NYTimes on Genetics/Behavioural link
Oct. 27th, 2003 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerHere.
One needs to be wary of these kinds of studies, partly because researchers drawn toward this field may have subconscious biases of their own. Moreover, many of the studies on the biological basis of homosexuality are flawed by small numbers or by the difficulty of finding valid random samples of gays and heterosexuals.
Still, while the data has problems, it is piling up — there are at least seven studies on twins. If there is a genetic component to homosexuality, one would expect identical twins to share sexual orientation more than fraternal twins, and that is indeed the case. An identical twin of a gay person is about twice as likely to be gay as a fraternal twin would be.
Earlier this year, the journal Personality and Individual Differences published an exhaustive review of the literature entitled "Born Gay?" After reviewing the twin studies, it concluded that 50 to 60 percent of sexual orientation might be genetic.
Many studies also suggest that sexual orientation may be linked to differences in brain anatomy. Compared with straight men, gay men appear to have a larger suprachiasmatic nucleus, a part of the brain that affects behavior, and some studies show most gay men have a larger isthmus of the corpus callosum — which may also be true of left-handed people. And that's intriguing because gays are 39 percent more likely to be left-handed than straight people.
O.K., these theories are potentially junk science until the studies are replicated with much larger numbers. But we also shouldn't ignore the accumulating evidence.
"There is now very strong evidence from almost two decades of `biobehavioral' research that human sexual orientation is predominantly biologically determined," said Qazi Rahman, the University of London researcher who led the blinking study. Many others don't go that far, but accept that there is probably some biological component.
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 04:25 am (UTC)Basically:
It's difficult to find a genetic basis for a socially-defined situation - "gay" doesn't exist, but same-sex attraction does. "Gay" doesn't exist, but people who discribe themselves as gay do. Inclinations and passions exist, and we interpret them through the frames our society makes available. It's kind of like trying to find a genetic basis for traffic wardens.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 04:50 am (UTC)How am I supposed to argue against it then? Tch.
But for a brief stab - surely what most people mean by "gay" is "largely sexually attracted to members of the same gender"?
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 05:01 am (UTC)surely what most people mean by "gay" is "largely sexually attracted to members of the same gender"?
Well, then, shouldn't they say so? Because that is a measurable thing - that also, actually, describes quite a few people who call themselves "bisexual" or "queer" or refuse labels, and also describes a fair few people who would call themselves "straight".
What I mean, really, is that people should say "same-sex attraction" when they mean that, because in such a very, very fraught area, you need to be bloody accurate. And because they're using a very complex, socially negotiated label adopted by people in the context of specific cultures to mean a slightly less complex thing, they're failing to define the research question appropriately.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 05:09 am (UTC)I do think that expecting The New York Times to use technically exact terms when 99% of people use "Gay" and "attracted to members of the same sex" to mean the same thing is possibly picking nits that are a little too small.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 05:24 am (UTC)It's not picking nits to ask people to define their terms appropriately: and I'm actually not talking about them being up on queer theory (how could I? I'm not.), but merely acknowledging that saying "I'm gay" simply cannot have a purely genetic basis.
Responsible science, and responsible journalism, is all I'm saying.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 05:33 am (UTC)The relevent question is, I think "are you attracted to members of the same sex?" That gets to the thing they're actually talking about, rather than coming at it indirectly through a social identity. They'd have to ask a randomly selected group of people, rather than contacting potential subjects via groups for those who have the social identity "gay".
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 05:51 am (UTC)It certainly _can_ be used as a tag indicating that it's a definition of the person as a whole, but I think we've agreed in the past that applying a tag to a person isn't defining a person as being that thing.
Saying that "X is a homosexual" means that "X is a homosexual person" or "X is a person who is sexually attracted to someone of the same gender". It feels to me like differentiating between "X is a Christian", "X is a Christian person" and "X follows the Christian religion". They're three rephrasings of the same meaning.
I can't see how these things can mean anything else (except in the hands of homophobes, who will take anything whatsoever and twist it to have negative connotations).
Categorisation of any kind certainly has problems - people do have a tendency towards an aristotalean worldview and definitions as being binary "Is/Is Not" statements, but I'm still struggling to see what the actual semantic difference is here.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 06:09 am (UTC)It's also a noun. The joys of English, eh?
Though, you seem to be saying that there's no difference between saying "I'm Catholic" and "I'm a Catholic", and there is. It's one of nuance, so, yes, the two sentences have the same truth value in the same circumstances, but they do mean different things - one is a description of one aspect of oneself, and the other is a description of oneself as a person located within a group of others (Catholics). If we were in a pub, I'd draw Venn diagrams on a beer mat. We shoud do that sometime.
I think, if someone said "I hate queers" I'd respond "I'm a queer". If someone said "Are there any queers in the room?" I'd respond "I'm queer". I think "Jew" and "Jewish" work the same, and have less of the English lack-of-morphology problem.
As for the rest: I'm not quite sure how else to phrase it, but I think there is something I'm failing to put across. Hmm. I'll go away and draw diagrams and think about that.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 06:28 am (UTC)Oh, and the problem with using Jews as an example is that there are people of Jewish descent who aren't followers of the Jewish religion (me, for example). In my post upstream of here I changed "Jewish" to "Christian" for that very reason.
And yeah, we ought to carry this on in a pub sometime.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 06:33 am (UTC)Darn Jews. Or Jewish people. Or Jewish-ish people. Yes, I'd forgotten that (and, in your opinion, which word is the "ethnic" and which the "religious"?). Islam and Muslim might work, then, for the morphology example, since, at least legally, "Muslim" isn't a racial descriptor.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 06:43 am (UTC)(Just checked with my mother and she agrees).
Oh, you might be interested to know that as far as Jews are concerned the Jewishness is passed matrilinearly. My maternal grandmother was Jewish, so I am.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 07:23 am (UTC)Like the difference between 'being a fan' defined as loving the series/book/person/whatever and 'being a fan' who mixes with other fans via the internet/whatever and is involved with 'fandom,' which is kind of a lifestyle attached to being a fan (where 'fan' is defined as someone who mixes with other fans.)
Woo. I made no sense. *watches people tear my argument apart* :)
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 08:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 09:35 am (UTC)(Don't actually read it myself, but I'm glad it brings pleasure to so many of you wierdos).
no subject
Date: 2003-10-29 04:33 am (UTC)To some people "gay" is anyone who has sex with someone of the same-sex, to some it's a political statement, some people hove sex with people of the same sex and don't identify as being 'gay.' There's no set definintion for anything, which means that research studies like this first need to figure out the defination of each word *and* make sure that all the participents are using the same definition.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 10:05 am (UTC)It does rather, doesn't it?
Is being gay more to do with living a particular kind of lifestyle?
Part of me wants to say "Course not, gay people can have any lifestyle they want." and part of me keeps noticing that "gay lifestyles" frequently have certain similarities. Whether that's down to a link between them or it's just a happenstance due to the fact that I'm only exposed to a certain section of society is a moot point for me at the moment.
Woo. I made no sense
Naah, lots of sense.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-29 04:30 am (UTC)Yeah, we should be able to live whatever life we want. But society - homophobes, whether we actually encounter them or are just afraid of encountering them - makes us gather in groups. COuld it be that the "gay lifestyle" builds up because young people who are just coming to terms with their sexuality copy what other gay people do, because there is the assumption that there is a certain lifestyle gay people lead. And that just fuels the whole vicious circle... large numbers of gay people act according to sterotypes because that's what society tells them is how gay people act?
Ow, my brain.
*scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 07:25 am (UTC)What biological component makes someone heterosexual? Can we test for it so that queer couples who want to ensure their children grow up queer can abort any babies who test genetically straight? Why did my brother turn out straight when my sister is functionally bisexual and I'm exclusively lesbian?
Bah. People care about trying to find a biological component for homosexuality because they want to discriminate against queer people. There is no other reason.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 07:36 am (UTC)I care.
That is not my reason.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 07:49 am (UTC)Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 09:46 am (UTC)1)I like knowing how things work.
2)I particularly like knowing how things that are important to me work.
3)People are important to me.
Therefore: I want to know how people work.
Considering that everything else about us is produced by a combination of genetic and environmental causes is seems unlikely that our brains would be any different, especially considering that the gross similarities between them both inter- and intra- species.
Therefore it seems obvious to me that some of our behaviour will be more influenced by our environment and some by our genetics. Further, investigation into similarities and differences between people and the various hereditary differences will allow us to (eventually) uncover which is which (or rather, to what extent they influence each other, seeing as it's most unlikely that anything is solely one or the other).
Is that really so hard to understand?
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 09:57 am (UTC)Nope. But it doesn't explain your interest in pseudo-scientific "research" into genetic "causes" for homosexuality. (Unless you're interested in what makes these pseudo-scientists tick, which is not the impression I get.)
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:02 am (UTC)Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:09 am (UTC)Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:11 am (UTC){checks back}
Nope, can't find one anywhere.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:18 am (UTC)Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:22 am (UTC)Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:27 am (UTC)Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:31 am (UTC)You've checked out all of those papers it's talking about?
I mean, _I_ haven't. But then I'm taking it as a "this is interesting, there's some stuff out there, needs a lot more study" indicator.
And you did start off saying that even looking for it meant that you had to be an evil person.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:43 am (UTC)No. But all of those described with detail made the queer media at the time they were first reported - and every single one used self-identified gay people and an extremely small sample size. Not one started from an extremely large group of randomly-selected people, tested all of them to measure their arousal on same-sex or mixed-sex, and measured their characteristics accordingly. Further, every single one had started out with the hypothesis that there was a biological difference between queer people and straight people. Why this is a dumb way to do science is rigorously explained in The Mismeasure of Man, which I recommend that you read.
And you did start off saying that even looking for it meant that you had to be an evil person.
Actually, I didn't. I said that this research is informed by prejudice and the desire to discriminate. I think this because this kind of research (whether to prove the biological differences between women and men, or between different races) has always proved out, given enough time to step back and see the absurdity of it, to be informed by exactly that: white male scientists didn't spend decades measuring skulls in the 19th century in order to establish that in fact white men are no different from black women, they did it in order to establish their innate superiority. This kind of crap is the same kind of thing. I think this kind of "research" is at best pointlessly stupid, and lends itself easily to evil uses.
But the researchers are not necessarily evil people, and the people who read the reports of the researchers are certainly not necessarily evil people. Clearly what I said was open to interpretation in the wrong direction.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:47 am (UTC)Well, my main hope is that what it leads to is a decent sized randomised study that can say something one way or the other.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:53 am (UTC)But in fact this kind of pseudo-science leads away from real research - it actively discourages it in direct proportion to how seriously it is taken in the scientific community. Because until researchers let go of the prejudices that these kind of "studies" are intended to bolster and confirm, they will not do any serious scientific research into human sexuality. Which is one of the unintended evil consequences of this kind of pseudo-science: bad science drives out good.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 12:09 pm (UTC)And where the hell are you getting the conclusion of 'bad science'...it's a factual, objective based process, science, that is...'bad science' is that which uses is sloppy procedures and draws unspecified conclusions...that which is studied can't be classified as 'bad science'. Whether you are intersted in it or not, whether you find any application for it or not, it is still valid research.
Which brings us back to your first argument about prejudice and the Nazis...what the hell?!? Why does deterimining if there is a biological pattern or influence on someone's sexual preference (or predeliction for same-sex attraction to use the specific terminology discussed above) necessitate prejudice and sexism? I mean, hell, many would argue that accepting that 'gay'-ness is partially a biological phenomenon would facilitate a broader acceptance of its existence as a norm in society. You see the purpose of the research to enable us to 'weed out' homosexuality...why? What evidence do you have that any of the scientists involved are such neo-facists that the only reason they began such studies was to destroy the gene.
Oh yeah, and in answer to your first question...if you can find the genetic tags and key points that 'cause' homosexuality so to speak, you are also finding the genetic coding for hetero...we've always known those genetic tags would be recessive...but hell, so is blonde hair.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 01:15 pm (UTC)Research that (1) didn't start out with preconceptions about what it was going to discover (2) was based on a large sample of randomly-selected people (3) was not dependent on how the people being tested themselves identify their sexuality. The problem with the "research" described in the NYT article is that (1) the researchers are starting out with the preconception that they're going to discover some difference between gay and straight people (2) are working from small samples (3) are using self-identified sexuality as if it was a biological rather than a social phenomenon.
Whether you are intersted in it or not, whether you find any application for it or not, it is still valid research.
It's not valid research if it's done badly.
Why does deterimining if there is a biological pattern or influence on someone's sexual preference (or predeliction for same-sex attraction to use the specific terminology discussed above) necessitate prejudice and sexism?
But that's not what they're researching, because they're starting out from the wrong premise. In order to discover if there is any biological pattern/influence on a predilection for opposite-sex attraction, you would have to take a large group of people and test them to find out what their predilections were. Pick a thousand men at random, and if Kinsey was right, then about 150 men in the group will admit to having had sex with other men, and 850 won't. A smaller percentage than the 150 who admitted to same-sex sex will identify as gay. Quite possibly a larger percentage than those who will admit to having had sex with other men will test out as being attracted to other men, at least some of the time. That would form the basis for a reasonably respectable piece of research: obviously, the larger numbers and the more mixed the sample the better. Same for women, except that Kinsey numbers suggest that only 50 out of the 1000 would admit to having had sex with other women. Now when you have a large pool of people whom you know are sexually attracted to the opposite sex but not to the same sex, and a large pool of people whom you know are sexually attracted to the same sex but not to the opposite sex, and a very large pool of people who are attracted to both sexes, then these researchers could start to do some serious research.
But none of them are doing this. They're operating on tiny samples and working on the idea that the social phenomenon of someone who identifies as gay is identical with people who feel attracted to the same sex; which is nonsense.
I mean, hell, many would argue that accepting that 'gay'-ness is partially a biological phenomenon would facilitate a broader acceptance of its existence as a norm in society
That would mean arguing that racism is a figment of our imaginations. Do you think it is?
Oh yeah, and in answer to your first question...if you can find the genetic tags and key points that 'cause' homosexuality so to speak, you are also finding the genetic coding for hetero...
Or not. Nobody's looking properly.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 09:36 am (UTC)As to the whole biological component to homosexuality thing, I remember horrendously long-lasting flame wars on this, so will only mention in passing that there those who believe that if a characteristic is inherited or somehow innate then it is more wrong to discriminate based on that characteristic than if the characteristic is something that can be altered....
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:13 am (UTC)Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:18 am (UTC)You can't please all the people all the time, it seems.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:22 am (UTC)Whether human sexuality is hard-wired or cultural is an entirely different issue. I don't know which; as far as I can tell no one else does either; and no one's interested in carrying out any serious research into it. Pseudo-science is flashy and attractive and gets funding.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:25 am (UTC)I'm just wondering how you'll tell when serious research is carried out? How would you know if one of the pieces cited in the article was real research?
I agree that there's far too much junk science, and it's entirely possible that one, some or all of the ones mentioned in the article are. But it's also possible they aren't - but you aren't even vaguely interested in that possibility, are you?
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:31 am (UTC)Er... because this is a re-hash of the various junky bits of "science" that have been carried out over the past ten years or so, and I recall at the time (starting with genuine interest, and moving on to repeated disillusion) that not one of them described any kind of research on human sexuality being carried out with scientific rigour. Small samples, using self-identified gay people, rather than large samples of randomly-selected people, were the norm.
But it's also possible they aren't - but you aren't even vaguely interested in that possibility, are you?
Oh, come off it. I'd be fascinated if someone was genuinely interested in doing real research into human sexuality. You're just pissed off because I am not interested in a re-hashed report of junk science.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:34 am (UTC)Aah, that's fair enough. See, if you'd started off with that line rather than:
People care about trying to find a biological component for homosexuality because they want to discriminate against queer people. There is no other reason.
then you'd have had me nodding in agreement from the start.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:45 am (UTC)And I still think that's what informs the research. I'd be very interested to see who's funding this kind of dreck.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:39 am (UTC)Moving the goalposts slightly, I'm thinking of a person who had, shall we say, an extremely negative opinion of people in Northern Ireland who had a different view of the One True Religion, but would get quite heated about the "positively mediaeval" bigotry some of their fellows displayed towards non-whites.
Re: *scream and leap*
Date: 2003-10-27 10:42 am (UTC)Of course, that delight is somewhat tempered by the fact it's a true story. Sigh.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 11:36 am (UTC)Studies where twins were raised separately are no better - in addition to the fact that in almost all cases the studies begin after the twins have gotten back together (and so are presumably now mimicking each other's behavior), the sample size of identical twins who have been raised apart is tiny. IIRC, all studies involving such people use the same 15 or 20 pairs of such twins.
I'm possibly willing to believe that homosexuals have different brain structures, but that says nothing about whether homosexuality is inborn or learned, merely that being a gay or lesbian in a First World culture is different from being straight in the same culture and so the person's brain changes. Bodies are not static and change dramatically in response to lifestyle. Given that all nerves grow and divide throughout one's life, why should this also not be true.
Hello all.
Date: 2003-10-28 08:44 pm (UTC)There is something obviously spurious about the scientists' hypothesis, though: Why would a man having a slightly more feminine brain have anything to do with being gay? After all, aren't some of the these self-same women with fuly female brains into other women? It just smacks of the assumption that being into men makes you feminine in some way. Living in a neighborhood where 30% of the residents are gay, I can tell you there are a LOT of different ways to approach that.
This may be where yonmei is getting the impression of bigoted assumptions in these studies, but I didn't otherwise see it mentioned in the comments so far.
Re: Hello all.
Date: 2003-10-29 12:35 am (UTC)