many of them have since been proven false. For example, anthropologists long claimed homosexuality was 'absent' in the Inuits, yet another anthropologist wrote a book about a very feminine male eskimo who preferred to hang out with girls and was clearly 'gay', but had no way to conceptualise it.
Likewise, in other hunter gatherer groups, bands might be no bigger than 150 people. Only 2% of men are gay, even in recent surveys, so among 75 males, you might only have one gay guy. A more interesting question to ask hunter gatherers is "have you ever seen any feminine boys from a young age?"
I also read an article about a man who fled North Korea to the South, and only realised he was 'homosexual' when he got to South Korea because he just didn't think about what his attractions meant in the context he was raised.
Homosexuals primarily having sex with each other mostly comes after the rise of urbanism. Among the ancient Greeks it wasn't believed that having sex with males meant you didn't have sex with females, and the receptive role was customarily associated with a male too young to have a beard. Here is from Bentham's utilitarian argument against laws restricting it:
All the documents we have from the antients relative to this matter, and we have a great abundance, agree in this, that it is only for a very few years of his life that a male continues an object of desire even to those in whom the infection of this taste is at the strongest. The very name it went by among the Greeks may stand instead of all other proofs, of which the works of Lucian and Martial alone will furnish any abundance that can be required. Among the Greeks it was called Paederastia, the love of boys, not Andrerastia, the love of men. Among the Romans the act was called Paedicare because the object of it was a boy. There was a particular name for those who had past the short period beyond which no man hoped to be an object of desire to his own sex. They were called exoleti. No male therefore who was passed this short period of life could expect to find in this way any reciprocity of affection; he must be as odious to the boy from the beginning as in a short time the boy would be to him. The objects of this kind of sensuality would therefore come only in the place of common prostitutes; they could never even to a person of this depraved taste answer the purposes of a virtuous woman.
Homosexuality emerges at 2-3% of males even in small pacific islands and rural villages of Russia (when studied). Claims about urbanism are just that: claims. I spent a long time looking through epidemiological literature from packed cities in Pakistan, where only 2% of men exclusively have sex with other men. Seems like population density has no play here.
I don't believe that, my understanding is that the GSS shows that gay men even in the US are significantly more likely to have been raised in urban than rural areas. The stack exchange link posted above linked to a paper confirming that it's less common among hunter-gatherers than agro-pastoral populations. So I don't think the rate is the same everywhere, rather it varies.
My pet theory for why (a little) bisexuality is adaptive, is that it lets you understand on a viceral level what is attractive in your own sex. Think the stereotype that gay and bisexual men dress better.
Self-admitted bisexuality is much more common in women, yes. But a woman who admits being bisexual, greatly increases her number of female suitors while scarcely decreasing male interest. A man who admits being bisexual, gets more male romantic interest but much less of such from women. So the incentives to openly admit one's bisexuality are not symmetric.
Yeah, but most people don't cleverly metagame survey questions like that; they just answer the way they would if you asked them in person and in public. Which is the minimum-effort safe policy for most people.
This is absurd. Women and gay men are attracted to very different things in men on average, and in any case the idea there's no chance that this provide a fitness advantage beyond the immense fitness cost of spending your time humping dudes instead of chicks. Or why it's so rare.
Gay men are stereotyped as more "fashionable", but they do not necessarily dress in a way that is more sexually attractive to women. Women admire gay fashion, but they don't necessarily want their romantic partners dressing the same way. And of course, this is all irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of human history.
I think this may be one of those red-blue things; liberal women appear to appreciate fashion on men from what I can tell. There's that whole 'he's so cute he must be gay' thing.
1) just explains everything here. This should be the working hypothesis until disconfirmed, and it shocks me that is not even mentioned—by Scott, and presumably by the paper authors.
I would say it's disproved by multiple lines of evidence. When gay men have an identical (monozygotic) twin, that twin is not gay about 50% of the time. Since they have the same DNA, clearly some environmental factor is involved.
And as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the math doesn't work. Male homosexuality dramatically lowers your reproductive fitness. For a gene promoting homosexuality to stick around, you'd need to imagine fantasy scenarios like gay men rescuing 2-3 family members from burning buildings, while their straight brothers stand around doing nothing. We don't observe anything like that. Both gay and straight men seem equally likely to help relatives in danger.
I'm confused. 1) *is* environmental. It's like the thing where you're not attracted to people you grew up with. If several older brothers are around, you're more likely to be gay, probably also based on other factors, like likely availability of mates.
This isn't about rescuing niblings from burning buildings, this is about taking over parenting from dead older siblings. If you have a lot of older siblings, the likelihood of that being needed (in an aboriginal environment) is pretty high. Plus of course the gay uncle can help with resource gathering and in other ways.
>This isn't about rescuing niblings from burning buildings, this is about taking over parenting from dead older siblings.
My point was, any putative "gay gene" has to overcome a massive loss of fitness.
If being gay truly reduces your reproductive fitness by 80% (or even a smaller number, like 50%), what could a gay gene carrier do for his relatives that outweighs that? Honestly, we ARE talking about saving lives. Just giving your relatives a 5% survival boost isn't enough.
>This isn't about rescuing niblings from burning buildings, this is about taking over parenting from dead older siblings. If you have a lot of older siblings, the likelihood of that being needed (in an aboriginal environment) is pretty high.
Gay men don't seem to do that. When you were growing up, did you have a gay relative fussing over you and making sure you were fed and clothed? I didn't. My mom did that.
>Plus of course the gay uncle can help with resource gathering and in other ways.
Non-gay uncles can do that to, plus they'd get to have children of their own and avoid the fitness hit.
Meaning you weren’t in a situation where you needed it. Like I said, in an aboriginal environment, the prospect of parental loss was a lot higher.
Though you hint at an interesting issue; gays are (at least stereotypically) more feminine than straight men; was the help they (hypothetically) provided more feminine than masculine? Interesting thought…
>Non-gay uncles can do that to, plus they'd get to have children of their own
Rephrase that as “non-gay uncles can give the resources they’d otherwise give to their own children too, plus they’d get to have children of their own,” and you’ll see how that doesn’t make sense.
And you seem to be missing the other half of this hypothesis, which is that younger sons may have had significantly lower reproductive prospects than older sons, as we know has occurred in some classes in historical times.
There can be an evolutionary advantage for the younger males in a family to be more likely to be gay without the "nurturing gay male" hypothesis.
The evolutionary advantage could instead be due to having fewer dangerously competitive heterosexual younger brothers in a family. Many a younger brother has enlisted parts of a community into a war against his older brother, leading to deaths of many males in the community and otherwise wasting community resources.
You can construct scenarios where a "gay gene" would be selected for, but you can do that for any gene. Even one that causes you to hit yourself on the head with a hammer.
If my brother will kill me if I compete with him for some girl, then being gay would help me. But suppose that same brother leaves town? Now I'm not finding a mate for no reason.
It is true that someone who is gay is less likely to pass on their genes themselves.
However, their ability to cooperate with family and their less aggressive/competitive behavior could make it more likely that the genes they share with their siblings and other relatives get passed on.
So it might be an evolutionary advantage if a mother who has previously borne sons has a mechanism to expose future male fetuses to an environment in the womb that makes them more likely to be gay/cooperative/less aggressive.
Does the word epigenetic refer to changes in the characteristics of a fetus that result from altered gene expression without changes to the DNA sequence itself? I wonder how much these types of changes have been studied in relation to homosexuality.
Absolutely not - it does literally nothing to explain how this helps gay genes get passed on. It's not enough that your group as a whole "benefits" from it (even though you having kids would be more beneficial to the groups genes being passed on 99 times out of 100). The gay genes themselves need to have a way of being passed on. You cannot have selection for a gene that codes for not passing the genes on!
Any of your family members, even if you share a lot of genes with them, is going to have an overwhelming fitness advantage over your and your gay genes by having less gay genes, as they're the ones having the most children. If gayness is genetic, there's no reason to expect that it wouldn't be selected against heavily to the point of not existing but for mutations.
Lots of self-sacrificial behaviors CAN be passed on, because the sacrifice is usually made for one's own genetic children. Sacrificing yourself to save your children directly increases the frequency of self-sacrifice genes in following generations. But if your sacrificed yourself to save other people's children, this has to be selected against because you're removing these genes from the gene pool. Nothing gay people can possibly do (in an historical evolutionary context) increases the frequency of gay genes in future generations - the gay genes literally cannot compete with the straight genes.
It's a just so story, nothing more. There's nothing "shocking" here, it makes literally no evolutionary sense.
That's obviously a very different mechanism. It's never been the case that humans have had vast numbers of non-fertile children to support the group. If half of all people were gay or something, you might have a point. But very rarely having a gay child does not lend itself to anaology with worker bees.
I mean, if your little theory is true, it's weird that this 'help the group through infertility' would not only be so rare, but almost entirely manifested in the form of being gay, and not being biologically infertile, asexual, impotent etc. These things exist, but they're fairly rare in young people are nobody on earth would claim they're being selected for (because there's no a political impetus for this the way there is with people being unwilling to accept that gayness is essentially a 'disorder').
Your claim was "You cannot have selection for a gene that codes for not passing the genes on!” That didn’t allow for differing mechanisms.
You seem to think that only direct fitness exists, and there’s no such thing as inclusive fitness [that isn’t direct fitness]. That’s…not how evolution works.
Yes, that would tend to disconfirm. Is that the case? Do gay uncles not give more gifts to niblings than straight uncles? Spend more time with siblings' families? Are they no more likely to take in a dead sibling's kids?
If you're claiming the "gay uncle" hypothesis as presumptively correct, I think the burden is on you to show that gay uncles are hugely more supportive of their families than straight ones. Because it would have to be a huge effect to outweigh the substantial direct reproductive disadvantage, and I don't think it is.
I did not at all say “presumptively correct.” That would indeed require a high standard of proof. I said “working hypothesis until disconfirmed,” i.e. “first hypothesis” or “most plausible."
Certainly this data would be very helping in confirming or disconfirming it.
I am confused as to what you imagine the difference to be between "presumptively correct" and "working hypothesis until disconfirmed". The working hypothesis is, while you are working with it, the one you presume is correct. That you're willing to consider alternative evidence is good, but it doesn't change the presumption.
And…why are you assuming that fifth sons, or whatever, are just as likely to have just as many kids as first sons? That’s not what we observe in historical times. Younger sons are often a burden, to be sent off to monasteries.
I think that's mostly a thing with the historic upper class, which was on the hook to provide scarce upper-class positions for all their kids. But even so, so what? It is not required that fifth sons have *as many* kids as first sons. If they have any kids at all, that's a reproductive advantage for being the sort of person who is likely to have five sons. And daughters, which you'll marry off regardless,
I don't think that's relevant. From my very undeveloped understanding of biology: In the context of evolutionary adaptation, "promoting the survival of" doesn't mean going-and-doing-nice-things for another person. It means slightly increasing the likelihood of the gene line outcompeting other gene lines in the local population.
EG: If there are cases where it's better to not constantly have offspring (like there are with complex animals who's offspring take a long time to reach maturity), limiting reproduction can be advantageous. In social animals, having strong social bonds can be advantageous. Both of these advantages are realized by being gay.
Having an organism that will 100% be gay would be maladaptive. Having a gene line where an organism becomes gay situationally in the edge cases where it's beneficial to other organisms with the gene line is (probably) adaptive.
When analyzing these things, you have to consider the entirety of the gene line replicating itself over time, not just one organism reproducing.
"Gay uncles and aunts promote survival of their nieces and nephews"
Do people have a lot of anecdotes to support that hypothesis. Most of the anecdotes I hear about gay uncles tend to be of the "And then he moved to San Francisco and now we only see him every few years."
Somebody was just telling me about a high school classmate of his who was the nephew of a famous name brand childless gay fashion designer. There was much speculation over whether he'd eventually inherit his uncle's vast fortune. But, in the meantime, his uncle lived three thousand miles away and had an extremely busy life as world-famous fashion icons tend to do, so he didn't appear to be doing all that much for his nephew at the moment.
The society you're drawing your examples from is very homophobic. Enough to drive away a lot of people who would otherwise stay with family. At least some other societies, including some traditional/non-city societies, have been a lot less homophobic.
That's a question I've asked myself for a long time. Why does "homophobia" (it's not a phobia) exist? The only thing I can think of is that parents don't want gay kids.
One is anything that drops the birth rate is bad. You may be competing with other societies for resources, and if you have more people you can kill them and take their stuff. Evolution isn't nice.
Another is if gay men are less masculine (on average, but that's all you need for the taboo), they may not make as good warriors, see above. Any man deviating from the whole package (be strong, be brave, sleep with women and have lots of kids) is a threat, especially if you do a lot of fighting with other bands/tribes/chiefdoms/states.
Plausible social-evolutionary explanations for maladaptive genes can be ruled out and replaced longer than you can remain solvent. By which I mean it's just too powerful a tool to be relied upon.
Maybe getting tuberculosis is beneficial in the prehistoric environment because it culls the weak ones. Or maybe genes that predispose you to tuberculosis also improve bone density. Or perhaps getting tuberculosis teaches your tribe to live in the moment because they could die horribly at any time for no reason. You wouldn't say, "Until these and others are ruled out, I don't think there's any mystery that needs to be solved with bacteria."
How are you determining which hypothesis is most plausible here? What makes it more plausible that a gay uncle improves offspring viability so much moreso than a straight one in a tight knit tribe that it offsets the cost of that uncle not reproducing? And if the evolutionary role of the uncle is to help raise the parent's child, why bother with him being distracted from that by a male sexual partner or sexual frustration when you could remove the impulse entirely? I think you should have evidence before you posit that a just-so story has to be ruled out first
I think "has to" is a bit strong; I said "should." And my only actual criticism is that what I see as the strongest hypothesis wasn't even mentioned.
Maybe I'm wrong and it doesn't explain everything here. But it sure seems to me that it does.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that *removing* sexual desire is a lot harder and more consequential than *redirecting* it. Pair-bonding has more benefits than mere reproduction.
I don't want to pick apart words here, as it's not really productive, but in my defense you did, in fact, say "need to", not "should". I accept that "should" is what you meant.
I think the fact that three very different plausible explanations exist and you don't think the strongest one was mentioned should heavily discount the plausibility of any individual explanation constructed in this way.
I do mostly agree with your critique of removing sexual desire. It should be noted, though, that evolution does not seem to refuse to make people asexual on principle, as that trait is present is >1% of individuals.
I went after that hypothesis just to keep things at the object level, but my broader point is that the simplest explanation for a trait that dramatically reduces reproductive fitness is non-genetic. If you want to use a more complex explanation, it should start from empirical evidence. There are enough free parameters in this kind of explanation that you can argue that anything is evolutionarily beneficial.
> I don't want to pick apart words here, as it's not really productive, but in my defense you did, in fact, say "need to", not "should". I accept that "should" is what you meant.
We're talking about different things. "I think you need to rule out what seems to be by far the most plausible hypothesis before seriously considering others," was a general statement. What I said about this specific scenario was "This should be the working hypothesis until disconfirmed."
> the simplest explanation for a trait that dramatically reduces reproductive fitness is non-genetic.
Maybe. Certainly errors happen. It just seems like homosexuality is too prevalent to make that plausible. But someone would have to run the numbers on that to be sure.
But homosexuality has such huge negative consequences for your fitness that it's hard to imagine an evolutionary offset. A study of gay men in SF that found they had something like 0.2 children each.
What do gay uncles do to promote the survival of nieces and nephews? Nothing, as far as anyone can tell. Remember that a nephew only has 25% of your DNA: even if a "gay gene" caused you to save the life of a young child (when you wouldn't have done so otherwise), that gene's getting selected against. 0.25 * 0.2 < 1.
And while I'm not trying to be politically incorrect, many gay men are estranged from their biological family, and not even in a position to help raise cousins. They're probably doing less than the straight people in their family. Tragic, but that's the way it is.
In societies where gay people are accepted and able to stay with their families, they are very likely to contribute financial resources - food, clothing, shelter. That may have been very important in the past.
Not enough to overcome not reproducing themselves. Worker ants sacrifice their own ability to reproduce because they're haplodiploid and can better promote their genes by dying for their hive/queen. We don't see anything comparable in humans.
Worker ants are not sacrificing anything, because they and their genes have no input into the decision to raise a queen or worker. If they did, they would always try to be a queen.
Why would gayness be selected for in those societies though? A gay uncle is going to be overhwlemingly outcompeted in terms of reproduction and so has no way of increasing the promience of their own genes in future generations. Any non-gay siblings are going to be the ones with their genes in future generations, and those genes are much less gay than the uncle's. It's absurd.
It's not enough to help the group on the whole. If gayness is to be selected for, people with the gay genes thesmelves need a mechanism for passing on these genes. It's doesn't matter how beneficial being gay supposedly is to the group, people without/with less gay genes will always be selected for over gay people.
Group evolution is completely nonsense - evolution acts on GENES, not groups. A gene that codes for not replicating itself cannot be selected for. Having more genes in common with your family than strangers is irrelevant - you need a mechanism for the genes for this individual trait to be passed on.
I don't think it makes sense to use any evidence post-agriculture to evaluate evolutionary things for humans.
As for gay uncles promoting survival, there are more complex things that could explain it. EG: sometimes it's evolutionarily advantageous to not have a group population continue to grow. It's also sometimes evolutionarily advantageous to maintain social cohesion in social animals.
The evolutionary advantage doesn't come from your gay uncle saving you from a gang of baboons. It comes from having a group of organisms who share the same gene line, where group population can stabilize through some members not reproducing but also maintaining social benefits of sexual attraction, is advantageous.
You are invoking group selection, which (to my knowledge) is not believed to be a strong evolutionary force.
Your genes only care about themselves. They have no interest in (or knowlege of) what's good for the clan, tribe, or nation. Genes can easily spread that help individuals but harm the population—like ones for aggression, cheating, or corruption.
I doubt a "do not reproduce" gene would spread or even remain stable. For one thing, this gene would hold you back in times when resources are abundant (imagine if colonists in the New World had stubbornly insisted on having just 2.1 children each. If not for immigration, the modern population of America would be in the low tens of millions). For another, people are already capable of rationally deciding that reproducing is a bad idea (see: women who use birth control). We don't need a gene for that: we can do it on our own.
I didn't mean to imply that group survival is what matters. I meant that there are instances where pro-group behavior in individuals can result in specific gene lines being propagated more in the local population, which would lead to those behaviors being selected for.
Yeah, the gay uncles theory is ridiculous as other commenters have noted.
A point no one else mentioned yet is that if you want to try to argue that homosexuality is secretly evolutionarily adaptive, you need to explain why homophobia is so common as well.
In the “gay uncles” theory, homophobia would be evolutionarily maladaptive, since if you pressure your gay siblings/children to get married, you’d be preventing them from … doing whatever it is that gay uncles are supposed to do to increase the family’s fitness. It would be bizarre for homophobia to ever evolve in that situation.
Whereas with something like the Female Fecundity Hypothesis (where being gay is an unwanted side effect of a gene that grants some unrelated reproductive benefit), homophobia makes perfect sense: a society with the “gay gene” floating around outreproduces one without the “gay gene” because of increased female fecundity, but a society with the “gay gene” *and* homophobia does even better, because they manage to force more of their gay kids into having offspring. (Evolution doesn’t care if you’re happy as long as you’re a parent!)
(Not arguing for the FFH in particular, just arguing that the right answer probably looks more like “evolution doesn’t want gay people but can’t avoid them for some reason” than “evolution wants gay people but wants them to be closeted”.)
You seem to assume that homophobia necessarily has evolutionary roots at the genetic level. At a first glance it sounds much more like the kind of thing cultural evolution would come up with, and not necessarily everywhere.
It doesn’t matter if homophobia is biological or cultural. If gayness was evolutionarily adaptive, then homophobia would be maladaptive and should be selected against, both biologically and culturally. Homophobia isn’t something that *had to* exist. But for some reason it does. You wouldn’t expect so many cultures to invent it (and then keep it) if it was hurting them by suppressing the guncle effect (or whatever). Cultures are able to “evolutionarily” figure out things like the right way to prepare slightly poisonous foods to make them nutritious, so you’d expect them to be able to figure out the right way to treat their family members to make them evolutionarily-advantageous too.
(It’s possible that homosexuality is evolutionarily advantageous for hunter-gatherers, but not for city-dwellers, and biological evolution is too slow to have managed to weed it out since we settled down, so cultural evolution is trying to fill in for it… but I don’t think that really fits anyone’s model either.)
But that is just exactly the sort of cultural adaptation that could arise when situations change, such as if gayness was adaptive in a hunter-gatherer society but maladaptive in an agricultural one.
You don't need norms for things your genetics already encodes.
There is zero evidence it was adaptive in hunter-gatherer socities though. You will always produce more copies of a gene through reproducing than not-reproducing.
I’m not sure of your point here. No, right now we have no direct evidence of that, but I’m suggesting that perhaps that’s the explanation, and responding to objections to that hypothesis. “It was adaptive in our aboriginal environment” is always a good first hypothesis for any enduring and widespread genetic phenomenon.
I think you're confusing your timescales. The time it would take for biological selection against homophobia is much larger than homophobia (or at least records of homophobia in human societies) has existed.
Cultural selection doesn't seem like it would be relevant, as there are plenty of cases where human culture selects for things that are really bad for fitness (sacrifices, birth control, celibacy etc).
I agree that cultural evolution is slow and non-optimal.
OTOH…
Are there any remaining cultures (which are in competition with other cultures) that practice human sacrifice? If not, score one for cultural selection.
As for birth control, there are lots of people worried (in both racist and non-racist ways!) about differences in birth rates between different groups of people based on, among other things, whether they tend to use birth control. People *hope* that either other things will make up for lower birth rates (in particular, better long-term survival rates) or that the high-birth-rate cultures will eventually be absorbed into low-birth-rate-ism. (In which case, one more point for cultural evolution.) But it’s also possible that in 1000 years the world will just be full of Mormons and sub-Saharan Africans.
Celibacy? Ask the Shakers how that’s going for them. “Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t because they’re dead!”
Instead of looking for some indirect evolutionary benefit from obligate homosexuality, I find it simpler and more plausible to hypothesize that maintaining a stable encoding from DNA to neural patterns of "finding the opposite sex attractive" is hard work, which means that beyond some level of precision (<100%), the tradeoff in complexity and energy just isn't worth it.
Any takers? Any obvious objections? Any ideas on how such a hypothesis might be put to the test?
Self reply here, David below links to a very specific hypothesis by William Rice which proposes an epigenetic mechanism just like this. If I understand the article right from a quick skim, they propose that an epigenetic mechanism to "canalize" sexual dimorphism, i.e to make XX individuals react less to androgens, and XY more so, which is generally adaptive, but then elements of this mechanism sometimes get inherited when they "should" not, resulting in things like homosexuality.
"Any ideas on how such a hypothesis might be put to the test?"
Wild guess off the top of my head: If getting heterosexuality right is hard work, then it should be expected to fail more often when components of that work fail (or are stressed). Are face-blind people more likely to be gay?
1) Gay uncles and aunts promote survival of their nieces and nephews - presumably more so in social animals.
Irrelevant - you need a way for gays genes to be passed on. It's not enough to help the group generally - the group isn't carrying gay genes at the same frequency as the gay uncle is and so helping raise nieces and nephews does little to propogate gay genes.
2) In animals where sexual competition can be dangerous, the ability to defer the urge to procreate via gay sex may be pro-survival enough to outweigh the delayed or less-certain reproduction.
This seems extremely implausible. You're basically saying that in order to reduce the risk of not passing on their genes (through being killed), men have evolved to become interested in an activity that...reduces the likelihood of passing on their genes (having sex with men instead of women). Nope, you want to have sex, period, because you've got nothing to lose. Evolution doesn't care if you live or die, only if you succesfully reproduce, and there's no conceivable way sex with men makes this more likely on net balance. And it's also absurd considering that most men are not gay and have no interest of sex with men, and that most gayness is extremely concentrated in a small % of gay men who are mostly not interested with sex with women.
3) Bisexuality may be selected for for some reason (perhaps attracting more than one mate or child-raising partner), and people being purely gay is a side effect.
Bisexual men are a very small % of the population, even relative to gay men. The 'side effect' would therefore be completely overwhelming the 'actual' effect, which is especially absurd since the side effect completely destroys the very fitness advantage the 'side effect' supposedly provides! (i.e. makes people not reproduce at all).
You also have the fact that having a additional, male partner may help your offspring survive, but the bisexual partner themselves suffers a fitness COST by helping your raise your child. Either they're not having kids themselves or they're spending less time/resources helping their own biological children, so being a bisexual partner to somebody else is going to be strongly selected against!
>Until these (and probably others) are ruled out, I'm going to think that there's no great evolutionary mystery in the existence of homosexuality. Absence of knowledge is very different from knowledge of absence.
All three of these hypotheses are extremely speculative and bordering on 'just so' stories. The burden of proof is on you to explain how they could conceivably work, not on us to disprove them. You didn't even attempt to identify any issues with any of them yourself, so it's bizarre to act as though you've proven anything here.
You have not provided a mechanism for gay genes being selected for, for gays genes providing an INDIVIDUAL fitness advantage (needed for gay genes to be passed on), and why gayness is so common compared to bisexuality.
You seem to have missed that nieces and nephews share a lot of genes with uncles. Not as good as offspring, but enough that we're talking kin selection rather than group selection.
And you seem to have missed that I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm trying to argue against the first link of the following rather ridiculous chain of non-reasoning:
1. We don't have an explanation for homosexuality.
2. Therefore, homosexuality should not biologically exist.
3. Therefore, it is some kind of weird dysfunction.
4. Therefore, we should oppose it socially.
I am not saying that you believe this chain of non-reasoning, but I often perceive it as a subtext in these discussions, and it is what I am arguing against.
>You seem to have missed that nieces and nephews share a lot of genes with uncles. Not as good as offspring, but enough that we're talking kin selection rather than group selection.
No, I literally addressed this in the second sentence of my response! It's not enough to share a lot of genes - for gayness to be passed on, the 'gay genes' themselves specifically need a way of being passed on, otherwise gayness dies out. In a family, the children without gay genes will have many many more children than the one with the gay genes, therefore over time that family is expected to become less gay (if gayness is genetic). There's simply no mechanism in humans for gayness to be selected for, especially considering the rarity of gayness and the obvious fact that no other forms of infertility (e.g. impotence, lack of sex cell production) were selected for despite having almost identical practical effects.
>And you seem to have missed that I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm trying to argue against the first link of the following rather ridiculous chain of non-reasoning:
I don't care what you're trying to argue *against*, your argument itself is wrong and bad and that's all that matters.
Nobody here is saying we should oppose gayness socially - either gayness is genetic or it isn't. Whatever "subtext" you're reading into here is utterly, utterly irrelevant (and almost entirely imagined). Scientific truths do not change just because you don't like the supposed political consequences of a particular truth, and the fact that you're implying they do is enough to dismiss whatever you're saying out of hand (though it's trivially wrong from a scientific stand point) because you're admitting you're choosing arguments that support your ideology, not which make the most (or any) scientific sense.
Gayness *almost certainly* wasn't selected for by evolution, period. It's unfortunate if you find this fact unsettling, but nobody should have to pretend faulty reasoning isn't faulty because you're unsettled by something.
Does the Dutch study control for time? Gen X is a little gayer than the baby boomers, Gen Y is a little gayer than Gen X. It seems like the more recent the birth, the more likely someone is to be gay, and younger siblings will tend to be born more recently.
> Following previous studies (see e.g., Blanchard & Bogaert, 1996; Bogaert, 2006; Frisch & Hviid, 2006), we also control for birth-cohort and maternal-age-at-birth fixed effects. These variables enter the model in a robust and fully flexible manner, as a set of 50 dummy variables for specific birth years (birth cohort) and a set of 30 dummy variables for specific years of age (maternal age at birth).
It's not that each generation is gayer. It is simply becoming increasingly safer to identify as gay.
When you conduct these surveys you rely on people to self label, if they're being perspecuted, naturally, they won't, that doesn't mean they stop existing. You don't need to go too far back in European history to see people being killed for it.
Unsurprisingly, the countries with the most generous human rights laws are also the "gayest"
That's one possibility. Another possibility is that each generation is actually getting gayer, rather than gayness being constant and willingness to admit it increasing.
It's not something we can really test for. You can't look inside someone's head and read their true label.
Yes. Could be. It could also be the real fear of being killed or ostracized for it.
I'm the only gay member of my family that came out.
Am aware of older family members that are still in the closet. And heard stories of members 2 generations far removed that "could have been"
You didn't count for these things back then.
There's a joke in the community that "roommates" is historians way of labeling same sex relationships. Emily Dickenson sure was fond of her roommate - type of thing.
I remember reading some article saying that Uganda supposedly doesn't gave any gay people. I'm sure the fear of the death penalty had nothing to do with those stats 😅
If you had decent, long-term statistics for cultures whose gay acceptance rates are independent, but also are exposed to whatever other causes you're checking against, I think you could tease out an answer. Whether it's testable really depends on the alternate hypothesis; airborne pollutants would be much easier to get data for than parental meat consumption (both arbitrary, not a real theory).
Probably both easier and more useful to work out a model for physiological causes of gayness first and then see what affects those pathways.
The biggest change has been an increase in females identifying as bisexual (although most women who identify as that and are in a relationship are with a man). Not what one would have expected if it were about persecution.
And an increase overall, not just for bisexuals, although they have indeed the highest spike.
It's multifaceted.
I know many bisexuals that are only out to friends and not family, which is a massive incentive to not marry the same sex. Especially when statistically there are *substantially* more available partners of the opposite sex. It complicates familial relationships to a degree few people outside of the community could understand.
This is very much a patriarchal society we live in. If you're a woman, married to a man, your life will objectively be much easier socially, beaurocratically, financially etc. If you have the option of choice, why wouldn't you choose an easier life.
This is anecdotal to my experience but I am a lesbian and my wife is bi. I have told her multiple times in the past that had I had the choice, like she does, I wouldn't choose to open myself up to this level of prejudice. Life's messy enough, I completely understand why bi women stay in straight relationships.
It is also hypersexualized in the media. I suspect this is part of the recent uptick in bisexuality. Think younger generations are still learning where bicuriosity ends and where bisexuality begins.
Isn't the stigma against men having male partners much stronger than that of women having female ones? I understand that "patriarchy" is a universally applicable bugaboo, but here its invocation is particularly jarring.
I remember watching this video last year that summarized it well;
* if you're a woman and you're straight, it makes perfect sense
* if you're a woman and you're bisexual, you're just doing it for male attention
* if you're a man and you're bisexual, you're actually just gay and confused.
The assumption is on "wanting to be with a man" any distancing from that rule is trivialized and not taken seriously.
Lesbians are just a weird glitch in the matrix. There to be sexualized and not taken seriously. "Who's the man in the relationship" is a question I've been asked an insulting amount of times.
My gay brothers have their share of homophobia. The stigma they face unfortunately often translated into physical bullying. It's seen as a very unmasculine and therefore "weak" thing to be, which is so deeply ironic considering there's two men in a relationship.
Someone once summarized this as "society can't imagine sex that doesn't focus on male genitalia." That's why bi women are actually straight and bi men are actually gay: both focus on the penis.
"* if you're a woman and you're bisexual, you're just doing it for male attention"
That seems like a strange hypothesis for anyone to propose. My impression is that the average woman gets more male attention than she wants, just in the default case.
You don't mention a couple of the other possibilities, though.
If you're a man and you're straight, it makes perfect sense. That doesn't fit that the assumption should be on "wanting to be with a man," and covers something like 45% of the population, the second-biggest bucket (or perhaps the first given the increased number of bi women).
If you're a man and you're gay, you're doing it because of some innate thing you can't control.
Lesbian sexualization these days (not in ancient Greece) occurs less because it's not taken seriously than because you have two women interested in sex, which a superstimulus for a straight or bi man. The fact that neither of them are interested in *him* is a separate issue, but is a lot less relevant in a fantasy.
And if they're bi, then it's the old 'man with two wives' fantasy, which actually does exist historically in high-status men, which many men like to fantasize about being. Again, there's no guarantee a pair of bi women would be interested in a randomly selected man, and in fact it's pretty unlikely. But...this is fantasy, not reality.
From what I can tell, a lot of it was fear of AIDS. When doing the bicurious thing a while back (purely online, never crossed the line into meatworld) I found a lot of straight or even bi women simply weren't interested in a guy with any male partners. The STD risk goes way up, one told me.
So if you're a bi guy, you have to pick. Since as a man the impetus is on you to approach, and the straight female pool is much larger than the gay male pool by maybe one and half orders of magnitude, plus carries more social approval outside of a few social scenes (poly, kink, progressive come to mind), a lot of bi guys just date and marry women and call it quits. The small number of Hugh Hefners and guys who approach everyone obscure the much larger number of men who find the whole mating dance difficult and unpleasant.
Also probably explains the existence of 'the down low' and other secret gay partners among men...how many of them were repressed gay men, and how many of them were bi? We'll probably never know.
If you're bi and female there's the 'hot bi babes' or 'unicorn' fantasy to deal with, but you don't have people rejecting you on basis of your identity to the same degree. Whether you come out ahead I think they can judge better than me!
>It's not that each generation is gayer. It is simply becoming increasingly safer to identify as gay.
Do you have proof for this? It's a convincing sounding story, but that's not enough for it to be asserted so strongly.
We know for a FACT that homosexuality is significantly affected by non-genetic factors (because the heritability of homosexuality is relatively low), so it would be extremely surprising to suggest the monumental environmental changes that have ocurred over time (or that exist between countries) have exactly zero intersection with the environmental factors that affect sexuality.
I'd worry that the large-population studies are going to pick up unwanted demographic differences. For example, larger family size may correlate with religiosity or traditionalism, either of which might make people differently likely to get gay-married (regardless of actual sexual orientation).
Did the authors of the Danish and Dutch studies try to control for these effects at all?
I feel like I should clarify one of my thoughts. I sort of alluded to it here (https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1693811404845830377), but I really want AKP to do some triangulation. There are many variables they had access to that could have been leveraged to winnow down the DAG. That they didn't do this leaves us unclear on several viable alternatives I'm certain they had the power to address.
Personal numbers:
Sibling birth order effect on homosexuality is real: 90%
Real and biological: 75%
Real and of currently-estimated magnitudes: 40%
Real and explicable by current theory: 25%
Real, biological, and linked to NLGN4Y in particular: 10%
This makes far more sense. In utero, homosexual men have female responsiveness to testosterone, but only in specific parts of their brains that control attraction.
Greg's theory is clearly contradicted by the fact that gay men were usually feminine from a very young age. Richard Green's experiment noted that many gay men were feminine from age 2, suggesting their brains were not completely masculinised. If homosexuality were caused by a virus in childhood you'd expect typical boys to suddenly become feminine and start liking barbies after the virus caused destruction to the male circuitry.
n=1. So what. There are thousands of cases of brain damage every day, and never another report to corroborate this. What if he was just a closet case who felt confidence to come out? Or a self hating homo who wanted to 'blame' it on a stroke? There are plausible confounders here. And even if the stroke did cause damage to the male typical circuitry, and made him gay, that doesn't prove Cochrans idea at all. I'll believe it when I see it happen in young kids, except it hasn't so far. If regular 5 year old boys were suddenly turning feminine, the gay germ hypothesis would've been proposed by every man and their dog, long before Cochran ever uttered the idea.
He's not self-hating and doesn't "blame" the stroke, he reports being quite happy now. Instead of actually checking to see whether your hypothesis had any truth to it you just threw it out without any regard for it.
Ulcers were blames on stress for a long time even though the introduction of antibiotics meant they were accidentally getting cured that way. Barry Marshall was not pushing on an open door when he attributed them to H. Pylori instead. So, no, germ theories would not be popular because they were true. They were not popular for things we know they cause in our actual history for a long time and people like Semmelweiss were not just accepted as being right.
Look, I've read Cochran's blog for over a decade. You're just parroting everything he says and it's clear you haven't read much on sex research (like most of his fanboys). I mean no offence, I used to be a gay germ proponent too, but absence of evidence for other hypotheses doesn't mean the gay germ is right.
Rice's hypothesis was badly misrepresented by Cochran. E.g. falsely claiming it was "left over" from chimp-human split, wrong. Falsely claiming it was due to "leaky" epigenetics, also wrong. Rice's newer paper better explains evidence for his hypothesis in general: http://volweb2.utk.edu/~gavrila/papers/mol_ecol_16.pdf
"a mutation producing the SA epimark will accumulate whenever C/B < 100. For example, a mutation that increased fitness of the parent that produced it by 1% would invade the gene pool even if it lowered the fitness of recipient opposite- sex offspring by 99% "
I know a comic collector called Chuck Rozanski who suffered West Nile-induced encephalitis. He emerged from the fever a changed man: he started cross-dressing, and has recently become non-binary. It apparently does happen.
What do you mean by, "It makes no evolutionary sense"? Evolution merely has to produce things that are "good enough", not "perfect". Human eyes have a design that's inferior to octopus eyes, but they worked well enough, so now we're stuck with the results. Human eyes are a local maximum, and evolution can't go down into the valley to find a higher hill. I don't see a reason why homosexuality can't be the same type of effect. As long as it only affects a small percentage of the bigger and stronger sex, it might well be an acceptable trade-off for whatever path got us to where we are.
2% of males in Samoa are "fa'afafine" (their version of homosexual) and have not had to reproduce for hundreds if not thousands of years. That is a huge fitness cost that is miraculously being maintained in the population somehow.
Even in the west in the 80s, male homosexuals suffered a loss in reproductive fitness that is roughly equivalent to that of achondrplasic dwarfs (calculated via number of offspring). In other words, from an evolutionary point of view, it’s better to be a 3’10” midget than it is to be Ian McKellen.
Dwarfism, blindness, muteness so rare because they're all costly from an evolutionary perspective. But male homosexuality (2%) is actually exceedingly common. If 2% of men were walking around blind you wouldn't say such a silly thing. If there were no homosexuals, just bisexuals, then this would be less of an evolutionary puzzle. But exclusive homosexuals exist, it's common and the idea it's socialized into them is pure nonsense.
I didn't say anything about "socialized", but I don't think it's genetic either. My best guess is, like the theory Scott talks about, that it's epigenetic. As in, various hormones and stuff floating around in the womb can affect the development of the fetus.
Yeah, its a fitness cost, but that only matters when a few mutations could produce something better. We're well past that stage now. Possibly the "choice" was made before our ancestors had evolved brains sophisticated enough to manifest the problem. If someone could decompile the human genome, tweak the source code to avoid this bug, and recompile it to create a version of humans that were purely heterosexual, then sure, all other things being equal, I think they'd be more reproductively fit than normal humans. But they'd be no less vulnerable to a quick genocidal war wiping them off the slate, leaving us where we started.
I agree, that is closer to the answer. But more likely, there is something sexually antagonistic about it. That is, there is some other mechanism maintaining its prevalence. This model proposes an evolutionary reason for why homosexuals might have sex atypical receptivity to hormones in their brains: http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Rice-et-al.-2012.pdf
Seems straightforward to me. With fewer siblings you get more parental attention. More of your parents subjecting you to gender/sexual stereotypes, and less time to be yourself.
So ‘gender stereotypes’ and socialization are needed to establish heterosexual attraction, now? When has that ever worked. John Money and dozens of other doctors raised typical boys as girls, removing their genitals, socializing them as girls, and not telling them they were born girls. Yet in every published case they turned out attracted to women.
That would be true if there were hundreds of cases, but there are not. 2% of a small number you're not going to get androphilic ones.
"It's possible that 'degree of heterosexuality' is a spectrum and that socialization is only needed for a minority on the edge of that spectrum"
Does it make sense for something so crucial for evolutionary function (attraction to the opposite sex) to be 'socialized' out of men? I mean, it doesn't make sense that you'd lose ALL attraction to women.
Even in the Sambia tribe, they make young boys fellatio one another for 10 years starting at age 8 (because they believe ingestion of semen is essential for male growth), and when they're given access to women, they happily move on to them. Only a few percent of the males continue exclusively wanting action with other men, and other tribesmen find it baffling, and even mock them.
Could the birth-order effect be partly due to older siblings, especially firstborns, being under more pressure to conform to their parents' wishes, whereas younger siblings get more slack?
It might be enlightening to see the results of similar studies on birth order vs. religiosity. I'd expect that firstborns would be more likely to profess their parents' religion, while youngers would be more likely not to practice it.
My hypothesis is that if homosexual behavior is culturally forbidden as in the case of past cultures, gay genes will increase cooperative behavior among males.
Enough to overcome the fact that you're going to be less likely to have sex with women at all?
And aversion to feminine men seems fairly common throughout history. It's easily the case that men cooperated with gay gene having men less because they were seen as less dependable in e.g. hunting/combat situtions which required tough men.
>Enough to overcome the fact that you're going to be less likely to have sex with women at all?
I think so. Also, I think in many cultures, the thought of men being attracted to other men did not even cross one's mind and even gay men thought of themselves as men and behaved in masculine way. Moreover, I recently found some study saying homosexual behavior aids in conflict resolution among Chimpanzees. It could be similar in humans too...
But I could be just as easily wrong and you could be right. We don't know how different humans are from chimpanzees, and the role of cultures.
What you're saying doesn't really allow gay genes to be passed on unless they only manifested as honest to goodness aversion to sex with women in modern environments.
You are right. Maybe having partially inheriting gay genes is advantageous, but inheriting them fully turns one gay? But this works only if there is more than one gay gene.
Given that women are more likely to identify as bisexual than men, I wonder how much of the differences in effect between gays and lesbians may be confounded by bisexuality – which these studies' methodologies could not control for (since they only observe monogamous marriages).
The sibling effect might be smaller for bisexuals and account for that sex difference?
Bisexuals seem like a big potential confounder for these studies: if the birth order effect includes bisexuals as well, then using marriage data would obscure that because bisexuals are more likely to end up in straight marriages than gay ones just due to number of potential partners (as discussed here a while back).
But if the birth order effects don’t include bisexuals, then the marriage data obscures that too, since some people the study would be counting as “gay” because they’re in a same-sex marriage are actually bisexual.
My recollection from the early 2000s was that Blanchard's estimate was that FBOE accounted for 1/7th of all male homosexuals: in other words, not a trivial amount, but not a large fraction either, thus leaving most examples of male homosexuality unaccounted for.
All this talk of "gay genes" without acknowledging that the concordance rate among identical twins is so low that the twin of a homosexual most likely isn't one also. Psychology had a replication crisis because they had weak theories that led them to mine for noise. There's still no good theory for how gay genes could persist at a level higher than the rate of de novo mutations.
"All this talk of "gay genes" without acknowledging that the concordance rate among identical twins is so low that the twin of a homosexual most likely isn't one also."
Slightly unrelated, but I think this is a bad argument/analogy. Some studies suggest the identical twin of a schizophrenic has <50% odds of being one (others say slightly more), but schizophrenia is 80-90% genetic - this is one of those times the brain is bad at Bayesian reasoning.
Variance in homosexuality is probably between 10-25% genetic, which isn't huge, but is big enough to confound studies. There's no amazing theory for how most genetic things could persist at a level higher than the rate of de novo mutations, but here we are.
Something to keep in mind about identical twin concordance rates is that the twins share a bunch of characteristics besides the one whose concordance you're interested in, and some of those characteristics may influence concordance rates via a psychosocial, rather than genetic, route. For instance if the twins are physically unattractive and bad at playground games they will have a harder time of it growing up. On average they'll see fewer teacher smiles, have fewer friends, and suffer more bullying. Seems quite possible to me that the heavier load of sad and bad experiences increases the chance of schizophrenia.
> Seems quite possible to me that the heavier load of sad and bad experiences increases the chance of schizophrenia.
But that's the opposite of Scott's point. He's saying that even though schizophrenia "is 80-90% genetic"[1], twins who share all their genes with a schizophrenic clone fail to be schizophrenic themselves about 50% of the time.
What you're saying is that twins are so similar to each other that they should be concordant on any given trait far _more_ than the genetic influence on the trait would suggest.
Yeah, I get that. My comment was a general one about concordance studies, not meant as an explanation for the difference in the figures Scott quotes for concordance for schizophrenia and what fraction of schizophrenia is accounted for by genetics.
Heritability is distinct from "genetically determined" for just this reason. Wearing earrings is highly heritable, but no one thinks there's an earring attraction gene or genes causing that. It's downstream of socialization of people who happen to have X chromosomes. That the variance of the trait is explained in genetic variance is distinct from mechanistic determination from those genes in the way people sometimes too quickly imagine, which I take as the point you are making.
If physical attractiveness of the type that is heritable is causally responsible for socialization that predisposes schizophrenia, so long as the attractiveness is the independent variable that matters and the socialization response is relatively constant, then the difference that matters for right here and now is the genes, not the environment. That's not to say we couldn't alter the social environment and upend the math. We potentially could.
Bailey did a gay twin concordance study by recruiting volunteers in gay newspapers. He got 50% of the time if one identical twin was gay, so might the other one be. That seemed like good evidence for gay genes.
But that might be a selection effect favoring when both identical twins are out on the gay scene in Boys Town: "Hey, Tim and Tom, you guys should volunteer for this twin study." But if one identical twin is living the gay life in Chicago, and the other back home in Dubuque as a fireman with two kids, will the study be as likely to be called to their attention?
So, Bailey redid this starting with the comprehensive Australian twin registry. And got 22% concordance. Which is far from nothing. But it's also less than people expected after he first got 50% concordance.
50% definitely feels wrong to me anecdotally. I’ve known a handful of gay men that have straight identical twin brothers (that I know about) but only 1 that I can think of that has a gay identical twin brother.
> I’ve known a handful of gay men that have straight identical twin brothers (that I know about) but only 1 that I can think of that has a gay identical twin brother.
How many people do you meet? Identical twins are less than 1 in 250 births. The number of identical twins I know is zero. I went to the same school as a pair of them once.
I mean, I’m not currently friends with anyone who has an identical twin (that I know about), but I’m 50, and I came out at 19, and have always lived in large cities, so I’ve met a lot of gay men over the years.
(And I think maybe because I would have expected both-gay twins to be more common, that that has made it more salient to me when I find out that a gay person I know has a straight twin. Whereas, eg, you might hear one of your coworkers mention “blah blah my twin brother blah blah” and then have forgotten about it the next day because it’s not really relevant to you, so you end up feeling like you don’t know any twins.)
That would still mean that someone with a gay twin is very roughly 5-10 times more likely than a random non-identical sibling to be gay, which would seem to be strong evidence that genes play an important role, just not an entirely deterministic one.
It is a much less important role for genes than is exhibited by virtually all traits.
Obviously genes are fully determinative of everything; it isn't possible for them not to play an important role. But people usually want to analyze things in narrower terms than that.
Right. 22% is way above random but pretty far below many other traits.
In general, trying to come up with a nature or nurture theory to explain male homosexuality seemed like a major question around the turn of the century, but decades have gone by and I certainly haven't made any additional progress on it.
Has anybody come up with a big new theory since the good old days of Blanchard's FBOE, Cochran's Gay Germ, whomever's Female Relative Fecundity theories?
The concordance rate you get has to depend heavily on how rare the trait is in your set of subjects. If you study pairs of identical male twins, making no effort to recruit twin pairs where one or both is gay, probably 5% or so of your subjects will be gay. If you recruit in gay newspapers for men who have identical twins, way more than 5% of your subject group will be gay. If everybody who answered the ad was a gay man who had an identical twin, 50% of your group at least will be gay, even if every single set of twins is discordant. In real life the ad was probably also answered by straight men who happened to have an identical twin (assuming the ad only asked for male identical twins), but the percent of subjects who are gay would surely be way higher than the 5% you'd get if you recruited in some way that didn't up the gay quotient of your subject pool.
Anyhow, as regards concordance being affected by commonness of trait in subject pool. imagine doing a concordance twin study for brown eyes, which 70% of people have. You'd get a very high figure. And note that you would get a high concordance rate even if you didn't match twin to twin, but matched each subject not to his twin but to a random other person in the study. Since 70% of people have brown eyes, you would get the following results:
-brown-brown: .7 x .7 = .49, or 49%
-blue-blue: .3 x .3 = 0.9, or 9%
-blue-brown 2x (.7 x .3) = .42 or 42%
So you'd get 58% concordance for *random pairs*. Seems like the concordance due to being genetically identical would be whatever the concordance rate is for identical twins, minus the 58% you get for random pairs.
Anyhow, I think that accounts for the high concordance figure Bailey got.
Using some rough population figures off the internet, it looks to me like the population of Europe + USA + Australia + Canada is is under 1200 million.
With a world population estimate of 8 billion, that would add up to around 15% of people.
But a lot of Europeans and Americans have brown eyes! (Also true for Australia and Canada, but neither of them is large enough to register against the population of the world.)
How can the share of people with brown eyes be as low as 70%? Shouldn't it be 90+? Who are these unknown hordes of people with the blue and green eyes?
(Including WIkipedia's description of the MENA region adds 600 million whites to our count. But (a) that could at most increase our estimate of the relevant population by 50%, since we were limited at 1200 million before, and (b) they are even more biased toward having brown eyes than Europeans are.)
Is this "male homosexuality" or "homosexuality"? At least footnote #4 suggests you meant indeed the latter by "gay genes," but though I can easily imagine there being genes promoting sex-specific homosexuality, I'd be very surprised if there were genes that promoted homosexuality independent of the carrier actual sex.
"Variance in homosexuality is probably between 10-25% genetic, which isn't huge"
Between this, and the observation that pre-homosexual behavior is observable in 2-year-olds, isn't that enough to bound the other 75%-90% of the variance to something happening either in utero or in very early childhood? ( *NOT* claiming that the antibody theory is right, just that the timing of whatever is going on is fairly constrained )
I've put up a couple posts on here about how the commonness of a trait in your subject pool *greatly* affects concordance rate. Don't want to repeat it here, but it should be easy to find if you are interested.
Is there a source that will disabuse me of what seems to be the obvious naïve parsimonious assumption that younger siblings are more submissive due to physical and intellectual inferiority during their childhood? Leading to higher rates of male homosexuality in particular when they learn to imprint on submission to another male (older brothers), but also leading to younger male siblings being less attractive to women due to a tendency to be submissive to females as well (older sisters) and thus finding themselves (on the margin) more likely to be both rejected by females for their submissiveness and accepted by male partners who seek submissive mates?
This seems really, really obvious to me. Males seek submissive partners and females seek dominant ones. Younger male siblings are more likely to be submissive.
The main counterargument is the 2006 study mentioned above claiming that the effect tracks biological (and not social) siblings, ie if someone with a biological older brother is adopted by a family where there is no older brother, they'll still get the effect. I don't know how strong this study is.
Your theory also doesn't really seem to explain why women with older siblings are more (rather than less) lesbian.
Regarding lesbians, isn't that a much weaker effect, and non-monotonous? I am prepared to be wrong on that as I am not great at reading papers or graphs.
My naïve parsimonious epicycle explaining lesbian younger siblings is that every gay man I know is literally super horny for men and their body hair like an imprinted person would be, but every lesbian I know is more disgusted/terrified by men (as a result of bad experiences) and not particularly horny for women or anything like that. Incredibly unwoke opinion, but it certainly seems to me like lesbianism is a totally different root cause then homosexuality in like, maybe 80% of cases? And that younger male siblings being submissive could lead to enough gay pairings on the margin, while if a lesbian effect exist it could be the result of younger siblings being less extroverted, more neurotic, etc.
Disclaimer: I only think these things because I have quite a few very frank friends with very non-normative sexualities and I love and respect them all and am noticing trends that I discuss with them regularly. The boys are like 80% into their non-normative sexualities due to imprinting and the girls who *aren't* lesbian are too, but the lesbians themselves mostly just want to get away from the boys.
Female sexuality does indeed seem to be quite different. Bisexuality is more common than obligate homosexuality, while in males it seems to be the reverse. Heterosexuality is obviously adaptive in males, but if one takes the William Buckner view that females had minimal mate choice in hunter-gatherer societies perhaps they didn't need it and could persist without. I don't think Buckner is quite right and the prevalence of heterosexual desire among females (even if it's not as intense as among males) indicates it was probably still adaptive for them and they were exercising some agency.
Mostly in my experience males just get absolutely wrecked by sex hormones some time between the latent and pubescent stage and either imprint on a global attractor state that society and biology nudge them toward (females) or get stuck in some kind of local maximum where it's Sonic the Hedgehog OC or other men or inanimate objects or whatever (which is fine).
It seems to me that in the case of IQ, as environmental insults decline (childhood malnutrition, disease, parasites, violent parenting behaviors) the genetic component comes to dominate. I wonder if there is an opposite effect where trends are currently adding environmental insults to heteronormative sexuality and as such genetic factors (if there were any beyond those that nudged toward heterosexuality in the EEA) diminish in predictive power.
In this case, I'm not sure if I'm seeing anything beyond a single study really claiming to show biological/genetic impact of birth order? I wouldn't take a single twin study to be convincing on any genetic basis (height, IQ, obesity, etc.) in vacuo. Show me five more and I'll believe there's a really biological basis, or something really incontrovertible beyond some weak and non-monotonous effects.
Men are in one sense more attractive partners for other men, since they are usually far more willing to indulge in casual sex. Might be a factor in nigh-obligate heterosexuality being the norm for them.
I think that's the point of TTAR's argument. Lots of gay men are "tops". Relatively fewer straight women are "tops". If a man's sexuality is not strongly defined, and if he is socialized to be more of a "bottom", he'll get more action if he goes looking for male sexual partners than female. This doesn't explain the existence of gay tops, but it could explain a modest percentage, maybe 10-20%, of gay men overall - which is about the claimed effect size.
Or it could be completely wrong. There's plenty of reason to be skeptical of the theory, but not to dismiss it altogether just because gay tops are a thing (or for any other reason I've seen here).
Well, John, you may be right. Both my mother and my half-brother were gay, and when somebody posts something that gives me the impression they don't know much about what gay people are like it gets under my skin & I feel an urge to push back.
In this case, OP's suggestion that younger male sibs are more likely to be gay because they are log a lot of time being submissive to older brothers smelled to me like it came from equating male gayness with submissiveness -- as though, to overstate it, he thinks gay males are all swishy, dependent, and burst into tears if they chip their nail polish. And, he didn't put in the qualification you did, which is that the submissiveness would account for at least a moderate percent of gays, something like the percent of the claimed effect size. Also, as a psychologist I know from both reading and patient accounts that people who are into sexual submission are not necessarily submissive in everyday life. Sexual submissiveness seems to be more of a kink than a manifestation of the person's main interpersonal stance. And besides, there are plenty of straight males whose submissiveness *is* their main interpersonal stance. They don't stand up to their wife, their co-workers, etc.. They crave to be nurtured and protected, rather than to have their views respected and translated into action.
I'm also twitching when I read posts from people who are arguing that gayness in younger brothers is a consequence of being raped or otherwise assaulted by older males. My intuitive take is that theories these theories are driven by the great EWWWW that is some people's reaction to homosexuality. The EWWWW makes it seem to these people like homosexuality has to be a pathology resulting from abnormality or illness. And the assault idea maybe comes from the writer's feeling that there's no way he'd ever participate in a homosexual act unless the other guy beat him til he was insensible then raped him. Yeah, OK, we believe you, buddy, don't worry. But gay guys do not need to be beaten into submission, they like gay sex for god's sake, get over it.
There's a weird affective divide here, some are conservatives who really don't like gay people and others are unwoke liberals who are curious about the origin of homosexuality but don't want any harm to come to gay people. There are also a few gay readers, who seem sprinkled around the political spectrum.
Interpersonal submission, sexual submission, and sexual orientation are from what I can tell all correlated, but not at r=1. The stereotypes exist or people wouldn't have them, but many people fit them imperfectly or not at all.
As for the interpersonal stance...it doesn't even have to be because you *like* submission, if you're not good at reading people or on the spectrum being a people-pleaser is an effective way to compensate for the large number of inadvertent insults you are always making.
"unwoke liberals who are curious about the origin of homosexuality but don't want any harm to come to gay people" Yup. I see it as an interesting puzzle akin to left-handedness or other minor variations in people.
> I'm also twitching when I read posts from people who are arguing that gayness in younger brothers is a consequence of being raped or otherwise assaulted by older males. My intuitive take is that theories these theories are driven by the great EWWWW that is some people's reaction to homosexuality.
Contagion theories are pretty strongly motivated by the gay germ hypothesis.
Is there really such a thing as the gay germ hypothesis? Is the germ thought to make you all filthy and disgusting and corrupt in your passions, or excessively interested in nail polish and home decor, or what?
Greg Cochran among others has proposed the hypothesis that homosexuality is (often) caused by exposure to a yet-unknown virus, presumably in childhood and maybe even in utero. And no, the hypothesis is not that the virus causes people to become home-decorating perverts or any such thing, nor that it spread *by* perverted homosexuals.
It's a plausible hypothesis, that should be considered alongside many other plausible hypotheses.
>"if you’re gay, it means your parents had some of the genes for homosexuality, which means they weren’t as committed to the whole heterosexual-sex-for-procreation thing as usual, and we should expect them to have fewer kids, and therefore for you to have fewer siblings."
But the whole point of the theory, at least the NLGN4Y version, is that it explains how it could be passed down through evolution without a gay gene, because it's a gay gene wouldn't be adaptive. The way NLGN4Y explanation escapes that is that it's not a gene that causes homosexuality in the individual, but a gene that slightly increases the probability of older siblings to be gay, which means by the time you get a homosexual child, you probably already have some heterosexual children, which still carry the gene (because it doesn't directly make them gay) and pass it forward.
There being some straight children already doesn't mean it isn't evolutionarily disadvantageous for the later children to be gay. Admittedly the disadvantage is weaker if it only applies to some of the children, but this isn't much different from it applying to only some of the individuals who have the gene themselves, which is how it would be expected to work already.
Most things like this are polygenic and have several different genetic mechanisms. I predict something like NLGN4Y is involved, but also some other pathways. Twin studies show some genetic component, and I think that can't involve NLGN4Y because each twin pair is part of the same pregnancy.
That also bothered me. Ignoring children who die young, the much larger number of siblings per person means this hypothesis says we should have seen gigantic numbers of gays in the past. 𝗔𝗹𝗹 of the additional births in a family are younger siblings, and they have steadily more older siblings as they become more additional.
That's a good point, but I think that social/cultural explanations (being gay wasn't considered a possibility, so nobody thought of it, and if they did think about it they did it very secretly) probably overwhelm this effect.
I mean, there's a chicken-and-egg thing here — how likely is it that being gay would have been much *more* taboo in a society with many more gay people?
I'm not sure how taboo gayness really was in, say, the Victorian era. I once read a pretty persuasive article saying that most people of that era got it that some were gay. But the norm was to not openly acknowledge someone's sexual orientation, but to use euphemisms -- someones's "dear friend" was their gay partner. That was the norm for public conversation. In private it was assumed that among people who trusted each other franker language was OK. I can imagine that. We are sort of like that about money and death. We might describe someone as "comfortable" or "wealthy," but giving actual estimates of their income and net worth would be rude in most settings. Similarly, in most settings you talk about somebody having, say, "long term health problems," rather than specifying what's wrong, unless one is with a group of close and trusted acquaintances.
That may apply to the Victorian era. But high birth rates existed in all societies and periods until recently. Surely, out of all of them, we'd see some with a high acknowledged rate of gayness - which would inexplicably decay just as modern medicine and the demographic transition arrived.
Where are the 25%+ rates of gayness in youngest-sons in historical societies?
How would we know about sons that were gay, though? It would not be spoken of openly in any surviving record. And if marriage was sort of arranged, rather than left up to young people who fell in love and demanded marriage, the gay sons would have ended up married too.
Again the question is, if *our* society got to be unusually gay-accepting even though (per this theory) we have comparatively fewer gays, how come that *no* historical societies with higher rates of homosexuality wound up with societies as accepting as ours, or indeed more?
(………Wait. Do we have any way of evaluating the average family size of the aristoi of ancient Athens, I suddenly wonder…)
William the Conqueror had four sons, I believe, the eldest being Robert, and several daughters. One of the younger sons, William Rufus, later William II, never married nor had any recorded offspring, and was said by contemporary historians to be "addicted to sodomy".
Another son, Richard, was killed aged around 18, galloping face first into a low hanging tree branch while hunting in the New Forest. So presumably his sexual orientation is now unknown. But the youngest son, Henry, later Henry I, fathered over 20 illegitimate children. So it is hard to argue that he was gay!
So it appears that in this example, Willliam Rufus (William II) constituted the 25% you seek! (He was later also killed in the New Forest while hunting, that time by an arrow - His family never seemed to have much luck there! Hence the song "Who killed Cock Robin?" )
That would be a victory for nurture over nature: you think societies or culture can effectively suppress even very high rates of obligate homosexuality.
With powerful enough stigmatization, we wouldn't know the true rate of gayness, and it would appear to be low; just as today we can't measure the true rate of highly stigmatized and punished predilections such as pedophilia.
This was surely true sometimes. But birth rates were high in all times and places until recently. "All historical cultures" are a very varied space and not all stigmatized gayness so strongly, or at all. I would still expect to see more historical societies with high rates of acknowledged homosexuality.
Maybe another complicating factor is the age difference between successive siblings, if changes in a mother's immune system gradually creep back to normal over time after the birth of a son. If so then perhaps the effect would be more pronounced and readily observable if results were weighted in inverse proportion to the interval between siblings (or better still based on typical functions of antibody levels over time following a male birth).
Parents pay far less attention to younger children of many, and are much more permissive and less controlling of them. The youngest are also going to be physically weaker and less able to physically compete with older siblings. The youngest is more likely to be the comedian of the family and more likely to reject the social paradigms around them- they’ve seen how they play out in their older siblings and can see the absurdity in them. My guess is this finding is more social than biological.
Another research group at King's College London has been attempting to find psycho-social correlates in childhood but failed to find anything significant for men:
Let me try a simple cultural hypothesis. Éducation is very often more rigid on first childs since parents put more conscious efforts on « holding the frame » to avoid unwanted trajectories. They relax with younger ones.
It then become more acceptable for the the youngs to make their coming out.
It seems very possible to me that gay-married men are a significantly skewed portion of gay men.
“Strongly gay” men (i.e. men with more of the “thing that makes you gay”) might also be much more promiscuous (?) and keen on non- monogamous lifestyle.
From what I'm told, the monogamy dynamic is something heterosexuals often inappropriately carry over to reasoning about homosexual relationships.
This makes me question whether there may be other subtle features of homosexual relationships that might be more trivial explanations for the birth order effect. Scott is skeptical that birth order can be trivially explained by the married/unmarried distinction, but it seems to me you can come up with as many explanations for why that should be the driving factor as a birth order effect without a good biological mechanism.
Maybe if you have older siblings all getting married, it's more socially normalized or expected? Maybe you watched Gary and Harry get married and go on honeymoons, so you figure you should marry Jerry because that's the thing you know. Meanwhile, if you're the firstborn and you're gay, getting married to Larry might be less of the obvious choice and you blaze your own trail.
If heterosexual relationships are different from homosexual relationships in fundamental ways - including reasons/timing/desire for marriage - it's possible that someone who follows a string of heterosexual marriages will be influenced by their experiences in a way someone without those in-family examples would not.
This isn't too claim "gay people only get married because straight people do" or anything that strong/ridiculous. Only that there may be a trivial social effect strong enough to skew the numbers and convince people they're seeing a signal in this noise.
Also, occasionally the internal areas of focus in the relationship are divided in such a way that, when asked, "So which of you is the woman?", one of them can cheerfully say "I am!", albeit with ironic tongue firmly in cheek.
So if homosexuality has an epigenetic cause, specifically an in-utero cause, does that mean that once we develop uterine replicators (a la Lois McMaster Bujold's sci-fi Vorkosigan saga books, setting aside "Ethan of Athos"), we would then be able to trigger or prevent homosexuality at will? And is there a reason to suppose that this would lead to anything other than an almost complete elimination of homosexuality?
(I'm asking because I'm curious. This isn't a veiled condemnation of technology. I personally view it like languages: humanity as a whole loses something every time a language becomes extinct, but at the same time it's obviously in a parent's interest to try to have their children be native speakers of [checks century] English.)
I think it would depend a lot on the culture that invents it! I could see a strong case for increases in *bisexuality*, if the gay switch were invented in a culture that was tolerant of that, just based on "more options is better"
I read a story in the 90s (in a collection of gay sci fi) set in a near future where reliable in utero testing of “the gay gene” became possible, and the result was… that within a generation or two homosexuality had become an almost-exclusively Catholic thing, because the Catholics stuck to their guns on abortion, but the Evangelicals decided that God was OK with aborting gay fetuses, and everyone else just wanted “what was best” for their children.
(From Googling, it looks like the story was “Sex, Guns, and Baptists” by Keith Hartman.)
Well, if we're that advanced we'll probably also be advanced enough to make it possible for male couples or a female ones to combine their genes and produce offspring, and I'd guess at least some of them would elect to have homosexual children. Even some straight couples might. I'm straight, but almost half my family's gay. I would have been fine with having a homosexual child.
Well, small variants of Brave New World could look quite livable - but I think they are unworkable for other reasons. I suspect that uterine replicators are a hard enough technical problem (fetuses seem to be exceedingly sensitive to all sorts of stuff that adults shrug off) that other major changes, notable ASI seem likely to happen first.
'Gay' vs 'Straight'. This Gay Younger Brothers post is doubtless an interesting and worthwhile area of research, although one of no particular interest to me personally. But something that does matter to me is that we should resist the English language being hijacked by propagandists. There is - I would guess -nothing particularly 'gay' about being homosexual. And 'straight' is a pointless and needless word as a description of the great majority of humans. It is a propagandist pitch.aimed at promoting a homosexual's illusory fantasist world in which there is no such thing as normal sexuality.
Sorry, but this comment is totally baffling I need to ask for clarification. Gay refers to homosexuals (et al, depending on context) because it roughly meant "slutty" in like the 17th century right? the whole reason we use like we do now is because gay people in the sixties or so were considered (and maybe considered themselves?) to be depraved and whorish and flamboyant. Meanwhile straight carries clear normal and rule-following connotations (straight-edge, straight-laced). Are you earnestly saying that using gay/straight is propaganda for there being no normal sexuality? why on earth would the totally symmetrical terms homo/hetero be better?
Gay used to mean happy, with a bit of flamboyant in there. However the usage changed decades ago. Odd that Graham is still upset.
Straight is a weird one, by the way, its antonym is bent which used to be a fairly strong insult for homosexuals. I am actually surprised that it hasn’t gone out of fashion.
It is sometimes useful to have terms to refer to things, in case one wants to discuss them. Do you have a better idea for terms than "gay" and "straight"?
Well Yes....homosexual instead of 'gay'. And the 90-odd% of people who are not homosexual simply don't need any term to denote them. I should perhaps clarify that I have no animus against homosexuality...none whatsoever. But I am unsympathetic to 'gay pride etc'. Homosexuality happens to some people and they should not be bullied on account of it (as of course does happen and did even in our own Western past.) But it does not need to be celebrated - which is what the term 'gay' was invented to promote.
> I am unsympathetic to 'gay pride etc'. Homosexuality happens to some people and they should not be bullied on account of it (as of course does happen and did even in our own Western past.) But it does not need to be celebrated - which is what the term 'gay' was invented to promote.
Eh -- I don't know about that. Clearly gay pride celebrations don't meet any need you have. But many gay people have suffered and in some places still do suffer both from being despised and from despising themselves. A big flamboyant parade is about the best corrective ritual I can think of. Have you got a better suggestion? And as for some of the over-the-top stuff you see in gay pride parades, it's the best corrective ritual I can think of for pushing back hard against attitudes that homosexuality is loathesome. Have you got a better suggestion?
Homosexually is, in the 21st century West, no longer demonised,; on the contrary it is valorised. My suggestion about big flamboyant 'gay pride' jamborees? Don't go there.... and I suspect that a lot of homosexuals - the ones that don't go there - would agree with me.
I dunno. I don't go there because I don't like big loud gatherings in general, and because I find them a bit cringe, but if people have fun at them, more power to them. (This is also how I feel about science-fiction conventions.)
Do you mean it's valorized in, like, San Francisco or in the western world? If you mean the western world, I suggest you ask someplace, maybe on here, about attitudes towards homosexuality gay people living in the western world have encountered in recent years. Here's a small piece of evidence for you: I live in one of the bluest states in the US, in a town where most homeowners are liberal professionals. But in the town's high school, gay kids still have a hard time of it. 10 years ago, when my daughter was in high school, she was friends with an out gay kid who was frequently taunted by classmates on social media, where he was addressed as "fudgepacker" and "faget" ("actually," he would respond, "it's spelled 'faggot.'")
If you are talking about statistics, you need to be able to say that gay people have more older brothers than ____________ . I really don't think it's convenient to have to say "gay people have more older brothers than the group which we refuse to give a name to, no matter how practical it would be to name them, in order to make some obscure political point" every time we want to discuss the topic.
As for gay vs. homosexual, I decline to use a word with five times as many syllables every time I want to talk about a simple concept. I feel the same about people who want to force me to say "African-American" instead of "black" (or whatever it is now).
I think the main problem with using "gay" is that it can refer to both gay men and gay women. But I suspect that whatever causes men to be gay is distinct from whatever causes women to be gay.
Using the umbrella term muddles people's thinking, especially when speculating about possible causes
I mean, "homosexual" can refer to both homosexual men and homosexual women, too. We're rather stuck unless Scott stoops to "MLM", a highly unfortunate acronym.
Both terms are ambiguous, but I'm pretty sure "gay" is much more strongly male-coded than "homosexual". See, e.g., "LGBT", which may have other letters attached but is never just "GBT". Or "HBT".
Yeah, I am confused why feminists haven't gone after this usage of "gay" with the same vigor that they've gone after similar usages of "man" and "mankind". It's equally male-centric, if perhaps not technically "patriarchal" in modern American culture.
That isn't how the terms developed, though. Nobody sat down, the way I imagine ad agencies do in naming a new product ("hey! let's call the soap 'Zest'!") and thought up the terms 'gay' and 'straight' with an eye to making homosexuality sound fun and groovy and heterosexuality sound like the plain, boring default. In fact, at the time the gays began using that word to refer to themselves, it did not have terribly positive associations when used as a slang term: It meant not *happy and carefree*, but something like *wild and slutty*. And of course gay people didn't vote on the use of the term -- it just slid into being common usage, the way other words do. The meaning of words slides around over time, as different uses of them become popular. As a matter of fact 10 or 15 years ago there was a slang use of the word "gay" among teens that had a whole different meaning. It meant something like "lame." So some kid's failed attempt to look cool could be deemed "so gay," and there would be no implication that anyone involved was homosexual.
Surely you know all that stuff about how language changes over time, and if you did not know how homosexuals came to be referred to as "gay," you could easily have looked it up. So whence comes this silly theory of yours the some wrongheaded woke committee sat down and chose the words "gay" and "straight" with the goal of making homosexuality sound attractive. I have the impression that you have a very strong visceral negative reaction to male homosexuality, and that is coloring your thinking. Why not work on separating your visceral reaction from your thinking?. All sex is messy and undignified, and for many people any sex act that they don't find hot as hell is disgusting and ridiculous. You probably can't help feeling EWWWW about male sex acts, but many gay men feel he exact same disgust reaction to thoughts of various sexual acts with women. EWWW is powerful but it does not mean anything. It is completely irrelevant to substantive matters and judgments about how we govern society and who has rights to what.
Actually I'd guess that for evolutionary reasons straight individuals who carry gay disposing genes would produce more offspring (or I'd expect the tendency to have been pushed out of the gene and meme pools).
For instance, esp in modern day, you might expect the prospect of uncles or aunts eager to assist w/o their own kids is more important in encouraging births than how much you want to fuck.
An idea that might help explain the unclear results: I remember having read many years ago (unfortunately I do not remember which book) the theory that there might be at the same time several reasons for (male) homosexuality. If I remember this correctly it was a) genetic, b) epigenetic (something about hormones during pregnancy I seem to remember?) and c) social (i.e. bisexuals that identify as gay). I found this theory also interesting as it would explain why there are from a young age very effeminate gays and gays that "pass", i.e. are not "read" as gay.
My father is gay, always has been. In terms of reproductive fitness throughout human history, I am not convinced that being gay would be a big disadvantage. Gay men make amazing parents, and want to have children. In prehistory there wouldn't be a gay culture or any distraction from having a family. Being gay you'd be content to hang out with all the manly warrior types, massage their muscles after a big hunt, braid their man locks. Gossiping with the ladies would come naturally too. And gays often assume that their gayness tracks with a set of genes for extra intelligence, a tendency for creativity, and a superior sense of aesthetics. Maybe this is true to some extent. Obviously there must be some benefit to being gay, even if the gayness is a sort of spandrel.
Well, but there were all those priests, who were probably disproportionately gay from the start. And the "confirmed bachelors" who didn't become priests but didn't get married either; that's an old, old stereotype and we've got examples here going back almost a thousand years. So, "gay men got married" is an oversimplification.
As is "...and because they got married, they were as fecund as any other couple". Gay men are almost certainly going to be having PiV sex with their wives less often than straight men. They are probably going to be more receptive to their wife's request to lay off that sex thing altogether for a year or so after the birth of a child, that she can rest and recover before the next one. And they definitely aren't going to be running around supplementing their total of legitimate children with some illegitimate ones for fun.
So I don't think you can go from "most gay men were pressured into marrying some woman" to "gay men face no reproductive deficit compared to straights".
Denmark did not legalise gay marriage in 1989, and it's remarkable that you could think that, having lived through this last 15 years or so when this change has been introduced around the world.
This is true, but (from Wikipedia): "1989: Denmark is the first country in the world to enact registered partnership laws (like a civil union) for same-sex couples, with most of the same rights as marriage (excluding the right to adoption (until June 2010) and the right to marriage in a church); activists Axel and Eigil Axgil and 10 other Danish couples are unofficially married by Tom Ahlberg, the deputy mayor of Copenhagen, in the city hall, accompanied by worldwide media attention."
Yes Ok, thanks, I assumed that he must have been referring to some liberalisation like this, but I thought it weird to call it marriage. That stage of the revolution is much more recent.
Paternal age and offspring neurodivergence, presumably considered and dismissed long ago? "offspring of the fathers 45 years or older had a 34% increased risk" (of mental illness.) JAMA Psychiatry. Very large March 2014 Dutch study. A Comprehensive Assessment of Parental Age and Psychiatric Disorders. John J. McGrath, MD et al.
> Real, biological, and linked to NLGN4Y in particular: 40%
This would imply a 2/3 probability of being linked to NLGN4Y, conditional on it being real and biological, which seems very overconfident to me, given the uncertainty about the mechanism raised by Ablaza et al. Am I understanding Scott's statement here correctly?
The biggest problem with the genetic linkage story as told is the women. If the gene on the Y chromosome is being attacked by antibodies from mom, how does a similar mechanism work for daughters? Mom will delete self antigens, so NLGN4X isn't going to be a viable mechanism of action for the theory in lesbians. It seems to me you either have a male-only effect, or you can't use a male-only explanation.
> Even granting that the FBOE is true, why does adding more younger siblings make you less gay?
I don't know why we're considering only the genetic and in utero effects. To me it seems plausible that having more exposure to the other sex (or both sexes) during childhood and adolescence could increase the chances of adult heterosexuality. Chalk it up to pheromones or cultural effects, whatever.
To me the most interesting/confusing finding in the article is the huge difference between the <1% incidence of married homosexuality in Netherlands and 4-10% of gays in Scott's poll. Is it the subject or the marriage?
Since 2002 the proportion of same-sex marrieges is somewhat higher (1.7%). But these statistics include the time same-sex marriage wasn't legal yet. And for some reason there are very few catch-up marriages.
I wonder if abortion (including miscarriages, of course) has any impact on FBOE. How far along in the pregnancy does a mother have to be in order for the pregnancy to have an effect on future pregnancies? Finding that out might help clarify some things, but I imagine it's a much harder thing to measure than most.
Nine million sample? There's supposedly less than 18 million people in the Netherlands right now.
Also 2.36 siblings for opposite-sex and 2.14 siblings for same-sex means there's on average more than 3 children per family (or relationship I guess). In an age where everyone's saying that every country in western Europe has less than 2.1 children per family (a *lot* less), i.e. not replacing themselves?
Now maybe these have already been pointed out, and maybe I've missed something. Maybe the study ignored people who didn't form any relationship? But that sounds like it ignores a *lot* of people, enough to confound and even reverse their findings.
I noticed that too. But the average number of siblings isn't one less than the average number of children per woman. It's one less than the mean number of children *weighted by the number of her children*. (After all, a woman with no children at all doesn't affect the average number of siblings at all, but she does affect the fertility rate.) This "self-weighted mean" is bigger than the plain arithmetic mean.
This self-weighted mean is equal to the sum of the squares of the variables (the number of children of each woman) divided by the sum of the variables. It's also equal to the quadratic mean multiplied by the ratio of the quadratic mean to the arithmetic mean; the quadratic mean is already bigger than the arithmetic mean.
Also, the average number of siblings of currently living people is related to the fertility of a few past generations, not the current fertility. And I've ignored half-siblings above, I don't know how they were counted in that statistic.
I think it’s interesting the effect was more observable with homosexual pedophiles, as that’s more likely to have a clear behavioral etiology. Very often they were themselves abused.
I’ve worked many child sexual abuse cases, and natural fathers almost never sexually abuse their own kids. The most common perpetrator is mom’s new boyfriend after the divorce. So the youngest siblings would have a higher chance of still being in the age range for the new boyfriend to groom and victimize them. Also a higher chance of an older step-brother or cousin being present in the house to abuse them.
If that point has been raised time & time again, I apologize for beating the dead horse. But...
Multiple people point out a supposed evolutionnary benefit to homosexuality in the form of "gay uncles" helping out with raising children, but isn't that ignoring the opportunity cost of that "gay uncle"? A non-gay uncle may not help with raising your 4-5 children, probably slightly worsening their outcome, but he'll have 4-5 children of his own, spreading their non-homosexuality-inducing genes.
I have a hard time believing a scenario where the effect of help raising the kids outweight a doubling of the offspring produced.
I don't have actual statistics on it, but that would seem to imply an implausibly high rate of sibling sexual assault, especially since being sexually assaulted as a child clearly isn't going to reliably turn everyone gay.
Were it socially acceptable to suggest that homosexuality can be caused by childhood sexual abuse, one would wonder if having older siblings might make that more likely.
One might also wonder what form of abuse a statistically-straight older sibling would be inclined to dish out that might have the power to turn a younger sibling gay, never mind whether it supports a new gay panic.
Kids do strange things to one another, and I've heard many people say both that older siblings or cousins did things to them that made a great impression AND that the older kids in question grew up to claim to remember none of it.
I don't find it unacceptable at all to suggest that homosexuality can be caused by childhood sexual abuse. In fact I find it quite plausible that early sexual experiences, if pleasurable, would have a big impact on a child's adult sexuality. However, finding the experiences pleasurable seems to be relatively rare. As a therapist I have seen many people who were abused as kids, and very few of them were raped or threatened. They were "seduced" by adults or older kids they liked, and the adult who seduced them very often fondled their genitals and did other things that felt very good to the child. Even when the abusers did things to satisfy themselves sexually, it was rarely via a sexual act that was painful to the child. However, I have never met anyone for whom the overall experience was pleasurable. The kids all felt as though they were doing something very bad or very weird. Even a pretty small child knows that touching other people's genitals is something you are not supposed to do. Also, the kids who responded sexually were disturbed by their own reactions. Most were quite naive about sexual arousal and orgasm, and are confused and alarmed by their body's response. One woman I knew who was sexually abused beginning at age 9 thought the orgasms she was having were a kind of seizure. Also, the kids all sense that the nice person who had become their special buddy is greatly changed during the abuse episodes -- they are preoccupied, weirdly unresponsive, insistent, breathe funny, give weird cries, squirt weird stuff. etc. Kids find the transformation quite scary. So overall, the experience of being abused has been somewhere between moderately negative to absolutely horrible for every person I have heard describe it. For that reason, it seems unlikely that it would influence tastes in the way something that is memorable and novel good experience would.
I've not heard any theories that kids who are molested become gay because they enjoyed it. Assuming such a straightforward mechanism would appear monstrously naive where psychopathology is concerned.
I dunno. A lot of pathology caused by mistreatment isn't particularly convoluted. Much of it is pretty easy to understand. People who've logged a lot of time in situations where fighting back made no difference develop learned helplessness. People who have been teased and mocked a lot fear more of it, and struggle to find settings and personas that make them mockery-proof.
And anyhow it's not clear that the best model for homosexuality is that it's a kind of psychopathology. Seems at least as reasonable to think of it as a normal variant -- sexual left-handedness. And once you're not wedded to a psychopathology model, and you're just thinking about how somebody's preferences develop, it's very plausible that a particularly enjoyable early experience would affect adult preferences. For instance, lots of STEM people's stories of how they ended up in their field start with childhood experiences where they were delighted and fascinated by having someone show them them the stars through a telescope, how to grow crystals, how to make something cool on a raspberry pi, etc.
Yes, and with very high levels of overlap between these groups. Yours sound like they had a better time of it than mine. maybe different SES backgrounds or something.
Call me a philistine, but given the uncertainty pervading the literature, the smallness of the effect if it exists at all, the gap between statistical significance and real world significance, and the lack of useful an actionable takeaways, the word which springs to my mind is: nothingburger. Perhaps 50 years ago this might have inspired the thought that perhaps we should scale back the penalties for being gay on the grounds it might not be altogether their fault.
Also I generally like evolutionary explanations for things, but not here. Lefthandedness is heritable but evolutionarily neither here nor there. I'm happy to think the same about being gay.
If Blanchard's numbers are right, this effect causes ~1/7th of all homosexuality.
That's still maybe not that much on a social level, but we really don't have many clues for why homosexuality exists, and this is maybe our best one so far.
I don't think it makes sense to say there are genes for things but their frequency isn't determined by evolution, especially if there's such strong evolutionary pressure against (ie you'd expect gays to have fewer children)
Question for the mathiest among us: I have a feeling that there is something lacking in the way concordance is calculated. My understanding is that you calculate it by taking number of concordant twin pairs in your sample and dividing it by the total number of pairs. But it seems to me that the calculation needs to somehow take into account how rare or common the trait is that you are looking at. Being gay is not a common trait for males -- last figure I saw was about 5% of males. But think about calculating concordance for brown eyes, which 70% or so of people have. It seems like for a common trait like that, it's way "easier" to get concordance -- or you could think of it as you're getting a lot of "free concordance" for brown eyes from the commonness of the trait, and that totally blurs the picture if you what you are trying to figure out is the genetic contribution to brown eyes. My intuition is that you need to do some math that corrects for trait commonness if you are using trait concordance to figure out how genetic something is. One correction would be to calculate concordance on the trait for paired individual subjects in the pool -- i.e., not the concordance of identical twin pairs, but the concordance of random pairs of subjects with subjects in these pairs not being twin pairs but unrelated individuals. Then subtract this figure from the concordance for twin pairs.
Also, a related question: Scott says the usual concordance rate found for identical twins is around 50%, but most think that 80-90% of schizophrenia is genetic. How do you figure out what percent of a trait is genetic? Is there some other way to do it besides calculating concordance rates among identical twins?
OK, so I RTFM'd and learn the following: "Heritability is calculated as a2 / (a2 + c2 + e2) where a2 is the amount of variance in phenotype explained by additive genetic effects, c2 is the amount of variance in phenotype explained by shared environmental influences, and e2 is the amount of variance in the phenotype explained by unique environmental factors."
But, Guy, I don't see how that answers my question. So *a* is the amount of variance in phenotype explained by additive genetic effects. So how does one determine that? I don't see how i*a* can be just the concordance rate. Did you read my first paragraph, about how concordance rate is heavily affected by commonness of the trait being measured?
"You can't use the statistic *r*, correlation coefficient, for binary data"
Not sure about that.
"And what do you think about concerns about the problem with concordance rates themselves?"
Is it a problem or just what concordance means? I guess you want some sort of base-rate adjusted concordance rate, but if we're looking at how genetic something is then heritability seems more relevant. The reason one might bring up concordance rate in such a scenario is probably as a simple and easy to understand way to demonstrate that say MZ twins are more similar than DZ twins, but far from perfectly similar. Not as some gold standard measure of how genetic a trait is in a way that's comparable between different phenotypes.
Another possible cause, less dependant on a specific gene: pregnancy is hard on a mother's body. An ideal pregnancy requires a lot from a mother's body. A child developing inside a body that's already been pregnant multiple times is less likely to develop ideally. A mother who's had such rough pregnancies as to produce a gay child is less likely to have more children (either choosing not to when that choice is available, or to a lesser extent being unable to even if she can't choose not to).
How testable is this? Survey mothers of adults, and ask them on a scale to rate how difficult their pregnancies were. Then ask which of their kids are straight, bi, or gay.
I made this comment years ago on this subject (obligate homosexuality caused by an intragenomic conflict), and it got some interesting push back. I still think that this isn't a completely crazy theory.
Not that I look for a non-biological explanation for everything, and yes, I haven't read every single comment, but: has nobody really suggested that younger siblings are often under less pressure (from their parents, relatives, internalized paternal authority, etc.), conscious and unconscious, to continue the family line? And couldn't that expectation, or lack of it, affect sexual orientation?
> Remember how Frisch and Hviid managed to look at two million Danes? Well, the Dutch also have gay marriage and keep really good records. Ablaza, Kabatek, and Perales were able to obtain and analyze the data from nine million of them. They do more advanced statistics than any of their predecessors and are able to report basically every parameter of interest with high confidence.
This type of study seems impossible to do right. One thing I noticed immediately:
> We observe all maternal siblings who were alive and residing in the Netherlands after October 1994
In other words, diseased siblings don't count. All people, but especially old people, are more likely to have diseased older siblings than diseased younger siblings. (Old people die.) If a youngest sibling is old, their siblings are more likely to be diseased, excluding them from the study. As such, I expect the sample of oldest siblings in this study to be older than the sample of youngest siblings. This matters because old gays are much more likely to be closeted/unmarried/married to a woman.
Also:
> For example, 0.73% of [Dutch] men who are the youngest of five siblings entered a same sex union, compared to just 0.35% of men who are the eldest of five siblings . . . the share of men with four older brothers entering a same-sex union is 0.96%, more than twice the share among men with four older sisters (0.46%)
My impression is that by the 80s, most Dutch parents rarely chose to have 4+ children, so I expect most of this sample to either be very religious or of age.
A proper Dutch social scientist could probably think of many more ways this data is skewed.
Re: genes ('fitness') or germs, I want to again encourage everyone to read "The Goodness Paradox", by Richard Wrangham. And our 'scrambling' of sex could be a spandrel to self domestication. (Selecting for less violence, aggression... read the book.) There is no selection for spandrels, though they are open for later selection in the genome.
I feel compelled to add, that this idea appeals to me on several levels, not the least of which is that Darwin himself, discussed the cross species similarities in domesticated animals.
Why wouldn't the nation the samples are from have a major difference? Genetics or cultural.
Additionally the parental acceptance of homosexuality could increase the more children they have. Ongoing changes in cultural acceptance would vary over time and by decade causing self identification issues.
I'm not surprised it will be difficult to perfectly find the same results as the original paper.
If the biological effect is correct, does this mean that if child #1 had an identical genome to child #7 (thought experiment here) the environment in the mother's womb could result in children with identical genomes, one gay and one not? The chemical conditions in the womb affect how the genes are expressed, not the content of the genome itself, right?
The names are apparently rare names from the Philippines, Poland, and Spain, which is a pretty wide range. Grimoires tended to draw on Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, so I guess you'd have a similar range of 'European-language-adjacent' given the long Spanish domination of the Philippines.
There is another aspect which may be slightly relevant to this. I've heard it said that someone's sexual orientation is to a degree determined early in their life by the presence or otherwise of a parent of the same sex (whether actual or in loco parentis) during a certain critical period of their infancy.
I'm not sure if this is idea still supported and, if so, the strength of the effect. But it seems that a parent might be more likely to be around, and around for longer, during their eldest offspring's infancy than maybe during that of their subsequent children, what with death or divorce or simply working away more to support their growing family.
That said, I would expect the effect, if any, to apply equally to either biological or adopted younger siblings, assuming the latter were adopted soon after birth.
This really feels like "thumb on the scale" studies in all instances.
Among other problems: the obvious societal pushes both for generalized acceptance of "gay" as well as increasing promotion via celebration of "gay" (as well evidenced by Hollywood alphabet children percentages) provides a non-linear, non-constant baseline.
As someone with a young kid, an obvious explanation for the other birth order effects is that they have the same cause as increased allergies in firstborns: later born children get a lot more exposure to viruses, in utero and as babies, thanks to their older sibling(s) bringing them home. Covid, with it's school and nursery closures and isolation measures, provides the ideal opportunity to test this hypothesis.
OK I thought I made this comment so maybe I'm making it twice, but. I think even if the older sibling effect appears statistically stronger, it's the older brother (as opposed to sister) effect that is more trustworthy, because it's one of those rare cases where nature is doing randomization for you.
"the share of men with four older brothers entering a same-sex union is 0.96%, more than twice the share among men with four older sisters (0.46%)"
Whether the older sibling was a brother or a sister was decided by meiosis, as good as a coin flip.
>The paper is 25,000 words of very dense statistical reasoning; I often found myself struggling to read a paragraph, only to eventually realize it was saying something obvious in as many long words as possible.
Maybe science needs to be less hostile to comprehension
Eh, some people hate my writing too, there are lots of decisions along the lines of making it technically airtight / comprehensible to experts vs. comprehensible to laypeople. I was mostly griping but don't really want to blame them.
I can remember discussing FBOE several times with Blanchard 20+ years ago, and my surprise at my brain constantly getting bogged down by how hard it was for me to think rigorously about something that seemed mundane and mostly requiring simple arithmetic. I'd gone to Catholic school during the baby boom, so I was familiar with statements like "My friend Mike has two older brothers, one older sister, and two younger brothers." But trying to reason about this quotidian information in the aggregate routinely left me stumped after a few minutes. So I'm not surprised that working with the topic has continued to prove difficult even for people much smarter than myself.
For what it's worth: sometimes the people who go way more into things than seems to be necessary are genuinely smarter than you...but in my experience they usually aren't, or at least they're only smart in their bubble of expertise (which perhaps leads to an unusual desire to prove how smart they are when they can).
I think you've got an ideal balance of rigorousness and understandability. In fact that's the main thing I use when trying to convince people to read something you wrote; "dude I dropped out of high school and even I can understand it, it's not just a bunch of graphs and huge words :)"
As a non-expert who sometimes skims scientific papers out of curiosity, I've found myself wondering more than once whether some really verbose technical phrasing is genuinely optimized for unambiguous communication with other experts, or just an example of academic status signaling.
Or is it that writing about technical topics in a way that's short and easily understandable just takes a lot of extra effort, and researchers often can't be bothered?
Part of it has gotta be status signaling. I once had to figure out what "we applied tallying rules" meant in a paper; turned out it was "we counted".
You gotta remember that the median academic paper is written by some grad student or postdoc desperately trying to fit in with the big important people. When you're in that situation you adopt a "more sciencey" way of writing because you think that's the only way to do it.
Once you have the advantage and confidence of seniority you can start to write like a normal person again... if you actually still have the time to write your own papers, and if you can even remember how. It can become a habit that's tricky to break.
I think even the established researchers are scared what other researchers think. When I was publishing papers as a PhD student, I often tried to make my language more plain English and readable, and my supervisors pushed back surprisingly hard, telling me it's important to write in the standard style in the field.
(We must acknowledge the possibility that my supervisors were right, and my language was too informal, but I don't believe this was the case.)
In the social sciences, the convention is to employ the passive voice. So if you measure subject's anxiety using the XYZ test, you can't say "we assessed subject anxiety by administering the XYZ test." You have to say "subject intelligence was assessed by administering the XYZ test." I think people write that way because they believe it makes things sound more objective -- as though the assessment was done by God or Mother Nature, not by the experimentors. But that writing convention drives me crazy. I hate it because it makes the article duller, because it's such a lameass way of trying to sound Scientific, but mostly because switching from passive to active voice in a sentence is a goddam grammatical error. "Was assessed by" is passive voice. But "by administering" is a gerund in the active voice, and has an implied 'we' as subject. (As passive voice gerund would be 'by being administered.')
That doesn’t strike me as obviously status signaling. You know the context and I don’t, but are there multiple ways of counting?
Yup. It also differs from field to field. Astronomers coin terms like "black holes". Chemists coin terms like "Nephelauxeic effect".
Nucleophilic attack...of the killer tomatoes!
(Sorry. I've had that joke for 30 years and it needed a place.)
The attack is, of course, initiated with "Charge!"
:-)
Birth order, I've found, is a surprisingly difficult topic to reason about.
In my own work writing scientific papers, I’m often surprised how easy it is to accidentally say something that’s approximately right but technically not true unless I use more verbose technical language.
I think, without even adding malice and signaling on top of it, a lot of people who are good at research aren't necessarily good at writing in general, and still more not that good at writing well in English if it's not their first language.
Further, sometimes the jargon is specific and technical, and an expert will have a good idea of what the terminology means our if it makes sense, like "analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean parameterization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds."
If English is not their first language, then writing in jargon is not going to make things clearer.
I think this conflates status signaling with pride in eloquence. Was Shakespeare status-signaling? I say this as somebody who writes technically documents for consumption by technical experts (in the field). In a sense, it is showing off one's eloquence which is a signaling of sorts. However, I think calling it "status signaling," muddies the water and implies to most readers that the author is trying to impress their superiority upon lay people. I suspect (it's certainly true for myself) that the authors if given an opportunity to present to a broader audience would be no less eloquent but far more comprehensible.
shakespear is willing to drop viscous direct insults and is it hard to understand for someone who speaks old english?
I don't know what vicious direct insults you are referring to but Shakespeare's writing was absolutely not the way everyone spoke in the 1500s. Just look up how many of the turns of phrase we use today, were originally coined by him.
This tendency in people is exhausting and frankly needs a lot more mockery than it gets.
There's a blogger I read who does it on RPG topics. It is pretty clearly that this is the language they are surrounded with, and no one has told them repeatedly and loudly that this is fucking ridiculous and not to be done.
I find that the proofing of any of my technical arguments inevitably winds up adding more qualifiers. That's probably 75% a commentary on my writing skill, but the other 25% is related to the fact that it's almost impossible to make a complicated argument without somebody misconstruing what the argument actually is.
Anybody who's programmed a computer for-real, either as a scientific investigator or as a software engineer (key discriminant: whether they refer to their programs as "code" or "codes") gets into the habit of on-the-fly proofing for failure detection. When you find a weak spot, you fix it before you forget about it.
If only there were a try/throw/catch construct for English prose...¹
____________
¹I guess there sorta is. It's a footnote. But it improves readability even less than a catch block.
I think that at least some of it is overloaded terms. Like, a derivative in mathematics can mean a bunch of different things, and so if you are working with multiple meanings, you're going to have to start saying something like "discrete derivative." It's not really optimization at this point so much as it is that when a parallel thing is created, it's called by the same original name to make it clear that it's a parallel. Normally this gets solved at the start of math papers by saying "these are the exact objects we're using and what we're calling them, read more about them [here]." I imagine that other fields might be more careful not to overload terms, but still want them to be clearly related, resulting in ballooning verbosity.
Sometimes dumbing stuff down for the unwashed plebs actually hurts comprehension.
The xkcd guy wrote a book called "Thing Explainer", which explains scientific concepts using only the 1,000 most common English words. I found it nearly unreadable (Reddit's /r/ExplainLikeImFive sub has the same effect). Some things just can't be written about simply.
Thing Explainer sounds a bit like Uncleftish Beholding.
In another example of 'why we can't have nice things', Anglish (trying to write English without any foreign borrowings) is apparently a far-right thing. It's too bad as I genuinely liked a lot of their coinages.
You can only be deprived of such things if you let them be exclusive to others. Language is naturally a commons.
I actually liked thing explainer, and gave it to a young relative.
Maybe that's just due to you being more familiar with the "sciencey" way of saying things.
Welcoming opinions about the writing style of this scientific paper by Adam Mastroianni and Ethan J. Ludwin-Peery:
Substack post: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/things-could-be-better
PsyArXiv preprint: https://psyarxiv.com/2uxwk/
"I’m posting a scientific paper written the way I think papers should be written: honest, fun, and open to all. People are hungry for a different way of doing and communicating science, and man does it taste good. ... [Its findings:] When people imagine how things could be *different*, they imagine things being *better*."
(Bonus: Scott's "Lizardman Constant" observation is mentioned in this paper.)
fantastic
There's a delightful article titled "Leaving office feet first: Death in Congress"
https://www.jstor.org/stable/420789
Non-stop puns such as "Although much research has been undertaken on electoral defeat, research on death is still in its infancy. Indeed, rather than staring death in the face, political scientists have buried the issue."
Thanks for this share, LA!
"... cutting a wide swath through some sessions while avoiding others like the plague." :)
> They speculated that maybe (male) homosexuality came from genes for a sort of super-femininity which was bad for men but very good for women; under this model, female relatives of male homosexuals would have more children than normal. But in fact this study found the opposite: they had fewer.
At this point, it would probably be easier to make a list of the handful of human things where antagonistic pleiotropy is still a viable hypothesis than to list all the things like schizophrenia that someone has claimed might boost fertility in relatives (but never does approaching the necessary levels, if at all)...
I would have thought evolution already solved the issue of only expressing genes that benefit females in females. Admittedly, males still have nipples, but there doesn't seem to be much of a fitness cost for those.
I dunno. I am sure somewhere in history, somebody might have outrun a predator were it not for that extra air drag. \S
More seriously, males can get breast cancer, though it is rare.
More seriously still, as a designer of mass produced electronic devices, what we find is that everything has variability (normal distribution). We see from human variation that most genes express themselves by merely moving the center point of this distribution. It seems plausible that at most times, human populations have not been constrained by birth rate. At the times where they were, traits which are expressed by 100's or 1000's of genes (distributions affecting fertility or sex drive) are the most likely candidates to improve growth rate. It seems reasonable that genes with relatively small negative growth rate consequences might survive nearly indefinitely in populations where population growth rate did not create continuous [edit: evolutionary] pressure.
"More seriously still, as a designer of mass produced electronic devices, what we find is that everything has variability (normal distribution)."
Mostly agreed - though e.g. individual electrons or 12C nuclei have consistent properties. ( BTW, how many dopant ions per transistor channel setting the threshold voltage are we down to these days? )
"We see from human variation that most genes express themselves by merely moving the center point of this distribution."
True. Most parameters have lots of genes each having a small effect. It is kind of funny that what is fundamentally a discrete distribution in 4^N possibilities winds up behaving as a gaussian. And some things don't - probability of a person having a sickling cell crisis is rather bimodal (or trimodal if it can happen with just one copy of the gene).
"It seems reasonable that genes with relatively small negative growth rate consequences might survive nearly indefinitely in populations where population growth rate did not create continuous [edit: evolutionary] pressure."
Agreed.
I recall when the Female Fecundity Hypothesis came out. They asked gay men to name their relatives and they could, on average, name a lot more relatives on their mother's side than on their father's side.
But it struck me back then that 1) Mothers tend to talk about their relatives more than fathers talk about their relatives; and 2) Gay men tend to talk to their mothers more than to their fathers.
You'd need a less subjective source, like the giant family tree of Iceland.
Nobody checked if straight people could also name more maternal relatives? :(
Another problem, I hypothesized, is that gay men tend to be more "people persons" than straight men so they can remember who came to Thanksgiving that one time more than straight men could.
That's certainly true of my mother and father.
> At this point, it would probably be easier to make a list of the handful of human things where antagonistic pleiotropy is still a viable hypothesis
Height?
I'm pretty sure all of these are true:
- Height is beneficial to men.
- Height is harmful to women.
- Tall men have tall daughters.
- Tall women have tall sons.
There's a huge sex effect that makes women shorter / men taller, but it hasn't developed far enough that women are unaffected by their father's tallness or that men are unaffected by their mother's shortness.
Out of interest, how is height harmful to women?
Yeah color me skeptical of this one. I could see a potential fitness cost of a woman being taller than prospective mates, but for any *given* height the number of males is going to vastly exceed the number of females, and the countervailing benefits of (good nutrition + higher likelihood of tall offspring) has to have significant counterbalance potential there.
TBH I'm not sure that a woman being taller than prospective mates would be a fitness cost if women weren't shorter on average anyway. ISTM that people think it's funny when a man is shorter than his wife/girlfriend because it's so unusual; but then it follows that any fitness cost is a result, rather than a cause, of the average height difference.
I'm not sure I understand your last sentence -- the claim is that being taller allegedly imposes a fitness cost on women (i.e. it reduces their number of surviving offspring on average).
I think that the space of possible male mates interested in a woman taller than themselves is plausibly smaller than the space of male mates interested in a woman shorter than themselves. Conceivably this imposes a fitness cost by reducing the space of desirable couplings and/or by reducing the number of offspring among paired mates (e.g., the mechanism whereby attractive women produce more offspring presumably because they have more sex, but in reverse).
The question is whether this effect actually exists and, if so, whether it has a nontrivial magnitude that isn't outweighed by countervailing factors (e.g. men who think taller women are hot.) My priors are that I'm basically skeptical that height has a large effect and that it carries a fitness cost rather than a fitness benefit.
I'm suggesting that the reason the space of possible male mates interested in a woman taller than themselves is plausibly smaller than the space of male mates interested in a woman shorter than themselves is that most men are already taller than most women, so a man having a wife taller than himelf looks weird; and, since most people don't want to look weird, this results in men not being interested in taller women. But this only applies if sex-based differences in average height already exist, whereas in order to cause a fitness cost, male preference would have to pre-exist height differences.
There's a height advantage (reach, weight, more room for muscle) - up to a certain point for the human anatomy, and then you get problems, e.g. world's tallest man had difficulty standing up and died pretty young.
For women, you have a fairly large percentage of the body devoted to producing more humans (certainly compared to men).
So the harmful bit may kick in at a lower height for women?
I think the idea is something like this: since women prefer tall men (ie, taller than themselves), the further above average height a woman is, the smaller her pool of potential acceptable mates, and thus the lower expected fecundity.
Shorter women have more children.
Height is harmful generally, it always increases heart strain. It's still net beneficial for men in evopsych because increased height directly leads to increased strength and fighting capacity, but in peacetime short kings win.
Height is significantly correlated with being overall in good health and receiving good nutrition.
That is only true in environments where it's common for people not to receive adequate nutrition.
Note that it's also a completely different phenomenon from genetic height; it is beneficial not to be malnourished, but that isn't related to your natural height. People who are stunted suffer in all kinds of ways that don't apply to people who are short.
> under this model, female relatives of male homosexuals would have more children than normal. But in fact this study found the opposite: they had fewer. This makes sense if they’re getting some of the gay genes and so have less interest in heterosexual sex than normal
Does this kind of conclusion really make sense in an environment with easily available birth control? Presumably the ancestral environment where these genes were selected for was quite different in that respect...
Lots of teen pregnancies still happen. I'm certain most of them are unplanned.
FAR fewer than there used to be.
I also thought there wouldn’t be many unplanned pregnancies, especially in Holland. Had a look for some data and it’s higher than I imagined! Around 15% of babies born were unplanned between 2015-2019.
https://www.guttmacher.org/regions/europe/netherlands
Anecdotally, lots of pregnancies are described as "unplanned" when what has actually happened is that a couple in a committed relationship that would welcome kids have stopped using birth control but aren't really thinking about it. ("We weren't trying, but we weren't trying not to").
I find this bizarre, but it seems a common pattern.
This has been 100% my method, haha.
Also there are three couples who think they can't, give up trying, and then it happens.
This seems like it's just the default pattern throughout most committed relationships in human history, no?
Three plausible-sounding reasons why evolution may support a non-zero level of being gay:
1) Gay uncles and aunts promote survival of their nieces and nephews - presumably more so in social animals.
2) In animals where sexual competition can be dangerous, the ability to defer the urge to procreate via gay sex may be pro-survival enough to outweigh the delayed or less-certain reproduction.
3) Bisexuality may be selected for for some reason (perhaps attracting more than one mate or child-raising partner), and people being purely gay is a side effect.
All of these seem somewhat testable by looking at animal species where homosexuality is observed, vs. biologically similar but socially different species where it's not observed, and checking the differences in social structure, investment in children, and mate competition.
Until these (and probably others) are ruled out, I'm going to think that there's no great evolutionary mystery in the existence of homosexuality. Absence of knowledge is very different from knowledge of absence.
Does homosexuality actually exist in hunter-gatherer societies?
If not, there's no evolutionary mystery to be solved. There's a whole lot more maladaptive behavior in modern people, which is to be expected as we did not evolve in modernity.
Homosexuality has existed for as long as we have recorded history. See ancient Greece and China. Assuming that gayness is a modern invention seems a little silly to me, sorry.
Citations: https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/29290/are-there-gay-and-transgender-hunter-gatherers
Men having sex with men has existed forever. Whether “gayness”, as in men who strongly identify as exclusively having sex with men, has historically been as common as it is today is a different question.
I'm reminded of the tribe where boys are expected to fellate a man in order to pass to adulthood.
Adulthood, where they would presumably have sex, and procreate with, women of the tribe.
Indeed, if I recall correctly the idea is that they need to consume the semen of a fertile man to become fertile themselves.
And any boy who demurs or shows reluctance is considered to be a monstrous little pervert and a disgrace to the tribe! :-)
Why the smiley face?
Whenever an anthropological argument is made that points to some obscure tribe somewhere, i am generally convinced that it’s therefore obscure.
Do you mean that the argument is therefore obscure? If the obscure tribe is badly documented, then I could see the poor documentation weakening the argument. If the obscure tribe is well enough documented that we can be reasonably sure that they did whatever they were purported to have done, then the tribe is a valuable existence proof or counterexample, even if obscure.
That has absolutely nothing to do with homosexual relationships i.e. 'finding another child-raising partner'.
Are there any characters in Shakespeare's plays who are clearly intended to be the kind of gay men we often meet in the present?
I'm sure there are Shakespearean characters who could be played like, say, Jack on "Will and Grace" (e.g., Richard Dreyfuss' flaming Richard III in "Goodbye Girl"), but are there any characters for whom that's the most obvious and least contrived way to play them?
Wouldn't Shakespeare have known a lot of gay men in the theater? Could he have resisted getting some easy laughs out of gay stereotypes ... if the gay stereotypes existed in 1600?
I find it all rather puzzling.
While I have no idea whether this theory is correct, it seems quite plausible to me that in a smaller and more strict society, homosexuals would have had to conform to standard gender roles, and would only be able to exercise their sexual preferences "in the margin", holding everything else equal. They might still have tendencies toward certain types of behavior, but the tendencies wouldn't be reinforced, but rather suppressed. Whereas in a larger, more accepting, and atomistic society, they'd be able to go off on their own, meet others like them, and develop their own sub-culture based on shared tendencies, producing what we think of as "gay".
But the London theater industry in Elizabethan times attracted ambitious and artistic young men from all over England, like Marlowe from Canterbury and Shakespeare from Stratford. It wasn't all that much different in this regard from Oscar Wilde's world 300 years later.
Camille Paglia theorizes that Wilde pretty much socially constructed the gay affect of the 20th Century.
I don't know. It's all rather curious.
Since women were forbidden from the stage during Shakespeare's lifetime, all the female characters were portrayed by young men. Perhaps it would have been too confusing to have gay characters while the audience is supposed to pretend all the males playing female roles were heterosexual females.
Of course recent gay Shakespeare scholars have argued that there is plenty of homoeroticism in Shakespeare: you just have to remember that the men playing women aren't really women but men.
In Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," the Traveling Players in Hamlet are pretty much of a gay pederasty prostitution racket.
I love that sort of “scholarship”! I love that feminist scholarship has unwittingly (!) unleashed the phenomenon of women being eg written out of Shakespeare, or as with drag, being written out of the universe.
In 'Taming of the Shrew' Grumio is discussing a meal to give his new wife Katherina (the demanding "shrew" he is trying to "tame"), and suggests beef and mustard, before having second thoughts about the mustard.
I _think_ mustard was a contemporary gay reference, perhaps (I'm guessing) because its tart taste was seen as comparable to camp sharpness or bitchiness versus the solid, supposedly heterosexual, virtues of beef on its own. And as others have mentioned, Katherina would have been played by a boy in the original performances. (Don't blame me for the stereotypes - It was four hundred years ago!) Of course the beef could also have been a metaphor for "c*ck" :-)
GRUMIO .. What say you to a piece of beef and mustard?
KATHARINA A dish that I do love to feed upon.
GRUMIO Ay, but the mustard is too hot a little.
KATHARINA Why then, the beef, and let the mustard rest.
GRUMIO Nay then, I will not: you shall have the mustard, Or else you get no beef of Grumio.
My assumption would just be that it's a humors reference. Katherina is already too fiery, therefore, you would want to feed her watery foods to try to make her more phlegmatic; a spicy food like mustard would be about the last thing you'd want to feed her, imbalancing her humors even further.
Shakespeare I doubt, but Kit Marlowe's plays have a lot (for the time anyway) of clear homosexual content that's plainly recognizable to us. Not in the limp-wristed flamer mode, but plenty of "if the Greeks and Romans did it, it can't be wrong"-type rhetoric. This is the major reason Marlowe himself has often been excoriated/extolled as a homosexual.
Ancient Greece and China were really far from being hunter-gatherers though. They had cities, for god’s sake.
> Homosexuality has existed for as long as we have recorded history. See ancient Greece and China.
You are attempting to compare unlike things. Modern gays have a shortage of people willing to penetrate. Ancient Greece, and other ancient cultures with prominent male/male sexual relations, had a shortage of people willing to be penetrated.
Ancient China and Greece, probably. But what's interesting is that it then disappears from history for a long time before popping up again many centuries later. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_homosexuality there's a distinct lack of any convincing sources between "Antiquity" and "Early Modernity".
Of course yes, it was certainly likely to get you beheaded for most of that period, but where are the records of all the beheadings? This article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Catholic_Church_and_homosexuality says that the Spanish Inquisition managed to try about a thousand people for sodomy, but only half of those cases were between humans, and only a handful were between consenting adult males, which appears to mean that early modern Spaniards were roughly a hundred times more likely to be caught fucking an animal than another man.
Who carried out the inquisition? Gay Catholic priests I assume.
Various Inquisitions; the famous one, the Spanish Inquisition, was as much a political tool of Ferdinand and Isabella for consolidating their newly-united realms as it had to do with religion. The overseers would have been the Dominicans, so yes Catholic religious order and yes some of them would have been ordained priests, no data on how many were gay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Organization
"Initially, each of the tribunals included two inquisitors, calificadors (qualifiers), an alguacil (bailiff), and a fiscal (prosecutor); new positions were added as the institution matured. The inquisitors were preferably jurists more than theologians; in 1608 Philip III even stipulated that all inquisitors needed to have a background in law. The inquisitors did not typically remain in the position for a long time: for the Court of Valencia, for example, the average tenure in the position was about two years. Most of the inquisitors belonged to the secular clergy (priests who were not members of religious orders) and had a university education."
The hostility of Catholicism to homosexuality is exaggerated. It was there but Catholics also saw sex outside marriage, as sinful. And some between heterosexuals as being sinful.
Like you I don’t see much going on with regards to the persecution of homosexuality any more than adultery, o similar, in the records. That actually changes, in England at least with the reformation, where the Catholic Churches are actually accused of pederasty and the laws are hardened.
This is exported by the British Empire. To this day the Anglophone Caribbean has much harsher laws on homosexuality than the rest.
Citing Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_medieval_Europe
The amount of punishment you could get for sodomy varied wildly depending on the part of the medieval ages you were in. Sometimes it was castration, but also sometimes the punishment was to go do prayers. Based on my extremely limited understanding, it looks like the most common punishment was to have your property seized.
(Honestly, if I get to steal your stuff if I accuse you of sodomy, I'm surprised there weren't "more" sodomites.)
The Spanish inquisition numbers are consistent with the church thinking that bestiality is 100x worse that consenting adult homosexual sex.
Yeah I suspect the "seize your property" had more to do with someone with the means to demonstrate sodomy and get caught, tended to be what the English later termed "confirmed bachelor", i.e. shacked up with a lot of good-looking male servants.
The relatives would have wanted the property...
Ancient Greece is very far removed from 'hunter gatherer socities'. This is no trivial fact.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/where-masturbation-and-homosexuality-do-not-exist/265849/
The problem with claims about absence is many of them have since been proven false. For example, anthropologists long claimed homosexuality was 'absent' in the Inuits, yet another anthropologist wrote a book about a very feminine male eskimo who preferred to hang out with girls and was clearly 'gay', but had no way to conceptualise it.
Likewise, in other hunter gatherer groups, bands might be no bigger than 150 people. Only 2% of men are gay, even in recent surveys, so among 75 males, you might only have one gay guy. A more interesting question to ask hunter gatherers is "have you ever seen any feminine boys from a young age?"
I also read an article about a man who fled North Korea to the South, and only realised he was 'homosexual' when he got to South Korea because he just didn't think about what his attractions meant in the context he was raised.
Homosexuals primarily having sex with each other mostly comes after the rise of urbanism. Among the ancient Greeks it wasn't believed that having sex with males meant you didn't have sex with females, and the receptive role was customarily associated with a male too young to have a beard. Here is from Bentham's utilitarian argument against laws restricting it:
All the documents we have from the antients relative to this matter, and we have a great abundance, agree in this, that it is only for a very few years of his life that a male continues an object of desire even to those in whom the infection of this taste is at the strongest. The very name it went by among the Greeks may stand instead of all other proofs, of which the works of Lucian and Martial alone will furnish any abundance that can be required. Among the Greeks it was called Paederastia, the love of boys, not Andrerastia, the love of men. Among the Romans the act was called Paedicare because the object of it was a boy. There was a particular name for those who had past the short period beyond which no man hoped to be an object of desire to his own sex. They were called exoleti. No male therefore who was passed this short period of life could expect to find in this way any reciprocity of affection; he must be as odious to the boy from the beginning as in a short time the boy would be to him. The objects of this kind of sensuality would therefore come only in the place of common prostitutes; they could never even to a person of this depraved taste answer the purposes of a virtuous woman.
https://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/JB-ESSAY.HTM
Homosexuality emerges at 2-3% of males even in small pacific islands and rural villages of Russia (when studied). Claims about urbanism are just that: claims. I spent a long time looking through epidemiological literature from packed cities in Pakistan, where only 2% of men exclusively have sex with other men. Seems like population density has no play here.
I don't believe that, my understanding is that the GSS shows that gay men even in the US are significantly more likely to have been raised in urban than rural areas. The stack exchange link posted above linked to a paper confirming that it's less common among hunter-gatherers than agro-pastoral populations. So I don't think the rate is the same everywhere, rather it varies.
It exists in lots of non-human animals.
My understanding is that sheep are the only species with a comparable level of obligate male homosexuality.
My understanding is that it's more common in sheep, even above 10%.
My pet theory for why (a little) bisexuality is adaptive, is that it lets you understand on a viceral level what is attractive in your own sex. Think the stereotype that gay and bisexual men dress better.
Bisexuality seems to be much more common in women. The puzzle is why obligate homosexuality appears in more than 1% of males.
Self-admitted bisexuality is much more common in women, yes. But a woman who admits being bisexual, greatly increases her number of female suitors while scarcely decreasing male interest. A man who admits being bisexual, gets more male romantic interest but much less of such from women. So the incentives to openly admit one's bisexuality are not symmetric.
"Openly" admitting something and responding to a survey that way have very different implications on one's potential suitors.
Yeah, but most people don't cleverly metagame survey questions like that; they just answer the way they would if you asked them in person and in public. Which is the minimum-effort safe policy for most people.
Private answers in anonymous surveys can be very different from what people say in public.
This is absurd. Women and gay men are attracted to very different things in men on average, and in any case the idea there's no chance that this provide a fitness advantage beyond the immense fitness cost of spending your time humping dudes instead of chicks. Or why it's so rare.
Gay men are stereotyped as more "fashionable", but they do not necessarily dress in a way that is more sexually attractive to women. Women admire gay fashion, but they don't necessarily want their romantic partners dressing the same way. And of course, this is all irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of human history.
I think this may be one of those red-blue things; liberal women appear to appreciate fashion on men from what I can tell. There's that whole 'he's so cute he must be gay' thing.
1) just explains everything here. This should be the working hypothesis until disconfirmed, and it shocks me that is not even mentioned—by Scott, and presumably by the paper authors.
I would say it's disproved by multiple lines of evidence. When gay men have an identical (monozygotic) twin, that twin is not gay about 50% of the time. Since they have the same DNA, clearly some environmental factor is involved.
And as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the math doesn't work. Male homosexuality dramatically lowers your reproductive fitness. For a gene promoting homosexuality to stick around, you'd need to imagine fantasy scenarios like gay men rescuing 2-3 family members from burning buildings, while their straight brothers stand around doing nothing. We don't observe anything like that. Both gay and straight men seem equally likely to help relatives in danger.
When one twin is born with cleft lip, the other usually does not. I think people need to look at epigenetic receptors which differ between identical twins from embryogenesis: http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Rice-et-al.-2012.pdf
This does not help the claim that gayness is selected for.
I don't think it is selected for, per se. Rather, it looks like a byproduct of another mechanism that might benefit the parents, but cause sex discordant traits in their offspring: http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Rice-et-al.-2012.pdf
I'm confused. 1) *is* environmental. It's like the thing where you're not attracted to people you grew up with. If several older brothers are around, you're more likely to be gay, probably also based on other factors, like likely availability of mates.
This isn't about rescuing niblings from burning buildings, this is about taking over parenting from dead older siblings. If you have a lot of older siblings, the likelihood of that being needed (in an aboriginal environment) is pretty high. Plus of course the gay uncle can help with resource gathering and in other ways.
>This isn't about rescuing niblings from burning buildings, this is about taking over parenting from dead older siblings.
My point was, any putative "gay gene" has to overcome a massive loss of fitness.
If being gay truly reduces your reproductive fitness by 80% (or even a smaller number, like 50%), what could a gay gene carrier do for his relatives that outweighs that? Honestly, we ARE talking about saving lives. Just giving your relatives a 5% survival boost isn't enough.
>This isn't about rescuing niblings from burning buildings, this is about taking over parenting from dead older siblings. If you have a lot of older siblings, the likelihood of that being needed (in an aboriginal environment) is pretty high.
Gay men don't seem to do that. When you were growing up, did you have a gay relative fussing over you and making sure you were fed and clothed? I didn't. My mom did that.
>Plus of course the gay uncle can help with resource gathering and in other ways.
Non-gay uncles can do that to, plus they'd get to have children of their own and avoid the fitness hit.
>My mom did that.
Meaning you weren’t in a situation where you needed it. Like I said, in an aboriginal environment, the prospect of parental loss was a lot higher.
Though you hint at an interesting issue; gays are (at least stereotypically) more feminine than straight men; was the help they (hypothetically) provided more feminine than masculine? Interesting thought…
>Non-gay uncles can do that to, plus they'd get to have children of their own
Rephrase that as “non-gay uncles can give the resources they’d otherwise give to their own children too, plus they’d get to have children of their own,” and you’ll see how that doesn’t make sense.
And you seem to be missing the other half of this hypothesis, which is that younger sons may have had significantly lower reproductive prospects than older sons, as we know has occurred in some classes in historical times.
There can be an evolutionary advantage for the younger males in a family to be more likely to be gay without the "nurturing gay male" hypothesis.
The evolutionary advantage could instead be due to having fewer dangerously competitive heterosexual younger brothers in a family. Many a younger brother has enlisted parts of a community into a war against his older brother, leading to deaths of many males in the community and otherwise wasting community resources.
You can construct scenarios where a "gay gene" would be selected for, but you can do that for any gene. Even one that causes you to hit yourself on the head with a hammer.
If my brother will kill me if I compete with him for some girl, then being gay would help me. But suppose that same brother leaves town? Now I'm not finding a mate for no reason.
It is true that someone who is gay is less likely to pass on their genes themselves.
However, their ability to cooperate with family and their less aggressive/competitive behavior could make it more likely that the genes they share with their siblings and other relatives get passed on.
So it might be an evolutionary advantage if a mother who has previously borne sons has a mechanism to expose future male fetuses to an environment in the womb that makes them more likely to be gay/cooperative/less aggressive.
Does the word epigenetic refer to changes in the characteristics of a fetus that result from altered gene expression without changes to the DNA sequence itself? I wonder how much these types of changes have been studied in relation to homosexuality.
Absolutely not - it does literally nothing to explain how this helps gay genes get passed on. It's not enough that your group as a whole "benefits" from it (even though you having kids would be more beneficial to the groups genes being passed on 99 times out of 100). The gay genes themselves need to have a way of being passed on. You cannot have selection for a gene that codes for not passing the genes on!
Any of your family members, even if you share a lot of genes with them, is going to have an overwhelming fitness advantage over your and your gay genes by having less gay genes, as they're the ones having the most children. If gayness is genetic, there's no reason to expect that it wouldn't be selected against heavily to the point of not existing but for mutations.
Lots of self-sacrificial behaviors CAN be passed on, because the sacrifice is usually made for one's own genetic children. Sacrificing yourself to save your children directly increases the frequency of self-sacrifice genes in following generations. But if your sacrificed yourself to save other people's children, this has to be selected against because you're removing these genes from the gene pool. Nothing gay people can possibly do (in an historical evolutionary context) increases the frequency of gay genes in future generations - the gay genes literally cannot compete with the straight genes.
It's a just so story, nothing more. There's nothing "shocking" here, it makes literally no evolutionary sense.
You're assuming that homosexuality is encoded at conception. Do we know that?
If it isn't, then its silly to suggest its being selected for
Why? Why can’t homosexuality be environmentally-triggered?
I mean, what’s your thinking about the proposed mechanism here? That gay eggs are more likely to drop if the mother has borne severals sons first?
Although of course you can have selection for a gene that codes for not passing the genes on, otherwise worker bees could not exist.
That's obviously a very different mechanism. It's never been the case that humans have had vast numbers of non-fertile children to support the group. If half of all people were gay or something, you might have a point. But very rarely having a gay child does not lend itself to anaology with worker bees.
I mean, if your little theory is true, it's weird that this 'help the group through infertility' would not only be so rare, but almost entirely manifested in the form of being gay, and not being biologically infertile, asexual, impotent etc. These things exist, but they're fairly rare in young people are nobody on earth would claim they're being selected for (because there's no a political impetus for this the way there is with people being unwilling to accept that gayness is essentially a 'disorder').
>That's obviously a very different mechanism.
Your claim was "You cannot have selection for a gene that codes for not passing the genes on!” That didn’t allow for differing mechanisms.
You seem to think that only direct fitness exists, and there’s no such thing as inclusive fitness [that isn’t direct fitness]. That’s…not how evolution works.
"1) just explains everything here. This should be the working hypothesis until disconfirmed,"
Does the fact that the gay uncles don't help their nieces and nephews noticeably more than straight uncles count as disconfirmation?
Yes, that would tend to disconfirm. Is that the case? Do gay uncles not give more gifts to niblings than straight uncles? Spend more time with siblings' families? Are they no more likely to take in a dead sibling's kids?
Probably not?
That’s…not helpful.
If you're claiming the "gay uncle" hypothesis as presumptively correct, I think the burden is on you to show that gay uncles are hugely more supportive of their families than straight ones. Because it would have to be a huge effect to outweigh the substantial direct reproductive disadvantage, and I don't think it is.
I did not at all say “presumptively correct.” That would indeed require a high standard of proof. I said “working hypothesis until disconfirmed,” i.e. “first hypothesis” or “most plausible."
Certainly this data would be very helping in confirming or disconfirming it.
I am confused as to what you imagine the difference to be between "presumptively correct" and "working hypothesis until disconfirmed". The working hypothesis is, while you are working with it, the one you presume is correct. That you're willing to consider alternative evidence is good, but it doesn't change the presumption.
And…why are you assuming that fifth sons, or whatever, are just as likely to have just as many kids as first sons? That’s not what we observe in historical times. Younger sons are often a burden, to be sent off to monasteries.
I think that's mostly a thing with the historic upper class, which was on the hook to provide scarce upper-class positions for all their kids. But even so, so what? It is not required that fifth sons have *as many* kids as first sons. If they have any kids at all, that's a reproductive advantage for being the sort of person who is likely to have five sons. And daughters, which you'll marry off regardless,
I don't think that's relevant. From my very undeveloped understanding of biology: In the context of evolutionary adaptation, "promoting the survival of" doesn't mean going-and-doing-nice-things for another person. It means slightly increasing the likelihood of the gene line outcompeting other gene lines in the local population.
EG: If there are cases where it's better to not constantly have offspring (like there are with complex animals who's offspring take a long time to reach maturity), limiting reproduction can be advantageous. In social animals, having strong social bonds can be advantageous. Both of these advantages are realized by being gay.
Having an organism that will 100% be gay would be maladaptive. Having a gene line where an organism becomes gay situationally in the edge cases where it's beneficial to other organisms with the gene line is (probably) adaptive.
When analyzing these things, you have to consider the entirety of the gene line replicating itself over time, not just one organism reproducing.
"Gay uncles and aunts promote survival of their nieces and nephews"
Do people have a lot of anecdotes to support that hypothesis. Most of the anecdotes I hear about gay uncles tend to be of the "And then he moved to San Francisco and now we only see him every few years."
Somebody was just telling me about a high school classmate of his who was the nephew of a famous name brand childless gay fashion designer. There was much speculation over whether he'd eventually inherit his uncle's vast fortune. But, in the meantime, his uncle lived three thousand miles away and had an extremely busy life as world-famous fashion icons tend to do, so he didn't appear to be doing all that much for his nephew at the moment.
The society you're drawing your examples from is very homophobic. Enough to drive away a lot of people who would otherwise stay with family. At least some other societies, including some traditional/non-city societies, have been a lot less homophobic.
Did Christopher Marlowe stick around Canterbury to be a self-sacrificing good uncle or did he head for the big city to seek his fortune on the stage?
Why would so many societies develop a phobia of, effectively, helpful eunuchs?
That's a question I've asked myself for a long time. Why does "homophobia" (it's not a phobia) exist? The only thing I can think of is that parents don't want gay kids.
Some religions are hostile to non-reproductive sex acts of any sort.
As much population as possible. Makes sense I guess.
There was a bit about this on Areo a while back.
One is anything that drops the birth rate is bad. You may be competing with other societies for resources, and if you have more people you can kill them and take their stuff. Evolution isn't nice.
Another is if gay men are less masculine (on average, but that's all you need for the taboo), they may not make as good warriors, see above. Any man deviating from the whole package (be strong, be brave, sleep with women and have lots of kids) is a threat, especially if you do a lot of fighting with other bands/tribes/chiefdoms/states.
Plausible social-evolutionary explanations for maladaptive genes can be ruled out and replaced longer than you can remain solvent. By which I mean it's just too powerful a tool to be relied upon.
Maybe getting tuberculosis is beneficial in the prehistoric environment because it culls the weak ones. Or maybe genes that predispose you to tuberculosis also improve bone density. Or perhaps getting tuberculosis teaches your tribe to live in the moment because they could die horribly at any time for no reason. You wouldn't say, "Until these and others are ruled out, I don't think there's any mystery that needs to be solved with bacteria."
I think you need to rule out what seems to be by far the most plausible hypothesis before seriously considering others, yes.
How are you determining which hypothesis is most plausible here? What makes it more plausible that a gay uncle improves offspring viability so much moreso than a straight one in a tight knit tribe that it offsets the cost of that uncle not reproducing? And if the evolutionary role of the uncle is to help raise the parent's child, why bother with him being distracted from that by a male sexual partner or sexual frustration when you could remove the impulse entirely? I think you should have evidence before you posit that a just-so story has to be ruled out first
I think "has to" is a bit strong; I said "should." And my only actual criticism is that what I see as the strongest hypothesis wasn't even mentioned.
Maybe I'm wrong and it doesn't explain everything here. But it sure seems to me that it does.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that *removing* sexual desire is a lot harder and more consequential than *redirecting* it. Pair-bonding has more benefits than mere reproduction.
I don't want to pick apart words here, as it's not really productive, but in my defense you did, in fact, say "need to", not "should". I accept that "should" is what you meant.
I think the fact that three very different plausible explanations exist and you don't think the strongest one was mentioned should heavily discount the plausibility of any individual explanation constructed in this way.
I do mostly agree with your critique of removing sexual desire. It should be noted, though, that evolution does not seem to refuse to make people asexual on principle, as that trait is present is >1% of individuals.
I went after that hypothesis just to keep things at the object level, but my broader point is that the simplest explanation for a trait that dramatically reduces reproductive fitness is non-genetic. If you want to use a more complex explanation, it should start from empirical evidence. There are enough free parameters in this kind of explanation that you can argue that anything is evolutionarily beneficial.
> I don't want to pick apart words here, as it's not really productive, but in my defense you did, in fact, say "need to", not "should". I accept that "should" is what you meant.
We're talking about different things. "I think you need to rule out what seems to be by far the most plausible hypothesis before seriously considering others," was a general statement. What I said about this specific scenario was "This should be the working hypothesis until disconfirmed."
> the simplest explanation for a trait that dramatically reduces reproductive fitness is non-genetic.
Maybe. Certainly errors happen. It just seems like homosexuality is too prevalent to make that plausible. But someone would have to run the numbers on that to be sure.
But homosexuality has such huge negative consequences for your fitness that it's hard to imagine an evolutionary offset. A study of gay men in SF that found they had something like 0.2 children each.
What do gay uncles do to promote the survival of nieces and nephews? Nothing, as far as anyone can tell. Remember that a nephew only has 25% of your DNA: even if a "gay gene" caused you to save the life of a young child (when you wouldn't have done so otherwise), that gene's getting selected against. 0.25 * 0.2 < 1.
And while I'm not trying to be politically incorrect, many gay men are estranged from their biological family, and not even in a position to help raise cousins. They're probably doing less than the straight people in their family. Tragic, but that's the way it is.
In societies where gay people are accepted and able to stay with their families, they are very likely to contribute financial resources - food, clothing, shelter. That may have been very important in the past.
Not enough to overcome not reproducing themselves. Worker ants sacrifice their own ability to reproduce because they're haplodiploid and can better promote their genes by dying for their hive/queen. We don't see anything comparable in humans.
Worker ants are not sacrificing anything, because they and their genes have no input into the decision to raise a queen or worker. If they did, they would always try to be a queen.
Dubious. My family's pretty darn liberal and my gay aunt didn't do #$% for me, growing up.
Why would gayness be selected for in those societies though? A gay uncle is going to be overhwlemingly outcompeted in terms of reproduction and so has no way of increasing the promience of their own genes in future generations. Any non-gay siblings are going to be the ones with their genes in future generations, and those genes are much less gay than the uncle's. It's absurd.
It's not enough to help the group on the whole. If gayness is to be selected for, people with the gay genes thesmelves need a mechanism for passing on these genes. It's doesn't matter how beneficial being gay supposedly is to the group, people without/with less gay genes will always be selected for over gay people.
Group evolution is completely nonsense - evolution acts on GENES, not groups. A gene that codes for not replicating itself cannot be selected for. Having more genes in common with your family than strangers is irrelevant - you need a mechanism for the genes for this individual trait to be passed on.
I don't think it makes sense to use any evidence post-agriculture to evaluate evolutionary things for humans.
As for gay uncles promoting survival, there are more complex things that could explain it. EG: sometimes it's evolutionarily advantageous to not have a group population continue to grow. It's also sometimes evolutionarily advantageous to maintain social cohesion in social animals.
The evolutionary advantage doesn't come from your gay uncle saving you from a gang of baboons. It comes from having a group of organisms who share the same gene line, where group population can stabilize through some members not reproducing but also maintaining social benefits of sexual attraction, is advantageous.
You are invoking group selection, which (to my knowledge) is not believed to be a strong evolutionary force.
Your genes only care about themselves. They have no interest in (or knowlege of) what's good for the clan, tribe, or nation. Genes can easily spread that help individuals but harm the population—like ones for aggression, cheating, or corruption.
I doubt a "do not reproduce" gene would spread or even remain stable. For one thing, this gene would hold you back in times when resources are abundant (imagine if colonists in the New World had stubbornly insisted on having just 2.1 children each. If not for immigration, the modern population of America would be in the low tens of millions). For another, people are already capable of rationally deciding that reproducing is a bad idea (see: women who use birth control). We don't need a gene for that: we can do it on our own.
I didn't mean to imply that group survival is what matters. I meant that there are instances where pro-group behavior in individuals can result in specific gene lines being propagated more in the local population, which would lead to those behaviors being selected for.
Yeah, the gay uncles theory is ridiculous as other commenters have noted.
A point no one else mentioned yet is that if you want to try to argue that homosexuality is secretly evolutionarily adaptive, you need to explain why homophobia is so common as well.
In the “gay uncles” theory, homophobia would be evolutionarily maladaptive, since if you pressure your gay siblings/children to get married, you’d be preventing them from … doing whatever it is that gay uncles are supposed to do to increase the family’s fitness. It would be bizarre for homophobia to ever evolve in that situation.
Whereas with something like the Female Fecundity Hypothesis (where being gay is an unwanted side effect of a gene that grants some unrelated reproductive benefit), homophobia makes perfect sense: a society with the “gay gene” floating around outreproduces one without the “gay gene” because of increased female fecundity, but a society with the “gay gene” *and* homophobia does even better, because they manage to force more of their gay kids into having offspring. (Evolution doesn’t care if you’re happy as long as you’re a parent!)
(Not arguing for the FFH in particular, just arguing that the right answer probably looks more like “evolution doesn’t want gay people but can’t avoid them for some reason” than “evolution wants gay people but wants them to be closeted”.)
You seem to assume that homophobia necessarily has evolutionary roots at the genetic level. At a first glance it sounds much more like the kind of thing cultural evolution would come up with, and not necessarily everywhere.
It doesn’t matter if homophobia is biological or cultural. If gayness was evolutionarily adaptive, then homophobia would be maladaptive and should be selected against, both biologically and culturally. Homophobia isn’t something that *had to* exist. But for some reason it does. You wouldn’t expect so many cultures to invent it (and then keep it) if it was hurting them by suppressing the guncle effect (or whatever). Cultures are able to “evolutionarily” figure out things like the right way to prepare slightly poisonous foods to make them nutritious, so you’d expect them to be able to figure out the right way to treat their family members to make them evolutionarily-advantageous too.
(It’s possible that homosexuality is evolutionarily advantageous for hunter-gatherers, but not for city-dwellers, and biological evolution is too slow to have managed to weed it out since we settled down, so cultural evolution is trying to fill in for it… but I don’t think that really fits anyone’s model either.)
But that is just exactly the sort of cultural adaptation that could arise when situations change, such as if gayness was adaptive in a hunter-gatherer society but maladaptive in an agricultural one.
You don't need norms for things your genetics already encodes.
There is zero evidence it was adaptive in hunter-gatherer socities though. You will always produce more copies of a gene through reproducing than not-reproducing.
I’m not sure of your point here. No, right now we have no direct evidence of that, but I’m suggesting that perhaps that’s the explanation, and responding to objections to that hypothesis. “It was adaptive in our aboriginal environment” is always a good first hypothesis for any enduring and widespread genetic phenomenon.
I think you're confusing your timescales. The time it would take for biological selection against homophobia is much larger than homophobia (or at least records of homophobia in human societies) has existed.
Cultural selection doesn't seem like it would be relevant, as there are plenty of cases where human culture selects for things that are really bad for fitness (sacrifices, birth control, celibacy etc).
I agree that cultural evolution is slow and non-optimal.
OTOH…
Are there any remaining cultures (which are in competition with other cultures) that practice human sacrifice? If not, score one for cultural selection.
As for birth control, there are lots of people worried (in both racist and non-racist ways!) about differences in birth rates between different groups of people based on, among other things, whether they tend to use birth control. People *hope* that either other things will make up for lower birth rates (in particular, better long-term survival rates) or that the high-birth-rate cultures will eventually be absorbed into low-birth-rate-ism. (In which case, one more point for cultural evolution.) But it’s also possible that in 1000 years the world will just be full of Mormons and sub-Saharan Africans.
Celibacy? Ask the Shakers how that’s going for them. “Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t because they’re dead!”
I remember on a previous blog that Scott put forward in passing what we could call the error theory of homosexuality ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-can-fetish-research-tell-us )
Instead of looking for some indirect evolutionary benefit from obligate homosexuality, I find it simpler and more plausible to hypothesize that maintaining a stable encoding from DNA to neural patterns of "finding the opposite sex attractive" is hard work, which means that beyond some level of precision (<100%), the tradeoff in complexity and energy just isn't worth it.
Any takers? Any obvious objections? Any ideas on how such a hypothesis might be put to the test?
Self reply here, David below links to a very specific hypothesis by William Rice which proposes an epigenetic mechanism just like this. If I understand the article right from a quick skim, they propose that an epigenetic mechanism to "canalize" sexual dimorphism, i.e to make XX individuals react less to androgens, and XY more so, which is generally adaptive, but then elements of this mechanism sometimes get inherited when they "should" not, resulting in things like homosexuality.
Absolutely agree.
"Any ideas on how such a hypothesis might be put to the test?"
Wild guess off the top of my head: If getting heterosexuality right is hard work, then it should be expected to fail more often when components of that work fail (or are stressed). Are face-blind people more likely to be gay?
1) Gay uncles and aunts promote survival of their nieces and nephews - presumably more so in social animals.
Irrelevant - you need a way for gays genes to be passed on. It's not enough to help the group generally - the group isn't carrying gay genes at the same frequency as the gay uncle is and so helping raise nieces and nephews does little to propogate gay genes.
2) In animals where sexual competition can be dangerous, the ability to defer the urge to procreate via gay sex may be pro-survival enough to outweigh the delayed or less-certain reproduction.
This seems extremely implausible. You're basically saying that in order to reduce the risk of not passing on their genes (through being killed), men have evolved to become interested in an activity that...reduces the likelihood of passing on their genes (having sex with men instead of women). Nope, you want to have sex, period, because you've got nothing to lose. Evolution doesn't care if you live or die, only if you succesfully reproduce, and there's no conceivable way sex with men makes this more likely on net balance. And it's also absurd considering that most men are not gay and have no interest of sex with men, and that most gayness is extremely concentrated in a small % of gay men who are mostly not interested with sex with women.
3) Bisexuality may be selected for for some reason (perhaps attracting more than one mate or child-raising partner), and people being purely gay is a side effect.
Bisexual men are a very small % of the population, even relative to gay men. The 'side effect' would therefore be completely overwhelming the 'actual' effect, which is especially absurd since the side effect completely destroys the very fitness advantage the 'side effect' supposedly provides! (i.e. makes people not reproduce at all).
You also have the fact that having a additional, male partner may help your offspring survive, but the bisexual partner themselves suffers a fitness COST by helping your raise your child. Either they're not having kids themselves or they're spending less time/resources helping their own biological children, so being a bisexual partner to somebody else is going to be strongly selected against!
>Until these (and probably others) are ruled out, I'm going to think that there's no great evolutionary mystery in the existence of homosexuality. Absence of knowledge is very different from knowledge of absence.
All three of these hypotheses are extremely speculative and bordering on 'just so' stories. The burden of proof is on you to explain how they could conceivably work, not on us to disprove them. You didn't even attempt to identify any issues with any of them yourself, so it's bizarre to act as though you've proven anything here.
You have not provided a mechanism for gay genes being selected for, for gays genes providing an INDIVIDUAL fitness advantage (needed for gay genes to be passed on), and why gayness is so common compared to bisexuality.
You seem to have missed that nieces and nephews share a lot of genes with uncles. Not as good as offspring, but enough that we're talking kin selection rather than group selection.
And you seem to have missed that I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm trying to argue against the first link of the following rather ridiculous chain of non-reasoning:
1. We don't have an explanation for homosexuality.
2. Therefore, homosexuality should not biologically exist.
3. Therefore, it is some kind of weird dysfunction.
4. Therefore, we should oppose it socially.
I am not saying that you believe this chain of non-reasoning, but I often perceive it as a subtext in these discussions, and it is what I am arguing against.
>You seem to have missed that nieces and nephews share a lot of genes with uncles. Not as good as offspring, but enough that we're talking kin selection rather than group selection.
No, I literally addressed this in the second sentence of my response! It's not enough to share a lot of genes - for gayness to be passed on, the 'gay genes' themselves specifically need a way of being passed on, otherwise gayness dies out. In a family, the children without gay genes will have many many more children than the one with the gay genes, therefore over time that family is expected to become less gay (if gayness is genetic). There's simply no mechanism in humans for gayness to be selected for, especially considering the rarity of gayness and the obvious fact that no other forms of infertility (e.g. impotence, lack of sex cell production) were selected for despite having almost identical practical effects.
>And you seem to have missed that I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm trying to argue against the first link of the following rather ridiculous chain of non-reasoning:
I don't care what you're trying to argue *against*, your argument itself is wrong and bad and that's all that matters.
Nobody here is saying we should oppose gayness socially - either gayness is genetic or it isn't. Whatever "subtext" you're reading into here is utterly, utterly irrelevant (and almost entirely imagined). Scientific truths do not change just because you don't like the supposed political consequences of a particular truth, and the fact that you're implying they do is enough to dismiss whatever you're saying out of hand (though it's trivially wrong from a scientific stand point) because you're admitting you're choosing arguments that support your ideology, not which make the most (or any) scientific sense.
Gayness *almost certainly* wasn't selected for by evolution, period. It's unfortunate if you find this fact unsettling, but nobody should have to pretend faulty reasoning isn't faulty because you're unsettled by something.
Wow ... a real tour de force ... great article.
Does the Dutch study control for time? Gen X is a little gayer than the baby boomers, Gen Y is a little gayer than Gen X. It seems like the more recent the birth, the more likely someone is to be gay, and younger siblings will tend to be born more recently.
This was lazy of me. I just checked myself:
> Following previous studies (see e.g., Blanchard & Bogaert, 1996; Bogaert, 2006; Frisch & Hviid, 2006), we also control for birth-cohort and maternal-age-at-birth fixed effects. These variables enter the model in a robust and fully flexible manner, as a set of 50 dummy variables for specific birth years (birth cohort) and a set of 30 dummy variables for specific years of age (maternal age at birth).
It's not that each generation is gayer. It is simply becoming increasingly safer to identify as gay.
When you conduct these surveys you rely on people to self label, if they're being perspecuted, naturally, they won't, that doesn't mean they stop existing. You don't need to go too far back in European history to see people being killed for it.
Unsurprisingly, the countries with the most generous human rights laws are also the "gayest"
Of course this study only measures gayness by “did you ever enter a legally recognized same-sex partnership”.
That's one possibility. Another possibility is that each generation is actually getting gayer, rather than gayness being constant and willingness to admit it increasing.
It's not something we can really test for. You can't look inside someone's head and read their true label.
Yes. Could be. It could also be the real fear of being killed or ostracized for it.
I'm the only gay member of my family that came out.
Am aware of older family members that are still in the closet. And heard stories of members 2 generations far removed that "could have been"
You didn't count for these things back then.
There's a joke in the community that "roommates" is historians way of labeling same sex relationships. Emily Dickenson sure was fond of her roommate - type of thing.
I remember reading some article saying that Uganda supposedly doesn't gave any gay people. I'm sure the fear of the death penalty had nothing to do with those stats 😅
> It could also be the real fear of being killed or ostracized for it.
You didn't say "it could be" though, you asserted it as an unquestionable fact. It's not. It's an hypothesis.
If you had decent, long-term statistics for cultures whose gay acceptance rates are independent, but also are exposed to whatever other causes you're checking against, I think you could tease out an answer. Whether it's testable really depends on the alternate hypothesis; airborne pollutants would be much easier to get data for than parental meat consumption (both arbitrary, not a real theory).
Probably both easier and more useful to work out a model for physiological causes of gayness first and then see what affects those pathways.
The biggest change has been an increase in females identifying as bisexual (although most women who identify as that and are in a relationship are with a man). Not what one would have expected if it were about persecution.
https://betonit.substack.com/p/lgbt-explosion
A gay man & lesbian discuss that relatively recent change here:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/video-with-katie-herzog-on-the-expansion
Yep, they do talk about stigma here.
And an increase overall, not just for bisexuals, although they have indeed the highest spike.
It's multifaceted.
I know many bisexuals that are only out to friends and not family, which is a massive incentive to not marry the same sex. Especially when statistically there are *substantially* more available partners of the opposite sex. It complicates familial relationships to a degree few people outside of the community could understand.
This is very much a patriarchal society we live in. If you're a woman, married to a man, your life will objectively be much easier socially, beaurocratically, financially etc. If you have the option of choice, why wouldn't you choose an easier life.
This is anecdotal to my experience but I am a lesbian and my wife is bi. I have told her multiple times in the past that had I had the choice, like she does, I wouldn't choose to open myself up to this level of prejudice. Life's messy enough, I completely understand why bi women stay in straight relationships.
It is also hypersexualized in the media. I suspect this is part of the recent uptick in bisexuality. Think younger generations are still learning where bicuriosity ends and where bisexuality begins.
Isn't the stigma against men having male partners much stronger than that of women having female ones? I understand that "patriarchy" is a universally applicable bugaboo, but here its invocation is particularly jarring.
It's different flavors of the same problem.
I remember watching this video last year that summarized it well;
* if you're a woman and you're straight, it makes perfect sense
* if you're a woman and you're bisexual, you're just doing it for male attention
* if you're a man and you're bisexual, you're actually just gay and confused.
The assumption is on "wanting to be with a man" any distancing from that rule is trivialized and not taken seriously.
Lesbians are just a weird glitch in the matrix. There to be sexualized and not taken seriously. "Who's the man in the relationship" is a question I've been asked an insulting amount of times.
My gay brothers have their share of homophobia. The stigma they face unfortunately often translated into physical bullying. It's seen as a very unmasculine and therefore "weak" thing to be, which is so deeply ironic considering there's two men in a relationship.
Someone once summarized this as "society can't imagine sex that doesn't focus on male genitalia." That's why bi women are actually straight and bi men are actually gay: both focus on the penis.
"* if you're a woman and you're bisexual, you're just doing it for male attention"
That seems like a strange hypothesis for anyone to propose. My impression is that the average woman gets more male attention than she wants, just in the default case.
You don't mention a couple of the other possibilities, though.
If you're a man and you're straight, it makes perfect sense. That doesn't fit that the assumption should be on "wanting to be with a man," and covers something like 45% of the population, the second-biggest bucket (or perhaps the first given the increased number of bi women).
If you're a man and you're gay, you're doing it because of some innate thing you can't control.
Lesbian sexualization these days (not in ancient Greece) occurs less because it's not taken seriously than because you have two women interested in sex, which a superstimulus for a straight or bi man. The fact that neither of them are interested in *him* is a separate issue, but is a lot less relevant in a fantasy.
And if they're bi, then it's the old 'man with two wives' fantasy, which actually does exist historically in high-status men, which many men like to fantasize about being. Again, there's no guarantee a pair of bi women would be interested in a randomly selected man, and in fact it's pretty unlikely. But...this is fantasy, not reality.
From what I can tell, a lot of it was fear of AIDS. When doing the bicurious thing a while back (purely online, never crossed the line into meatworld) I found a lot of straight or even bi women simply weren't interested in a guy with any male partners. The STD risk goes way up, one told me.
So if you're a bi guy, you have to pick. Since as a man the impetus is on you to approach, and the straight female pool is much larger than the gay male pool by maybe one and half orders of magnitude, plus carries more social approval outside of a few social scenes (poly, kink, progressive come to mind), a lot of bi guys just date and marry women and call it quits. The small number of Hugh Hefners and guys who approach everyone obscure the much larger number of men who find the whole mating dance difficult and unpleasant.
Also probably explains the existence of 'the down low' and other secret gay partners among men...how many of them were repressed gay men, and how many of them were bi? We'll probably never know.
If you're bi and female there's the 'hot bi babes' or 'unicorn' fantasy to deal with, but you don't have people rejecting you on basis of your identity to the same degree. Whether you come out ahead I think they can judge better than me!
>It's not that each generation is gayer. It is simply becoming increasingly safer to identify as gay.
Do you have proof for this? It's a convincing sounding story, but that's not enough for it to be asserted so strongly.
We know for a FACT that homosexuality is significantly affected by non-genetic factors (because the heritability of homosexuality is relatively low), so it would be extremely surprising to suggest the monumental environmental changes that have ocurred over time (or that exist between countries) have exactly zero intersection with the environmental factors that affect sexuality.
That's a good point.
I'd worry that the large-population studies are going to pick up unwanted demographic differences. For example, larger family size may correlate with religiosity or traditionalism, either of which might make people differently likely to get gay-married (regardless of actual sexual orientation).
Did the authors of the Danish and Dutch studies try to control for these effects at all?
I had this question as well.
I feel like I should clarify one of my thoughts. I sort of alluded to it here (https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1693811404845830377), but I really want AKP to do some triangulation. There are many variables they had access to that could have been leveraged to winnow down the DAG. That they didn't do this leaves us unclear on several viable alternatives I'm certain they had the power to address.
Personal numbers:
Sibling birth order effect on homosexuality is real: 90%
Real and biological: 75%
Real and of currently-estimated magnitudes: 40%
Real and explicable by current theory: 25%
Real, biological, and linked to NLGN4Y in particular: 10%
Do you think the effect size is larger or smaller than the current estimate?
I think it's smaller and it has a biological and nonbiological component, and the biological is larger.
There is no FBOE. It makes no evolutionary sense. The only plausible explanation is that (male) homosexuality traces back to a single mechanism. It’s a byproduct of an evolved mechanism: http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Rice-et-al.-2012.pdf
This makes far more sense. In utero, homosexual men have female responsiveness to testosterone, but only in specific parts of their brains that control attraction.
I say Greg Cochran's theory is more plausible than an evolved mechanism that doesn't evolve to stop producing this deleterious outcome.
Greg's theory is clearly contradicted by the fact that gay men were usually feminine from a very young age. Richard Green's experiment noted that many gay men were feminine from age 2, suggesting their brains were not completely masculinised. If homosexuality were caused by a virus in childhood you'd expect typical boys to suddenly become feminine and start liking barbies after the virus caused destruction to the male circuitry.
We do actually have an example of a man who suddenly became gay after damage to his brain, and became a hairdresser:
https://metro.co.uk/2011/11/08/rugby-player-chris-birch-suffers-stroke-and-becomes-gay-hairdresser-212304/
n=1. So what. There are thousands of cases of brain damage every day, and never another report to corroborate this. What if he was just a closet case who felt confidence to come out? Or a self hating homo who wanted to 'blame' it on a stroke? There are plausible confounders here. And even if the stroke did cause damage to the male typical circuitry, and made him gay, that doesn't prove Cochrans idea at all. I'll believe it when I see it happen in young kids, except it hasn't so far. If regular 5 year old boys were suddenly turning feminine, the gay germ hypothesis would've been proposed by every man and their dog, long before Cochran ever uttered the idea.
He's not self-hating and doesn't "blame" the stroke, he reports being quite happy now. Instead of actually checking to see whether your hypothesis had any truth to it you just threw it out without any regard for it.
Ulcers were blames on stress for a long time even though the introduction of antibiotics meant they were accidentally getting cured that way. Barry Marshall was not pushing on an open door when he attributed them to H. Pylori instead. So, no, germ theories would not be popular because they were true. They were not popular for things we know they cause in our actual history for a long time and people like Semmelweiss were not just accepted as being right.
Look, I've read Cochran's blog for over a decade. You're just parroting everything he says and it's clear you haven't read much on sex research (like most of his fanboys). I mean no offence, I used to be a gay germ proponent too, but absence of evidence for other hypotheses doesn't mean the gay germ is right.
Rice's hypothesis was badly misrepresented by Cochran. E.g. falsely claiming it was "left over" from chimp-human split, wrong. Falsely claiming it was due to "leaky" epigenetics, also wrong. Rice's newer paper better explains evidence for his hypothesis in general: http://volweb2.utk.edu/~gavrila/papers/mol_ecol_16.pdf
"a mutation producing the SA epimark will accumulate whenever C/B < 100. For example, a mutation that increased fitness of the parent that produced it by 1% would invade the gene pool even if it lowered the fitness of recipient opposite- sex offspring by 99% "
I know a comic collector called Chuck Rozanski who suffered West Nile-induced encephalitis. He emerged from the fever a changed man: he started cross-dressing, and has recently become non-binary. It apparently does happen.
https://www.facebook.com/chuckrozanski/posts/pfbid02vXrZR3ra34dvEY5jH8vn34hXE261MMka9Ej2KnaaXP9masMBfKgXXpthPwZPuahYl
Was that the guy in Portland who was found dead after a wellness check prompted by his extreme cognitive change he attributed to illness?
What do you mean by, "It makes no evolutionary sense"? Evolution merely has to produce things that are "good enough", not "perfect". Human eyes have a design that's inferior to octopus eyes, but they worked well enough, so now we're stuck with the results. Human eyes are a local maximum, and evolution can't go down into the valley to find a higher hill. I don't see a reason why homosexuality can't be the same type of effect. As long as it only affects a small percentage of the bigger and stronger sex, it might well be an acceptable trade-off for whatever path got us to where we are.
2% of males in Samoa are "fa'afafine" (their version of homosexual) and have not had to reproduce for hundreds if not thousands of years. That is a huge fitness cost that is miraculously being maintained in the population somehow.
Even in the west in the 80s, male homosexuals suffered a loss in reproductive fitness that is roughly equivalent to that of achondrplasic dwarfs (calculated via number of offspring). In other words, from an evolutionary point of view, it’s better to be a 3’10” midget than it is to be Ian McKellen.
Dwarfism, blindness, muteness so rare because they're all costly from an evolutionary perspective. But male homosexuality (2%) is actually exceedingly common. If 2% of men were walking around blind you wouldn't say such a silly thing. If there were no homosexuals, just bisexuals, then this would be less of an evolutionary puzzle. But exclusive homosexuals exist, it's common and the idea it's socialized into them is pure nonsense.
I didn't say anything about "socialized", but I don't think it's genetic either. My best guess is, like the theory Scott talks about, that it's epigenetic. As in, various hormones and stuff floating around in the womb can affect the development of the fetus.
Yeah, its a fitness cost, but that only matters when a few mutations could produce something better. We're well past that stage now. Possibly the "choice" was made before our ancestors had evolved brains sophisticated enough to manifest the problem. If someone could decompile the human genome, tweak the source code to avoid this bug, and recompile it to create a version of humans that were purely heterosexual, then sure, all other things being equal, I think they'd be more reproductively fit than normal humans. But they'd be no less vulnerable to a quick genocidal war wiping them off the slate, leaving us where we started.
I agree, that is closer to the answer. But more likely, there is something sexually antagonistic about it. That is, there is some other mechanism maintaining its prevalence. This model proposes an evolutionary reason for why homosexuals might have sex atypical receptivity to hormones in their brains: http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Rice-et-al.-2012.pdf
Even in the 80s might be “only since the 80s”. Right?
Seems straightforward to me. With fewer siblings you get more parental attention. More of your parents subjecting you to gender/sexual stereotypes, and less time to be yourself.
So ‘gender stereotypes’ and socialization are needed to establish heterosexual attraction, now? When has that ever worked. John Money and dozens of other doctors raised typical boys as girls, removing their genitals, socializing them as girls, and not telling them they were born girls. Yet in every published case they turned out attracted to women.
Shouldn't 2% have been gay just by chance?
It's possible that 'degree of heterosexuality' is a spectrum and that socialization is only needed for a minority on the edge of that spectrum.
"Shouldn't 2% have been gay just by chance?"
That would be true if there were hundreds of cases, but there are not. 2% of a small number you're not going to get androphilic ones.
"It's possible that 'degree of heterosexuality' is a spectrum and that socialization is only needed for a minority on the edge of that spectrum"
Does it make sense for something so crucial for evolutionary function (attraction to the opposite sex) to be 'socialized' out of men? I mean, it doesn't make sense that you'd lose ALL attraction to women.
Even in the Sambia tribe, they make young boys fellatio one another for 10 years starting at age 8 (because they believe ingestion of semen is essential for male growth), and when they're given access to women, they happily move on to them. Only a few percent of the males continue exclusively wanting action with other men, and other tribesmen find it baffling, and even mock them.
>Does it make sense for something so crucial for evolutionary function (attraction to the opposite sex) to be 'socialized' out of men?
I don't see how it makes any less sense than homosexuality existing at all.
Could the birth-order effect be partly due to older siblings, especially firstborns, being under more pressure to conform to their parents' wishes, whereas younger siblings get more slack?
It might be enlightening to see the results of similar studies on birth order vs. religiosity. I'd expect that firstborns would be more likely to profess their parents' religion, while youngers would be more likely not to practice it.
Then why do only biological siblings have an effect?
My hypothesis is that if homosexual behavior is culturally forbidden as in the case of past cultures, gay genes will increase cooperative behavior among males.
Enough to overcome the fact that you're going to be less likely to have sex with women at all?
And aversion to feminine men seems fairly common throughout history. It's easily the case that men cooperated with gay gene having men less because they were seen as less dependable in e.g. hunting/combat situtions which required tough men.
>Enough to overcome the fact that you're going to be less likely to have sex with women at all?
I think so. Also, I think in many cultures, the thought of men being attracted to other men did not even cross one's mind and even gay men thought of themselves as men and behaved in masculine way. Moreover, I recently found some study saying homosexual behavior aids in conflict resolution among Chimpanzees. It could be similar in humans too...
But I could be just as easily wrong and you could be right. We don't know how different humans are from chimpanzees, and the role of cultures.
What you're saying doesn't really allow gay genes to be passed on unless they only manifested as honest to goodness aversion to sex with women in modern environments.
You are right. Maybe having partially inheriting gay genes is advantageous, but inheriting them fully turns one gay? But this works only if there is more than one gay gene.
Given that women are more likely to identify as bisexual than men, I wonder how much of the differences in effect between gays and lesbians may be confounded by bisexuality – which these studies' methodologies could not control for (since they only observe monogamous marriages).
The sibling effect might be smaller for bisexuals and account for that sex difference?
Bisexuals seem like a big potential confounder for these studies: if the birth order effect includes bisexuals as well, then using marriage data would obscure that because bisexuals are more likely to end up in straight marriages than gay ones just due to number of potential partners (as discussed here a while back).
But if the birth order effects don’t include bisexuals, then the marriage data obscures that too, since some people the study would be counting as “gay” because they’re in a same-sex marriage are actually bisexual.
Really good point.
My recollection from the early 2000s was that Blanchard's estimate was that FBOE accounted for 1/7th of all male homosexuals: in other words, not a trivial amount, but not a large fraction either, thus leaving most examples of male homosexuality unaccounted for.
All this talk of "gay genes" without acknowledging that the concordance rate among identical twins is so low that the twin of a homosexual most likely isn't one also. Psychology had a replication crisis because they had weak theories that led them to mine for noise. There's still no good theory for how gay genes could persist at a level higher than the rate of de novo mutations.
"All this talk of "gay genes" without acknowledging that the concordance rate among identical twins is so low that the twin of a homosexual most likely isn't one also."
Slightly unrelated, but I think this is a bad argument/analogy. Some studies suggest the identical twin of a schizophrenic has <50% odds of being one (others say slightly more), but schizophrenia is 80-90% genetic - this is one of those times the brain is bad at Bayesian reasoning.
Variance in homosexuality is probably between 10-25% genetic, which isn't huge, but is big enough to confound studies. There's no amazing theory for how most genetic things could persist at a level higher than the rate of de novo mutations, but here we are.
Something to keep in mind about identical twin concordance rates is that the twins share a bunch of characteristics besides the one whose concordance you're interested in, and some of those characteristics may influence concordance rates via a psychosocial, rather than genetic, route. For instance if the twins are physically unattractive and bad at playground games they will have a harder time of it growing up. On average they'll see fewer teacher smiles, have fewer friends, and suffer more bullying. Seems quite possible to me that the heavier load of sad and bad experiences increases the chance of schizophrenia.
> Seems quite possible to me that the heavier load of sad and bad experiences increases the chance of schizophrenia.
But that's the opposite of Scott's point. He's saying that even though schizophrenia "is 80-90% genetic"[1], twins who share all their genes with a schizophrenic clone fail to be schizophrenic themselves about 50% of the time.
What you're saying is that twins are so similar to each other that they should be concordant on any given trait far _more_ than the genetic influence on the trait would suggest.
[1] It's not actually clear what this means.
Yeah, I get that. My comment was a general one about concordance studies, not meant as an explanation for the difference in the figures Scott quotes for concordance for schizophrenia and what fraction of schizophrenia is accounted for by genetics.
Heritability is distinct from "genetically determined" for just this reason. Wearing earrings is highly heritable, but no one thinks there's an earring attraction gene or genes causing that. It's downstream of socialization of people who happen to have X chromosomes. That the variance of the trait is explained in genetic variance is distinct from mechanistic determination from those genes in the way people sometimes too quickly imagine, which I take as the point you are making.
If physical attractiveness of the type that is heritable is causally responsible for socialization that predisposes schizophrenia, so long as the attractiveness is the independent variable that matters and the socialization response is relatively constant, then the difference that matters for right here and now is the genes, not the environment. That's not to say we couldn't alter the social environment and upend the math. We potentially could.
Bailey did a gay twin concordance study by recruiting volunteers in gay newspapers. He got 50% of the time if one identical twin was gay, so might the other one be. That seemed like good evidence for gay genes.
But that might be a selection effect favoring when both identical twins are out on the gay scene in Boys Town: "Hey, Tim and Tom, you guys should volunteer for this twin study." But if one identical twin is living the gay life in Chicago, and the other back home in Dubuque as a fireman with two kids, will the study be as likely to be called to their attention?
So, Bailey redid this starting with the comprehensive Australian twin registry. And got 22% concordance. Which is far from nothing. But it's also less than people expected after he first got 50% concordance.
50% definitely feels wrong to me anecdotally. I’ve known a handful of gay men that have straight identical twin brothers (that I know about) but only 1 that I can think of that has a gay identical twin brother.
> I’ve known a handful of gay men that have straight identical twin brothers (that I know about) but only 1 that I can think of that has a gay identical twin brother.
How many people do you meet? Identical twins are less than 1 in 250 births. The number of identical twins I know is zero. I went to the same school as a pair of them once.
I mean, I’m not currently friends with anyone who has an identical twin (that I know about), but I’m 50, and I came out at 19, and have always lived in large cities, so I’ve met a lot of gay men over the years.
(And I think maybe because I would have expected both-gay twins to be more common, that that has made it more salient to me when I find out that a gay person I know has a straight twin. Whereas, eg, you might hear one of your coworkers mention “blah blah my twin brother blah blah” and then have forgotten about it the next day because it’s not really relevant to you, so you end up feeling like you don’t know any twins.)
That would still mean that someone with a gay twin is very roughly 5-10 times more likely than a random non-identical sibling to be gay, which would seem to be strong evidence that genes play an important role, just not an entirely deterministic one.
It is a much less important role for genes than is exhibited by virtually all traits.
Obviously genes are fully determinative of everything; it isn't possible for them not to play an important role. But people usually want to analyze things in narrower terms than that.
Right. 22% is way above random but pretty far below many other traits.
In general, trying to come up with a nature or nurture theory to explain male homosexuality seemed like a major question around the turn of the century, but decades have gone by and I certainly haven't made any additional progress on it.
Has anybody come up with a big new theory since the good old days of Blanchard's FBOE, Cochran's Gay Germ, whomever's Female Relative Fecundity theories?
The concordance rate you get has to depend heavily on how rare the trait is in your set of subjects. If you study pairs of identical male twins, making no effort to recruit twin pairs where one or both is gay, probably 5% or so of your subjects will be gay. If you recruit in gay newspapers for men who have identical twins, way more than 5% of your subject group will be gay. If everybody who answered the ad was a gay man who had an identical twin, 50% of your group at least will be gay, even if every single set of twins is discordant. In real life the ad was probably also answered by straight men who happened to have an identical twin (assuming the ad only asked for male identical twins), but the percent of subjects who are gay would surely be way higher than the 5% you'd get if you recruited in some way that didn't up the gay quotient of your subject pool.
Anyhow, as regards concordance being affected by commonness of trait in subject pool. imagine doing a concordance twin study for brown eyes, which 70% of people have. You'd get a very high figure. And note that you would get a high concordance rate even if you didn't match twin to twin, but matched each subject not to his twin but to a random other person in the study. Since 70% of people have brown eyes, you would get the following results:
-brown-brown: .7 x .7 = .49, or 49%
-blue-blue: .3 x .3 = 0.9, or 9%
-blue-brown 2x (.7 x .3) = .42 or 42%
So you'd get 58% concordance for *random pairs*. Seems like the concordance due to being genetically identical would be whatever the concordance rate is for identical twins, minus the 58% you get for random pairs.
Anyhow, I think that accounts for the high concordance figure Bailey got.
> Since 70% of people have brown eyes
Wait, really?
Using some rough population figures off the internet, it looks to me like the population of Europe + USA + Australia + Canada is is under 1200 million.
With a world population estimate of 8 billion, that would add up to around 15% of people.
But a lot of Europeans and Americans have brown eyes! (Also true for Australia and Canada, but neither of them is large enough to register against the population of the world.)
How can the share of people with brown eyes be as low as 70%? Shouldn't it be 90+? Who are these unknown hordes of people with the blue and green eyes?
(Including WIkipedia's description of the MENA region adds 600 million whites to our count. But (a) that could at most increase our estimate of the relevant population by 50%, since we were limited at 1200 million before, and (b) they are even more biased toward having brown eyes than Europeans are.)
Does this count as partially dodging a bullet from the replication crisis? :-)
Is this "male homosexuality" or "homosexuality"? At least footnote #4 suggests you meant indeed the latter by "gay genes," but though I can easily imagine there being genes promoting sex-specific homosexuality, I'd be very surprised if there were genes that promoted homosexuality independent of the carrier actual sex.
"Variance in homosexuality is probably between 10-25% genetic, which isn't huge"
Between this, and the observation that pre-homosexual behavior is observable in 2-year-olds, isn't that enough to bound the other 75%-90% of the variance to something happening either in utero or in very early childhood? ( *NOT* claiming that the antibody theory is right, just that the timing of whatever is going on is fairly constrained )
What is the concordance rate among identical male twins for homosexuality? Not arguing, just curious.
Cochran referred to it being around 25%
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/not-final/
I've seen other figures in the 30s.
The 2016 Bailey et al. review which did a meta analysis of all twin studies put it at 24% (page 76). The rest of the review is very good too: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/1529100616637616
I've put up a couple posts on here about how the commonness of a trait in your subject pool *greatly* affects concordance rate. Don't want to repeat it here, but it should be easy to find if you are interested.
Because it isn't "gay genes", it's almost certainly caused by receptivity to hormones: http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Rice-et-al.-2012.pdf
You will need to do more to convince me to read this article. How is hormone sensitivity not genetic?
Is there a source that will disabuse me of what seems to be the obvious naïve parsimonious assumption that younger siblings are more submissive due to physical and intellectual inferiority during their childhood? Leading to higher rates of male homosexuality in particular when they learn to imprint on submission to another male (older brothers), but also leading to younger male siblings being less attractive to women due to a tendency to be submissive to females as well (older sisters) and thus finding themselves (on the margin) more likely to be both rejected by females for their submissiveness and accepted by male partners who seek submissive mates?
This seems really, really obvious to me. Males seek submissive partners and females seek dominant ones. Younger male siblings are more likely to be submissive.
The main counterargument is the 2006 study mentioned above claiming that the effect tracks biological (and not social) siblings, ie if someone with a biological older brother is adopted by a family where there is no older brother, they'll still get the effect. I don't know how strong this study is.
Your theory also doesn't really seem to explain why women with older siblings are more (rather than less) lesbian.
Regarding lesbians, isn't that a much weaker effect, and non-monotonous? I am prepared to be wrong on that as I am not great at reading papers or graphs.
My naïve parsimonious epicycle explaining lesbian younger siblings is that every gay man I know is literally super horny for men and their body hair like an imprinted person would be, but every lesbian I know is more disgusted/terrified by men (as a result of bad experiences) and not particularly horny for women or anything like that. Incredibly unwoke opinion, but it certainly seems to me like lesbianism is a totally different root cause then homosexuality in like, maybe 80% of cases? And that younger male siblings being submissive could lead to enough gay pairings on the margin, while if a lesbian effect exist it could be the result of younger siblings being less extroverted, more neurotic, etc.
Disclaimer: I only think these things because I have quite a few very frank friends with very non-normative sexualities and I love and respect them all and am noticing trends that I discuss with them regularly. The boys are like 80% into their non-normative sexualities due to imprinting and the girls who *aren't* lesbian are too, but the lesbians themselves mostly just want to get away from the boys.
Female sexuality does indeed seem to be quite different. Bisexuality is more common than obligate homosexuality, while in males it seems to be the reverse. Heterosexuality is obviously adaptive in males, but if one takes the William Buckner view that females had minimal mate choice in hunter-gatherer societies perhaps they didn't need it and could persist without. I don't think Buckner is quite right and the prevalence of heterosexual desire among females (even if it's not as intense as among males) indicates it was probably still adaptive for them and they were exercising some agency.
Mostly in my experience males just get absolutely wrecked by sex hormones some time between the latent and pubescent stage and either imprint on a global attractor state that society and biology nudge them toward (females) or get stuck in some kind of local maximum where it's Sonic the Hedgehog OC or other men or inanimate objects or whatever (which is fine).
It seems to me that in the case of IQ, as environmental insults decline (childhood malnutrition, disease, parasites, violent parenting behaviors) the genetic component comes to dominate. I wonder if there is an opposite effect where trends are currently adding environmental insults to heteronormative sexuality and as such genetic factors (if there were any beyond those that nudged toward heterosexuality in the EEA) diminish in predictive power.
In this case, I'm not sure if I'm seeing anything beyond a single study really claiming to show biological/genetic impact of birth order? I wouldn't take a single twin study to be convincing on any genetic basis (height, IQ, obesity, etc.) in vacuo. Show me five more and I'll believe there's a really biological basis, or something really incontrovertible beyond some weak and non-monotonous effects.
Men are in one sense more attractive partners for other men, since they are usually far more willing to indulge in casual sex. Might be a factor in nigh-obligate heterosexuality being the norm for them.
Gayness and submissiveness are different, though. Lots of gay men -- gay "tops," for instance -- are not into submissiveness.
I think that's the point of TTAR's argument. Lots of gay men are "tops". Relatively fewer straight women are "tops". If a man's sexuality is not strongly defined, and if he is socialized to be more of a "bottom", he'll get more action if he goes looking for male sexual partners than female. This doesn't explain the existence of gay tops, but it could explain a modest percentage, maybe 10-20%, of gay men overall - which is about the claimed effect size.
Or it could be completely wrong. There's plenty of reason to be skeptical of the theory, but not to dismiss it altogether just because gay tops are a thing (or for any other reason I've seen here).
Well, John, you may be right. Both my mother and my half-brother were gay, and when somebody posts something that gives me the impression they don't know much about what gay people are like it gets under my skin & I feel an urge to push back.
In this case, OP's suggestion that younger male sibs are more likely to be gay because they are log a lot of time being submissive to older brothers smelled to me like it came from equating male gayness with submissiveness -- as though, to overstate it, he thinks gay males are all swishy, dependent, and burst into tears if they chip their nail polish. And, he didn't put in the qualification you did, which is that the submissiveness would account for at least a moderate percent of gays, something like the percent of the claimed effect size. Also, as a psychologist I know from both reading and patient accounts that people who are into sexual submission are not necessarily submissive in everyday life. Sexual submissiveness seems to be more of a kink than a manifestation of the person's main interpersonal stance. And besides, there are plenty of straight males whose submissiveness *is* their main interpersonal stance. They don't stand up to their wife, their co-workers, etc.. They crave to be nurtured and protected, rather than to have their views respected and translated into action.
I'm also twitching when I read posts from people who are arguing that gayness in younger brothers is a consequence of being raped or otherwise assaulted by older males. My intuitive take is that theories these theories are driven by the great EWWWW that is some people's reaction to homosexuality. The EWWWW makes it seem to these people like homosexuality has to be a pathology resulting from abnormality or illness. And the assault idea maybe comes from the writer's feeling that there's no way he'd ever participate in a homosexual act unless the other guy beat him til he was insensible then raped him. Yeah, OK, we believe you, buddy, don't worry. But gay guys do not need to be beaten into submission, they like gay sex for god's sake, get over it.
There's a weird affective divide here, some are conservatives who really don't like gay people and others are unwoke liberals who are curious about the origin of homosexuality but don't want any harm to come to gay people. There are also a few gay readers, who seem sprinkled around the political spectrum.
Interpersonal submission, sexual submission, and sexual orientation are from what I can tell all correlated, but not at r=1. The stereotypes exist or people wouldn't have them, but many people fit them imperfectly or not at all.
As for the interpersonal stance...it doesn't even have to be because you *like* submission, if you're not good at reading people or on the spectrum being a people-pleaser is an effective way to compensate for the large number of inadvertent insults you are always making.
"unwoke liberals who are curious about the origin of homosexuality but don't want any harm to come to gay people" Yup. I see it as an interesting puzzle akin to left-handedness or other minor variations in people.
> I'm also twitching when I read posts from people who are arguing that gayness in younger brothers is a consequence of being raped or otherwise assaulted by older males. My intuitive take is that theories these theories are driven by the great EWWWW that is some people's reaction to homosexuality.
Contagion theories are pretty strongly motivated by the gay germ hypothesis.
Is there really such a thing as the gay germ hypothesis? Is the germ thought to make you all filthy and disgusting and corrupt in your passions, or excessively interested in nail polish and home decor, or what?
Greg Cochran among others has proposed the hypothesis that homosexuality is (often) caused by exposure to a yet-unknown virus, presumably in childhood and maybe even in utero. And no, the hypothesis is not that the virus causes people to become home-decorating perverts or any such thing, nor that it spread *by* perverted homosexuals.
It's a plausible hypothesis, that should be considered alongside many other plausible hypotheses.
You keep saying
>"if you’re gay, it means your parents had some of the genes for homosexuality, which means they weren’t as committed to the whole heterosexual-sex-for-procreation thing as usual, and we should expect them to have fewer kids, and therefore for you to have fewer siblings."
But the whole point of the theory, at least the NLGN4Y version, is that it explains how it could be passed down through evolution without a gay gene, because it's a gay gene wouldn't be adaptive. The way NLGN4Y explanation escapes that is that it's not a gene that causes homosexuality in the individual, but a gene that slightly increases the probability of older siblings to be gay, which means by the time you get a homosexual child, you probably already have some heterosexual children, which still carry the gene (because it doesn't directly make them gay) and pass it forward.
There being some straight children already doesn't mean it isn't evolutionarily disadvantageous for the later children to be gay. Admittedly the disadvantage is weaker if it only applies to some of the children, but this isn't much different from it applying to only some of the individuals who have the gene themselves, which is how it would be expected to work already.
Most things like this are polygenic and have several different genetic mechanisms. I predict something like NLGN4Y is involved, but also some other pathways. Twin studies show some genetic component, and I think that can't involve NLGN4Y because each twin pair is part of the same pregnancy.
Before modern medicine, women had many more children (often 10+), and many children died in childbirth or at a young age.
If birth order effects were biological, this would predict many more gay men historically than today, but I'm pretty sure that was not the case.
Does the birth order theory have an explanation for this?
That also bothered me. Ignoring children who die young, the much larger number of siblings per person means this hypothesis says we should have seen gigantic numbers of gays in the past. 𝗔𝗹𝗹 of the additional births in a family are younger siblings, and they have steadily more older siblings as they become more additional.
Not really, the fboe is big but not that big. It's really more interesting as an indicator of an underlying mechanism.
That's a good point, but I think that social/cultural explanations (being gay wasn't considered a possibility, so nobody thought of it, and if they did think about it they did it very secretly) probably overwhelm this effect.
I mean, there's a chicken-and-egg thing here — how likely is it that being gay would have been much *more* taboo in a society with many more gay people?
I'm not sure how taboo gayness really was in, say, the Victorian era. I once read a pretty persuasive article saying that most people of that era got it that some were gay. But the norm was to not openly acknowledge someone's sexual orientation, but to use euphemisms -- someones's "dear friend" was their gay partner. That was the norm for public conversation. In private it was assumed that among people who trusted each other franker language was OK. I can imagine that. We are sort of like that about money and death. We might describe someone as "comfortable" or "wealthy," but giving actual estimates of their income and net worth would be rude in most settings. Similarly, in most settings you talk about somebody having, say, "long term health problems," rather than specifying what's wrong, unless one is with a group of close and trusted acquaintances.
That may apply to the Victorian era. But high birth rates existed in all societies and periods until recently. Surely, out of all of them, we'd see some with a high acknowledged rate of gayness - which would inexplicably decay just as modern medicine and the demographic transition arrived.
Where are the 25%+ rates of gayness in youngest-sons in historical societies?
How would we know about sons that were gay, though? It would not be spoken of openly in any surviving record. And if marriage was sort of arranged, rather than left up to young people who fell in love and demanded marriage, the gay sons would have ended up married too.
Again the question is, if *our* society got to be unusually gay-accepting even though (per this theory) we have comparatively fewer gays, how come that *no* historical societies with higher rates of homosexuality wound up with societies as accepting as ours, or indeed more?
(………Wait. Do we have any way of evaluating the average family size of the aristoi of ancient Athens, I suddenly wonder…)
William the Conqueror had four sons, I believe, the eldest being Robert, and several daughters. One of the younger sons, William Rufus, later William II, never married nor had any recorded offspring, and was said by contemporary historians to be "addicted to sodomy".
Another son, Richard, was killed aged around 18, galloping face first into a low hanging tree branch while hunting in the New Forest. So presumably his sexual orientation is now unknown. But the youngest son, Henry, later Henry I, fathered over 20 illegitimate children. So it is hard to argue that he was gay!
So it appears that in this example, Willliam Rufus (William II) constituted the 25% you seek! (He was later also killed in the New Forest while hunting, that time by an arrow - His family never seemed to have much luck there! Hence the song "Who killed Cock Robin?" )
Unfortunately, anecdotes won't get us anywhere, we need bigger datasets and ones proof against various selection biases.
That would be a victory for nurture over nature: you think societies or culture can effectively suppress even very high rates of obligate homosexuality.
With powerful enough stigmatization, we wouldn't know the true rate of gayness, and it would appear to be low; just as today we can't measure the true rate of highly stigmatized and punished predilections such as pedophilia.
This was surely true sometimes. But birth rates were high in all times and places until recently. "All historical cultures" are a very varied space and not all stigmatized gayness so strongly, or at all. I would still expect to see more historical societies with high rates of acknowledged homosexuality.
Maybe another complicating factor is the age difference between successive siblings, if changes in a mother's immune system gradually creep back to normal over time after the birth of a son. If so then perhaps the effect would be more pronounced and readily observable if results were weighted in inverse proportion to the interval between siblings (or better still based on typical functions of antibody levels over time following a male birth).
Parents pay far less attention to younger children of many, and are much more permissive and less controlling of them. The youngest are also going to be physically weaker and less able to physically compete with older siblings. The youngest is more likely to be the comedian of the family and more likely to reject the social paradigms around them- they’ve seen how they play out in their older siblings and can see the absurdity in them. My guess is this finding is more social than biological.
There is lacking evidence for social environmental theories, certainly it's something "non-social environmental" at least in males. The Bailey et al. 2016 review concluded that: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/1529100616637616
Another research group at King's College London has been attempting to find psycho-social correlates in childhood but failed to find anything significant for men:
https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.13317
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1079063215618378
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dev.21894
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fdev0000704
Let me try a simple cultural hypothesis. Éducation is very often more rigid on first childs since parents put more conscious efforts on « holding the frame » to avoid unwanted trajectories. They relax with younger ones.
It then become more acceptable for the the youngs to make their coming out.
It seems very possible to me that gay-married men are a significantly skewed portion of gay men.
“Strongly gay” men (i.e. men with more of the “thing that makes you gay”) might also be much more promiscuous (?) and keen on non- monogamous lifestyle.
Speculation.
Gay married men are not all monogamous. ;-)
From what I'm told, the monogamy dynamic is something heterosexuals often inappropriately carry over to reasoning about homosexual relationships.
This makes me question whether there may be other subtle features of homosexual relationships that might be more trivial explanations for the birth order effect. Scott is skeptical that birth order can be trivially explained by the married/unmarried distinction, but it seems to me you can come up with as many explanations for why that should be the driving factor as a birth order effect without a good biological mechanism.
Maybe if you have older siblings all getting married, it's more socially normalized or expected? Maybe you watched Gary and Harry get married and go on honeymoons, so you figure you should marry Jerry because that's the thing you know. Meanwhile, if you're the firstborn and you're gay, getting married to Larry might be less of the obvious choice and you blaze your own trail.
If heterosexual relationships are different from homosexual relationships in fundamental ways - including reasons/timing/desire for marriage - it's possible that someone who follows a string of heterosexual marriages will be influenced by their experiences in a way someone without those in-family examples would not.
This isn't too claim "gay people only get married because straight people do" or anything that strong/ridiculous. Only that there may be a trivial social effect strong enough to skew the numbers and convince people they're seeing a signal in this noise.
OMG no! Say it ain't so, Moon Moth!
[jk]
Also, occasionally the internal areas of focus in the relationship are divided in such a way that, when asked, "So which of you is the woman?", one of them can cheerfully say "I am!", albeit with ironic tongue firmly in cheek.
So if homosexuality has an epigenetic cause, specifically an in-utero cause, does that mean that once we develop uterine replicators (a la Lois McMaster Bujold's sci-fi Vorkosigan saga books, setting aside "Ethan of Athos"), we would then be able to trigger or prevent homosexuality at will? And is there a reason to suppose that this would lead to anything other than an almost complete elimination of homosexuality?
(I'm asking because I'm curious. This isn't a veiled condemnation of technology. I personally view it like languages: humanity as a whole loses something every time a language becomes extinct, but at the same time it's obviously in a parent's interest to try to have their children be native speakers of [checks century] English.)
I think it would depend a lot on the culture that invents it! I could see a strong case for increases in *bisexuality*, if the gay switch were invented in a culture that was tolerant of that, just based on "more options is better"
I read a story in the 90s (in a collection of gay sci fi) set in a near future where reliable in utero testing of “the gay gene” became possible, and the result was… that within a generation or two homosexuality had become an almost-exclusively Catholic thing, because the Catholics stuck to their guns on abortion, but the Evangelicals decided that God was OK with aborting gay fetuses, and everyone else just wanted “what was best” for their children.
(From Googling, it looks like the story was “Sex, Guns, and Baptists” by Keith Hartman.)
Well, if we're that advanced we'll probably also be advanced enough to make it possible for male couples or a female ones to combine their genes and produce offspring, and I'd guess at least some of them would elect to have homosexual children. Even some straight couples might. I'm straight, but almost half my family's gay. I would have been fine with having a homosexual child.
Political winds are fickle.
"And is there a reason to suppose that this would lead to anything other than an almost complete elimination of homosexuality?"
It might alternate on successive administrations. :-)
Hmm... Perhaps a sex-positive scenario like Huxley's Brave New World might opt to make everyone bi?
That's a nice happy optimistic future. :-)
Well, small variants of Brave New World could look quite livable - but I think they are unworkable for other reasons. I suspect that uterine replicators are a hard enough technical problem (fetuses seem to be exceedingly sensitive to all sorts of stuff that adults shrug off) that other major changes, notable ASI seem likely to happen first.
'Gay' vs 'Straight'. This Gay Younger Brothers post is doubtless an interesting and worthwhile area of research, although one of no particular interest to me personally. But something that does matter to me is that we should resist the English language being hijacked by propagandists. There is - I would guess -nothing particularly 'gay' about being homosexual. And 'straight' is a pointless and needless word as a description of the great majority of humans. It is a propagandist pitch.aimed at promoting a homosexual's illusory fantasist world in which there is no such thing as normal sexuality.
Sorry, but this comment is totally baffling I need to ask for clarification. Gay refers to homosexuals (et al, depending on context) because it roughly meant "slutty" in like the 17th century right? the whole reason we use like we do now is because gay people in the sixties or so were considered (and maybe considered themselves?) to be depraved and whorish and flamboyant. Meanwhile straight carries clear normal and rule-following connotations (straight-edge, straight-laced). Are you earnestly saying that using gay/straight is propaganda for there being no normal sexuality? why on earth would the totally symmetrical terms homo/hetero be better?
I think his point was that we ought to rename gay people, "destined for hell," and rename straight people, "children of God." \S
Gay used to mean happy, with a bit of flamboyant in there. However the usage changed decades ago. Odd that Graham is still upset.
Straight is a weird one, by the way, its antonym is bent which used to be a fairly strong insult for homosexuals. I am actually surprised that it hasn’t gone out of fashion.
"Straight" could also be interpreted as in "straight man" or "straight and narrow path", which some people view as stifling and boring.
It is sometimes useful to have terms to refer to things, in case one wants to discuss them. Do you have a better idea for terms than "gay" and "straight"?
Well Yes....homosexual instead of 'gay'. And the 90-odd% of people who are not homosexual simply don't need any term to denote them. I should perhaps clarify that I have no animus against homosexuality...none whatsoever. But I am unsympathetic to 'gay pride etc'. Homosexuality happens to some people and they should not be bullied on account of it (as of course does happen and did even in our own Western past.) But it does not need to be celebrated - which is what the term 'gay' was invented to promote.
> I am unsympathetic to 'gay pride etc'. Homosexuality happens to some people and they should not be bullied on account of it (as of course does happen and did even in our own Western past.) But it does not need to be celebrated - which is what the term 'gay' was invented to promote.
Eh -- I don't know about that. Clearly gay pride celebrations don't meet any need you have. But many gay people have suffered and in some places still do suffer both from being despised and from despising themselves. A big flamboyant parade is about the best corrective ritual I can think of. Have you got a better suggestion? And as for some of the over-the-top stuff you see in gay pride parades, it's the best corrective ritual I can think of for pushing back hard against attitudes that homosexuality is loathesome. Have you got a better suggestion?
Homosexually is, in the 21st century West, no longer demonised,; on the contrary it is valorised. My suggestion about big flamboyant 'gay pride' jamborees? Don't go there.... and I suspect that a lot of homosexuals - the ones that don't go there - would agree with me.
I dunno. I don't go there because I don't like big loud gatherings in general, and because I find them a bit cringe, but if people have fun at them, more power to them. (This is also how I feel about science-fiction conventions.)
Do you mean it's valorized in, like, San Francisco or in the western world? If you mean the western world, I suggest you ask someplace, maybe on here, about attitudes towards homosexuality gay people living in the western world have encountered in recent years. Here's a small piece of evidence for you: I live in one of the bluest states in the US, in a town where most homeowners are liberal professionals. But in the town's high school, gay kids still have a hard time of it. 10 years ago, when my daughter was in high school, she was friends with an out gay kid who was frequently taunted by classmates on social media, where he was addressed as "fudgepacker" and "faget" ("actually," he would respond, "it's spelled 'faggot.'")
I hate bullying of all kinds; the kind you have described included.
But I don't think the invention of a new valorising word has helped to reduce this kind of small-minded behaviour.
If you are talking about statistics, you need to be able to say that gay people have more older brothers than ____________ . I really don't think it's convenient to have to say "gay people have more older brothers than the group which we refuse to give a name to, no matter how practical it would be to name them, in order to make some obscure political point" every time we want to discuss the topic.
As for gay vs. homosexual, I decline to use a word with five times as many syllables every time I want to talk about a simple concept. I feel the same about people who want to force me to say "African-American" instead of "black" (or whatever it is now).
I think the main problem with using "gay" is that it can refer to both gay men and gay women. But I suspect that whatever causes men to be gay is distinct from whatever causes women to be gay.
Using the umbrella term muddles people's thinking, especially when speculating about possible causes
I mean, "homosexual" can refer to both homosexual men and homosexual women, too. We're rather stuck unless Scott stoops to "MLM", a highly unfortunate acronym.
I think the Germans have a word for "gay man". Do they think more clearly about these things? I don't know.
Both terms are ambiguous, but I'm pretty sure "gay" is much more strongly male-coded than "homosexual". See, e.g., "LGBT", which may have other letters attached but is never just "GBT". Or "HBT".
I should clarify that I didn't think "homosexual" is any better. Any term that clumps gay men and lesbians together would have the same issue.
Yeah, I am confused why feminists haven't gone after this usage of "gay" with the same vigor that they've gone after similar usages of "man" and "mankind". It's equally male-centric, if perhaps not technically "patriarchal" in modern American culture.
We're not going to agree are we? But two things:
1) our language would be in a strange way if intellectuals refused to use words with many syllables.
2) black - unlike gay - is not a word that was promoted to advance a particular attitude to what it denotes.
That isn't how the terms developed, though. Nobody sat down, the way I imagine ad agencies do in naming a new product ("hey! let's call the soap 'Zest'!") and thought up the terms 'gay' and 'straight' with an eye to making homosexuality sound fun and groovy and heterosexuality sound like the plain, boring default. In fact, at the time the gays began using that word to refer to themselves, it did not have terribly positive associations when used as a slang term: It meant not *happy and carefree*, but something like *wild and slutty*. And of course gay people didn't vote on the use of the term -- it just slid into being common usage, the way other words do. The meaning of words slides around over time, as different uses of them become popular. As a matter of fact 10 or 15 years ago there was a slang use of the word "gay" among teens that had a whole different meaning. It meant something like "lame." So some kid's failed attempt to look cool could be deemed "so gay," and there would be no implication that anyone involved was homosexual.
Surely you know all that stuff about how language changes over time, and if you did not know how homosexuals came to be referred to as "gay," you could easily have looked it up. So whence comes this silly theory of yours the some wrongheaded woke committee sat down and chose the words "gay" and "straight" with the goal of making homosexuality sound attractive. I have the impression that you have a very strong visceral negative reaction to male homosexuality, and that is coloring your thinking. Why not work on separating your visceral reaction from your thinking?. All sex is messy and undignified, and for many people any sex act that they don't find hot as hell is disgusting and ridiculous. You probably can't help feeling EWWWW about male sex acts, but many gay men feel he exact same disgust reaction to thoughts of various sexual acts with women. EWWW is powerful but it does not mean anything. It is completely irrelevant to substantive matters and judgments about how we govern society and who has rights to what.
Actually I'd guess that for evolutionary reasons straight individuals who carry gay disposing genes would produce more offspring (or I'd expect the tendency to have been pushed out of the gene and meme pools).
For instance, esp in modern day, you might expect the prospect of uncles or aunts eager to assist w/o their own kids is more important in encouraging births than how much you want to fuck.
Could this be the entire effect?
Is such an effect enough to explain the outcome.
Interestingly, i would predict that birth control would make the gay uncle effect far stronger in increasing births.
That predicts that gays should be increasing in percentage since 60s.
Family sizes are much smaller now, shouldn't we be seeing less and less gays in the population? But we're not.
An idea that might help explain the unclear results: I remember having read many years ago (unfortunately I do not remember which book) the theory that there might be at the same time several reasons for (male) homosexuality. If I remember this correctly it was a) genetic, b) epigenetic (something about hormones during pregnancy I seem to remember?) and c) social (i.e. bisexuals that identify as gay). I found this theory also interesting as it would explain why there are from a young age very effeminate gays and gays that "pass", i.e. are not "read" as gay.
My father is gay, always has been. In terms of reproductive fitness throughout human history, I am not convinced that being gay would be a big disadvantage. Gay men make amazing parents, and want to have children. In prehistory there wouldn't be a gay culture or any distraction from having a family. Being gay you'd be content to hang out with all the manly warrior types, massage their muscles after a big hunt, braid their man locks. Gossiping with the ladies would come naturally too. And gays often assume that their gayness tracks with a set of genes for extra intelligence, a tendency for creativity, and a superior sense of aesthetics. Maybe this is true to some extent. Obviously there must be some benefit to being gay, even if the gayness is a sort of spandrel.
Yeh, I think that’s the answer. There was no evolutionary disadvantage because gay men got married (priests aside).
Well, but there were all those priests, who were probably disproportionately gay from the start. And the "confirmed bachelors" who didn't become priests but didn't get married either; that's an old, old stereotype and we've got examples here going back almost a thousand years. So, "gay men got married" is an oversimplification.
As is "...and because they got married, they were as fecund as any other couple". Gay men are almost certainly going to be having PiV sex with their wives less often than straight men. They are probably going to be more receptive to their wife's request to lay off that sex thing altogether for a year or so after the birth of a child, that she can rest and recover before the next one. And they definitely aren't going to be running around supplementing their total of legitimate children with some illegitimate ones for fun.
So I don't think you can go from "most gay men were pressured into marrying some woman" to "gay men face no reproductive deficit compared to straights".
Denmark did not legalise gay marriage in 1989, and it's remarkable that you could think that, having lived through this last 15 years or so when this change has been introduced around the world.
This is true, but (from Wikipedia): "1989: Denmark is the first country in the world to enact registered partnership laws (like a civil union) for same-sex couples, with most of the same rights as marriage (excluding the right to adoption (until June 2010) and the right to marriage in a church); activists Axel and Eigil Axgil and 10 other Danish couples are unofficially married by Tom Ahlberg, the deputy mayor of Copenhagen, in the city hall, accompanied by worldwide media attention."
Yes Ok, thanks, I assumed that he must have been referring to some liberalisation like this, but I thought it weird to call it marriage. That stage of the revolution is much more recent.
Honestly, there’s often no difference in law.
Fair enough, this is a rationalist blog.
Here is a comic that explains an evolutionary reason for homosexuality and also for the birth order effect: https://evolutions.thecomicseries.com/
Paternal age and offspring neurodivergence, presumably considered and dismissed long ago? "offspring of the fathers 45 years or older had a 34% increased risk" (of mental illness.) JAMA Psychiatry. Very large March 2014 Dutch study. A Comprehensive Assessment of Parental Age and Psychiatric Disorders. John J. McGrath, MD et al.
> Real and biological: 60%
> Real, biological, and linked to NLGN4Y in particular: 40%
This would imply a 2/3 probability of being linked to NLGN4Y, conditional on it being real and biological, which seems very overconfident to me, given the uncertainty about the mechanism raised by Ablaza et al. Am I understanding Scott's statement here correctly?
The biggest problem with the genetic linkage story as told is the women. If the gene on the Y chromosome is being attacked by antibodies from mom, how does a similar mechanism work for daughters? Mom will delete self antigens, so NLGN4X isn't going to be a viable mechanism of action for the theory in lesbians. It seems to me you either have a male-only effect, or you can't use a male-only explanation.
Yeah, you're right, I probably messed that up somehow, I'll have to think about it more.
> Even granting that the FBOE is true, why does adding more younger siblings make you less gay?
I don't know why we're considering only the genetic and in utero effects. To me it seems plausible that having more exposure to the other sex (or both sexes) during childhood and adolescence could increase the chances of adult heterosexuality. Chalk it up to pheromones or cultural effects, whatever.
To me the most interesting/confusing finding in the article is the huge difference between the <1% incidence of married homosexuality in Netherlands and 4-10% of gays in Scott's poll. Is it the subject or the marriage?
Since 2002 the proportion of same-sex marrieges is somewhat higher (1.7%). But these statistics include the time same-sex marriage wasn't legal yet. And for some reason there are very few catch-up marriages.
source: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2021/13/20-jaar-na-invoering-homohuwelijk-20-duizend-homo-echtparen-in-nederland
I wonder if abortion (including miscarriages, of course) has any impact on FBOE. How far along in the pregnancy does a mother have to be in order for the pregnancy to have an effect on future pregnancies? Finding that out might help clarify some things, but I imagine it's a much harder thing to measure than most.
The Dutch study numbers seem odd.
Nine million sample? There's supposedly less than 18 million people in the Netherlands right now.
Also 2.36 siblings for opposite-sex and 2.14 siblings for same-sex means there's on average more than 3 children per family (or relationship I guess). In an age where everyone's saying that every country in western Europe has less than 2.1 children per family (a *lot* less), i.e. not replacing themselves?
Now maybe these have already been pointed out, and maybe I've missed something. Maybe the study ignored people who didn't form any relationship? But that sounds like it ignores a *lot* of people, enough to confound and even reverse their findings.
I noticed that too. But the average number of siblings isn't one less than the average number of children per woman. It's one less than the mean number of children *weighted by the number of her children*. (After all, a woman with no children at all doesn't affect the average number of siblings at all, but she does affect the fertility rate.) This "self-weighted mean" is bigger than the plain arithmetic mean.
This self-weighted mean is equal to the sum of the squares of the variables (the number of children of each woman) divided by the sum of the variables. It's also equal to the quadratic mean multiplied by the ratio of the quadratic mean to the arithmetic mean; the quadratic mean is already bigger than the arithmetic mean.
Also, the average number of siblings of currently living people is related to the fertility of a few past generations, not the current fertility. And I've ignored half-siblings above, I don't know how they were counted in that statistic.
Most families are reproducing themselves Ie more than one child . Single people are not.
I think it’s interesting the effect was more observable with homosexual pedophiles, as that’s more likely to have a clear behavioral etiology. Very often they were themselves abused.
I’ve worked many child sexual abuse cases, and natural fathers almost never sexually abuse their own kids. The most common perpetrator is mom’s new boyfriend after the divorce. So the youngest siblings would have a higher chance of still being in the age range for the new boyfriend to groom and victimize them. Also a higher chance of an older step-brother or cousin being present in the house to abuse them.
Scott, Denmark had "registered partnership" (= civil unions?) for gay couples starting in 1989. They didn't have actual gay marriage until 2012.
If that point has been raised time & time again, I apologize for beating the dead horse. But...
Multiple people point out a supposed evolutionnary benefit to homosexuality in the form of "gay uncles" helping out with raising children, but isn't that ignoring the opportunity cost of that "gay uncle"? A non-gay uncle may not help with raising your 4-5 children, probably slightly worsening their outcome, but he'll have 4-5 children of his own, spreading their non-homosexuality-inducing genes.
I have a hard time believing a scenario where the effect of help raising the kids outweight a doubling of the offspring produced.
Has anyone considered this might be the impact of older siblings (particularly brothers) committing sexual assault?
I don't have actual statistics on it, but that would seem to imply an implausibly high rate of sibling sexual assault, especially since being sexually assaulted as a child clearly isn't going to reliably turn everyone gay.
What if we expand assault to include all the forms of sexual intimidation, hazing, and general malfeasance an older brother can get up to?
Were it socially acceptable to suggest that homosexuality can be caused by childhood sexual abuse, one would wonder if having older siblings might make that more likely.
One might also wonder what form of abuse a statistically-straight older sibling would be inclined to dish out that might have the power to turn a younger sibling gay, never mind whether it supports a new gay panic.
Kids do strange things to one another, and I've heard many people say both that older siblings or cousins did things to them that made a great impression AND that the older kids in question grew up to claim to remember none of it.
My four younger siblings can certainly vouch for that experience. But if there was any buggery, we've all done a capital job of repressing it.
I don't find it unacceptable at all to suggest that homosexuality can be caused by childhood sexual abuse. In fact I find it quite plausible that early sexual experiences, if pleasurable, would have a big impact on a child's adult sexuality. However, finding the experiences pleasurable seems to be relatively rare. As a therapist I have seen many people who were abused as kids, and very few of them were raped or threatened. They were "seduced" by adults or older kids they liked, and the adult who seduced them very often fondled their genitals and did other things that felt very good to the child. Even when the abusers did things to satisfy themselves sexually, it was rarely via a sexual act that was painful to the child. However, I have never met anyone for whom the overall experience was pleasurable. The kids all felt as though they were doing something very bad or very weird. Even a pretty small child knows that touching other people's genitals is something you are not supposed to do. Also, the kids who responded sexually were disturbed by their own reactions. Most were quite naive about sexual arousal and orgasm, and are confused and alarmed by their body's response. One woman I knew who was sexually abused beginning at age 9 thought the orgasms she was having were a kind of seizure. Also, the kids all sense that the nice person who had become their special buddy is greatly changed during the abuse episodes -- they are preoccupied, weirdly unresponsive, insistent, breathe funny, give weird cries, squirt weird stuff. etc. Kids find the transformation quite scary. So overall, the experience of being abused has been somewhere between moderately negative to absolutely horrible for every person I have heard describe it. For that reason, it seems unlikely that it would influence tastes in the way something that is memorable and novel good experience would.
I've not heard any theories that kids who are molested become gay because they enjoyed it. Assuming such a straightforward mechanism would appear monstrously naive where psychopathology is concerned.
I dunno. A lot of pathology caused by mistreatment isn't particularly convoluted. Much of it is pretty easy to understand. People who've logged a lot of time in situations where fighting back made no difference develop learned helplessness. People who have been teased and mocked a lot fear more of it, and struggle to find settings and personas that make them mockery-proof.
And anyhow it's not clear that the best model for homosexuality is that it's a kind of psychopathology. Seems at least as reasonable to think of it as a normal variant -- sexual left-handedness. And once you're not wedded to a psychopathology model, and you're just thinking about how somebody's preferences develop, it's very plausible that a particularly enjoyable early experience would affect adult preferences. For instance, lots of STEM people's stories of how they ended up in their field start with childhood experiences where they were delighted and fascinated by having someone show them them the stars through a telescope, how to grow crystals, how to make something cool on a raspberry pi, etc.
I'm starting to think you and I worked with very different populations.
Oh have you also worked with gay people or people who have been abused?
Yes, and with very high levels of overlap between these groups. Yours sound like they had a better time of it than mine. maybe different SES backgrounds or something.
Call me a philistine, but given the uncertainty pervading the literature, the smallness of the effect if it exists at all, the gap between statistical significance and real world significance, and the lack of useful an actionable takeaways, the word which springs to my mind is: nothingburger. Perhaps 50 years ago this might have inspired the thought that perhaps we should scale back the penalties for being gay on the grounds it might not be altogether their fault.
Also I generally like evolutionary explanations for things, but not here. Lefthandedness is heritable but evolutionarily neither here nor there. I'm happy to think the same about being gay.
If Blanchard's numbers are right, this effect causes ~1/7th of all homosexuality.
That's still maybe not that much on a social level, but we really don't have many clues for why homosexuality exists, and this is maybe our best one so far.
I don't think it makes sense to say there are genes for things but their frequency isn't determined by evolution, especially if there's such strong evolutionary pressure against (ie you'd expect gays to have fewer children)
Question for the mathiest among us: I have a feeling that there is something lacking in the way concordance is calculated. My understanding is that you calculate it by taking number of concordant twin pairs in your sample and dividing it by the total number of pairs. But it seems to me that the calculation needs to somehow take into account how rare or common the trait is that you are looking at. Being gay is not a common trait for males -- last figure I saw was about 5% of males. But think about calculating concordance for brown eyes, which 70% or so of people have. It seems like for a common trait like that, it's way "easier" to get concordance -- or you could think of it as you're getting a lot of "free concordance" for brown eyes from the commonness of the trait, and that totally blurs the picture if you what you are trying to figure out is the genetic contribution to brown eyes. My intuition is that you need to do some math that corrects for trait commonness if you are using trait concordance to figure out how genetic something is. One correction would be to calculate concordance on the trait for paired individual subjects in the pool -- i.e., not the concordance of identical twin pairs, but the concordance of random pairs of subjects with subjects in these pairs not being twin pairs but unrelated individuals. Then subtract this figure from the concordance for twin pairs.
Also, a related question: Scott says the usual concordance rate found for identical twins is around 50%, but most think that 80-90% of schizophrenia is genetic. How do you figure out what percent of a trait is genetic? Is there some other way to do it besides calculating concordance rates among identical twins?
Look up heritability.
Homosexuality has a higher heritability than left handedness. Heritability is basically irrelevant to determining the true cause here.
OK, so I RTFM'd and learn the following: "Heritability is calculated as a2 / (a2 + c2 + e2) where a2 is the amount of variance in phenotype explained by additive genetic effects, c2 is the amount of variance in phenotype explained by shared environmental influences, and e2 is the amount of variance in the phenotype explained by unique environmental factors."
But, Guy, I don't see how that answers my question. So *a* is the amount of variance in phenotype explained by additive genetic effects. So how does one determine that? I don't see how i*a* can be just the concordance rate. Did you read my first paragraph, about how concordance rate is heavily affected by commonness of the trait being measured?
I believe heritability is calculated using correlations, not concordance rates.
You can't use the statistic *r*, correlation coefficient, for binary data (gay/not gay). It is only applicable to quantitative data, such as height.
And what do you think about concerns about the problem with concordance rates themselves?
"You can't use the statistic *r*, correlation coefficient, for binary data"
Not sure about that.
"And what do you think about concerns about the problem with concordance rates themselves?"
Is it a problem or just what concordance means? I guess you want some sort of base-rate adjusted concordance rate, but if we're looking at how genetic something is then heritability seems more relevant. The reason one might bring up concordance rate in such a scenario is probably as a simple and easy to understand way to demonstrate that say MZ twins are more similar than DZ twins, but far from perfectly similar. Not as some gold standard measure of how genetic a trait is in a way that's comparable between different phenotypes.
where they able to control for age of the mother? or the father?
Another possible cause, less dependant on a specific gene: pregnancy is hard on a mother's body. An ideal pregnancy requires a lot from a mother's body. A child developing inside a body that's already been pregnant multiple times is less likely to develop ideally. A mother who's had such rough pregnancies as to produce a gay child is less likely to have more children (either choosing not to when that choice is available, or to a lesser extent being unable to even if she can't choose not to).
How testable is this? Survey mothers of adults, and ask them on a scale to rate how difficult their pregnancies were. Then ask which of their kids are straight, bi, or gay.
I made this comment years ago on this subject (obligate homosexuality caused by an intragenomic conflict), and it got some interesting push back. I still think that this isn't a completely crazy theory.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/14/age-gaps-and-birth-order-effects/#comment-752266
An equivalent study on 1980s-‘90s AIDS victims might turn up interesting results.
Not that I look for a non-biological explanation for everything, and yes, I haven't read every single comment, but: has nobody really suggested that younger siblings are often under less pressure (from their parents, relatives, internalized paternal authority, etc.), conscious and unconscious, to continue the family line? And couldn't that expectation, or lack of it, affect sexual orientation?
> Remember how Frisch and Hviid managed to look at two million Danes? Well, the Dutch also have gay marriage and keep really good records. Ablaza, Kabatek, and Perales were able to obtain and analyze the data from nine million of them. They do more advanced statistics than any of their predecessors and are able to report basically every parameter of interest with high confidence.
This type of study seems impossible to do right. One thing I noticed immediately:
> We observe all maternal siblings who were alive and residing in the Netherlands after October 1994
In other words, diseased siblings don't count. All people, but especially old people, are more likely to have diseased older siblings than diseased younger siblings. (Old people die.) If a youngest sibling is old, their siblings are more likely to be diseased, excluding them from the study. As such, I expect the sample of oldest siblings in this study to be older than the sample of youngest siblings. This matters because old gays are much more likely to be closeted/unmarried/married to a woman.
Also:
> For example, 0.73% of [Dutch] men who are the youngest of five siblings entered a same sex union, compared to just 0.35% of men who are the eldest of five siblings . . . the share of men with four older brothers entering a same-sex union is 0.96%, more than twice the share among men with four older sisters (0.46%)
My impression is that by the 80s, most Dutch parents rarely chose to have 4+ children, so I expect most of this sample to either be very religious or of age.
A proper Dutch social scientist could probably think of many more ways this data is skewed.
Re: genes ('fitness') or germs, I want to again encourage everyone to read "The Goodness Paradox", by Richard Wrangham. And our 'scrambling' of sex could be a spandrel to self domestication. (Selecting for less violence, aggression... read the book.) There is no selection for spandrels, though they are open for later selection in the genome.
I feel compelled to add, that this idea appeals to me on several levels, not the least of which is that Darwin himself, discussed the cross species similarities in domesticated animals.
Why wouldn't the nation the samples are from have a major difference? Genetics or cultural.
Additionally the parental acceptance of homosexuality could increase the more children they have. Ongoing changes in cultural acceptance would vary over time and by decade causing self identification issues.
I'm not surprised it will be difficult to perfectly find the same results as the original paper.
"All of these differences are statistically significant . . ." Yay!
"Ablaza, Kabatek, Perales, And 9,000,000 Dutch People To The Rescue"
To me, this conjures up an image of a statistician rubbing their hands together and muttering: Power!, Power!, I must have more [statistical] power!
If the biological effect is correct, does this mean that if child #1 had an identical genome to child #7 (thought experiment here) the environment in the mother's womb could result in children with identical genomes, one gay and one not? The chemical conditions in the womb affect how the genes are expressed, not the content of the genome itself, right?
I just want to say that "Ablaza, Kabatek, Perales" sounds like a magical incantation.
The names are apparently rare names from the Philippines, Poland, and Spain, which is a pretty wide range. Grimoires tended to draw on Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, so I guess you'd have a similar range of 'European-language-adjacent' given the long Spanish domination of the Philippines.
There is another aspect which may be slightly relevant to this. I've heard it said that someone's sexual orientation is to a degree determined early in their life by the presence or otherwise of a parent of the same sex (whether actual or in loco parentis) during a certain critical period of their infancy.
I'm not sure if this is idea still supported and, if so, the strength of the effect. But it seems that a parent might be more likely to be around, and around for longer, during their eldest offspring's infancy than maybe during that of their subsequent children, what with death or divorce or simply working away more to support their growing family.
That said, I would expect the effect, if any, to apply equally to either biological or adopted younger siblings, assuming the latter were adopted soon after birth.
This really feels like "thumb on the scale" studies in all instances.
Among other problems: the obvious societal pushes both for generalized acceptance of "gay" as well as increasing promotion via celebration of "gay" (as well evidenced by Hollywood alphabet children percentages) provides a non-linear, non-constant baseline.
As someone with a young kid, an obvious explanation for the other birth order effects is that they have the same cause as increased allergies in firstborns: later born children get a lot more exposure to viruses, in utero and as babies, thanks to their older sibling(s) bringing them home. Covid, with it's school and nursery closures and isolation measures, provides the ideal opportunity to test this hypothesis.
OK I thought I made this comment so maybe I'm making it twice, but. I think even if the older sibling effect appears statistically stronger, it's the older brother (as opposed to sister) effect that is more trustworthy, because it's one of those rare cases where nature is doing randomization for you.
"the share of men with four older brothers entering a same-sex union is 0.96%, more than twice the share among men with four older sisters (0.46%)"
Whether the older sibling was a brother or a sister was decided by meiosis, as good as a coin flip.