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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (13824)	10/25/2003 10:59:06 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793648

Don't most identical twins also share the same social environment? I suppose that's why the researchers chose twins for the comparison. Fraternal twins also pretty much share the same social environment. No two individuals can have exactly the same experiences. Life is not led in a petrie dish, and all. Comparative, controlled studies of twins, or siblings, are routinely made with that knowledge, of course. Groups of people are used for that reason, rather than just one pair of twins. If the findings are strongly enough suggestive with a smaller group, larger studies can be done, and conclusions drawn with more statistical certainty. Others might speculate about the social/psychological conditions common to males with older brothers. "For each older brother he is about 33 percent more likely to be gay" is a pretty striking stat, and of course I agree with you that it doesn't much matter philosophically and ethically whether it's from being beaten up a lot by your big brothers (for example) or from a prenatal androgen bath. A theory could be that the lesbians are blinking like men because they can't believe their eyes when they see females preferring dudes. I think the only fair answer to the "nature vs. nurture" question is that we don't know. Kristol made that clear. The research is strongly suggestive, in its accumulation, but is still in the early stages. It is interesting to discuss with those to whom it does matter what the ethical implications would be, to them, if homosexuality was demonstrated to be significantly biologically-based. It does matter to a lot of people. I had this (obvious) thought, in trying to figure out what was UP, with their hostility to others' sexual preferences. If one's child becomes gay, one might well be disappointed on the grandchild --> descendents-ad-infinitum front. That's not a little thing, given the bodily and psychological drives to multiply one's DNA. That fear, even (maybe especially) in one unaware it was there, could make the gay option, as represented by a happy gay community, deeply threatening on an almost "genetic" level. And people do like scapegoats for their anxieties. And nobody likes to generate dysfunctional (reproduction-wise) DNA, for heaven's sake. (A joke.) So scapegoats are handy. When my son was maybe 13, a longtime gay friend spent the night here, in the bottom bunk of our son's bunk bed, the only spare bed in the house. The next day, he made a sexually-tinged remark about our handsome son. (Not in front of him, of course.) We were, I confess, extremely discomfited, and never invited him to spend the night with us again. If a heterosexual male friend had made such a remark about a young daughter of mine, I'd have thought him a creep, also, and not invited him to spend the night again, either; but I suspect, I also confess, that I was more deeply disturbed about the tasteless gay remark than I would have been about a tasteless straight one. Thinking about that made me wonder how much homophobia, or other types of hostility toward gays, comes from unconscious fear of one's child being traduced into becoming a non-viable vessel for carrying one's big deal DNA. It does suggest that the parents of a gay son who already have several straight ones might be unusually cool about the whole thing.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (13824)	10/25/2003 11:20:20 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793648

Don't most identical twins also share the same social environment? I believe (working from memory) that the finding holds in twins separated at birth. I also really don't see that it matters It matters if it makes society as a whole regard homosexuality differently. Over the last thirty years, the prevalent societal view of homosexuality has changed from regarding homosexuality as a perversion or a disease or a choice to regarding it as matter of biology. The tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality has gone way up too. I think the two trends are closely related.