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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: w0z who wrote (546240)	2/27/2004 7:26:33 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Respond to of 769670

LOL, a vacuum of creative thinking, no make that reality thinking... Now how much rape and pillage has gone on through the centuries. For how many generations have men and woman really had independence to decide to marry or not. And that's only in Western culture maybe.

To: w0z who wrote (546240)	2/27/2004 8:48:04 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

<If indeed homosexuality is genetic, then how is it propagated in the human species?> 1. The reason is, that "fit" behavior is anything that helps propogate genes like mine into the next generation. This is true, even if I personally did not produce those genes in my sperm. For example: Let's say I'm gay, and have no children. My brother is hetero, fathers 5 children by 3 different women, but he'd a worthless bum who abandons his children. So I get custody of the children, and raise them. Or maybe I just give money to the mothers, for food and housing. I share genes with those kids, so whatever I do to help them is "fit", from a Darwinian perspective. The universal adult opinion, that (almost) all babies are cute, is "fit". Example: I'm a lesbian, in a hunter-gatherer tribe of Eskimos in 20,000 BC. I have no children. But, I help raise the kids in my band of 10-30 people (all of whom I am closely related to). I have helped pass genes like mine into the next generation. These small bands of related people, were the universal social structure, for all but the last 10,000 years of human evolution. 2. There are actually innumerable examples of this, in the animal kingdom. Worker bees are sterile (the Darwinian functional equivalent of gay), but they work hard for the Queen, who puts their genes in the eggs. In many social mammals, only the alpha male and female of a band will breed and produce young. All the other adults in the tribe (usually the adult children of the alphas) are celibate. They gather food, raise the young, protect against predators. 3. There is another factor: Gay vs. hetero is not an on/off switch. Nobody is 100% gay or 100% hetero, we are all somewhere on the continuum. Which means gays and lesbians end up having a surprising number of children. And heteros end up having a surprising amount of same-sex sex. Yes, they do; if you don't think so, you just aren't aware of it. 4. The desire for children, and the desire to have sex (with the same or opposite sex), are two completely separate drives. People can have both desires, neither, or just one. Some people like sex, but don't want to raise children. Others (and some of these are gays and lesbians) want to have children. And people are very, very, very creative in getting what they want. 5. Homosexuals make about as good parents as heteros do. A male adult homosexual raising a male child is no more likely to sexually abuse him, than a male adult heterosexual is with his daughter. (personal opinion and observation; there are no good statistics to back this up). 6. Homosexuality in animal species: In chimpanzees (5 million years since a common ancestor with humans; 98.5% identical DNA to humans) male-female behavior is harshly dominant-submissive (lots of biting and beating). When dominant males interact with males lower in the heirarchy, they will display the same behaviors as in male-female interactions, including mock coitus. But this is (probably) not sexual, it is simply dominance-submissive behavior. Chimps do not form pair bonds (marriage) of any kind; any male will have sex with any female in heat, anytime. But "friendships" (sharing food, picking parasites out of each other's fur, enforcing each other's place in the heirarchy) between two adult males, or two adult females, can be as close and enduring as any male-female "friendship". To sum up: no clearly homosexual behavior in our closest animal relative.