Besides, genocide requires an action to be taken to result in death.
An island full of homosexuals isn't being murdered, they're dying of old age.
Corax said:Bad science.
You have 1 island with 500 heterosexual couples, and another with 250 heterosexual couples and 250 homosexual couples.
Given the same specified factors in regards to food, shelter, clothing, & barring natural disasters, one island would have no human inhabitants within ~*** years, the population being murdered by its sexual practice. (murdered in the context of put an end to; destroy), through famine and disease due to an imbalance between limited resources and workforce.
So sure, it's natural, natural survival.
I still love my Mom though, and she still loves me.
Sorry TM (and probably put less than diplomatically), but that's exactly my problem with your example. It bears no semblance to reality.Bad retort.
"So sure, it's natural, natural survival" is flawed because your island theory throws heteros in the mix. My theory depicts each group exclusively on an island.
Pomplemous said:yes of course, but not with eachother - maybe that's what they meant - segragating sexes as well as sexualities
Survival of genetic homosexual traits explained
00:01 13 October 04
NewScientist.com news service
Italian geneticists may have explained how genes apparently linked to male homosexuality survive, despite gay men seldom having children. Their findings also undermine the theory of a single “gay gene”.
The researchers discovered that women tend to have more children when they inherit the same - as yet unidentified - genetic factors linked to homosexuality in men. This fertility boost more than compensates for the lack of offspring fathered by gay men, and keeps the “gay” genetic factors in circulation.
The findings represent the best explanation yet for the Darwinian paradox presented by homosexuality: it is a genetic dead-end, yet the trait persists generation after generation.
“We have finally solved this paradox,” says Andrea Camperio-Ciani of the University of Padua. “The same factor that influences sexual orientation in males promotes higher fecundity in females.”
Relative differences
Camperio-Ciani's team questioned 98 gay and 100 straight men about their closest relatives - 4600 people in total. They found that female relatives of gay men had more children on average than the female relatives of straight men. But the effect was only seen on their mother’s side of the family.
Mothers of gay men produced an average of 2.7 babies compared with 2.3 born to mothers of straight men. And maternal aunts of gay men had 2.0 babies compared with 1.5 born to the maternal aunts of straight men.
“This is a novel finding," says Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist and commentator on sexuality at Stanford University in California. “We think of it as genes for ‘male homosexuality’, but it might really be genes for sexual attraction to men. These could predispose men towards homosexuality and women towards ‘hyper-heterosexuality’, causing women to have more sex with men and thus have more offspring.”
Camperio-Ciani stresses that whatever the genetic factors are, there is no single gene accounting for his observations. And the tendency of the trait to be passed through the female line backs previous research suggesting that some of the factors involved are on the male “X” chromosome, the only sex chromosome passed down by women. “It’s a combination of something on the X chromosome with other genetic factors on the non-sex chromosomes,” he says.
Immune system
Helen Wallace, of the UK lobby group GeneWatch, welcomes the new research that moves away from the controversial single-gene theory for homosexuality. “But it’s worth noting that the data on the sexuality of family members may be unreliable, so more studies are likely to be needed to confirm these findings,” she says.
Even if the maternal factors identified by Camperio-Ciani’s team are linked with male homosexuality, the research team’s calculations suggest they account for only about 14% of the incidence.
Their findings also support earlier findings that when mothers have several sons, the younger ones are progressively more likely to be gay. This might be due to effects changes to the mother’s immune system with each son they carry.
But Camperio-Ciani calculates the contribution of this effect to male homosexuality at 7% at most. So together, he says, the “maternal” and “immune” effects only account for 21% of male homosexuality, leaving 79% of the causation still a mystery.
This leaves a major role for environmental factors, or perhaps more genetic factors. “Genes must develop in an environment, so if the environment changes, genes go in a new direction,” he says. “Our findings are only one piece in a much larger puzzle on the nature of human sexuality.”
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2004)
Homosexuality is biological, suggests gay sheep study
10:51 05 November 02
NewScientist.com news service
A study of gay sheep appears to confirm the controversial suggestion that there is a biological basis for sexual preference.
The work shows that rams that prefer male sexual partners had small but distinct differences in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, when compared with rams that preferred to mate with ewes.
Kay Larkin and colleagues from Oregon Health and Science University found the difference was in a particular region of the hypothalamus - the preoptic nucleus. The region is generally almost twice as large in rams as in ewes. But in gay rams its size was almost identical to that in "straight" females.
The hypothalamus is known to control sex hormone release and many types of sexual behaviour. Several other parts of the hypothalamus showed consistent sex differences in size, but only this specific region showed differences that correlated with sexual preference.
The differences are almost identical to those identified by the neuroscientist Simon LeVay in his studies of the brains of gay men. His work has always been considered controversial, partly because the brains he studied were mostly from men who had died of AIDS. So it was not clear whether the differences were related to the disease or to sexual preferences.
Hormone converter
But the findings in sheep are an important confirmation of LeVay's work, says Jacques Balthazart from the University of Liege in Belgium.
Sheep are particularly interesting, he says, because besides humans, they are the only animal where the males may naturally express exclusively gay sexual preferences. As many as one in 10 rams can be gay.
Larkin's team also found that the hypothalamic region had a rich supply of the enzyme aromatase, which converts testosterone into oestrogen. It is in this form that the hormone interacts with the brain. This may help support one theory that sexual orientation, in part at least, may be related to the hormones present during fetal development, says Balthazart.
But Larkin suggests there may also be the influence of genes at work, at least in predisposing the animals to homosexuality. This is because selective breeding seems to have been responsible for the high proportion of gay sheep compared with other animals.
Larkin presented the research on Monday at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Orlando Florida, US.
Noodle said:If they wanted to survive and thrive as a society the boys would peg the girls and the girls would take it and make the babies.
![]()
Acidfiend said:Fuck off bigots
The findings represent the best explanation yet for the Darwinian paradox presented by homosexuality: it is a genetic dead-end, yet the trait persists generation after generation.
Camperio-Ciani's team questioned 98 gay and 100 straight men about their closest relatives - 4600 people in total. They found that female relatives of gay men had more children on average than the female relatives of straight men. But the effect was only seen on their mother’s side of the family.
Mothers of gay men produced an average of 2.7 babies compared with 2.3 born to mothers of straight men. And maternal aunts of gay men had 2.0 babies compared with 1.5 born to the maternal aunts of straight men.
“This is a novel finding," says Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist and commentator on sexuality at Stanford University in California. “We think of it as genes for ‘male homosexuality’, but it might really be genes for sexual attraction to men. These could predispose men towards homosexuality and women towards ‘hyper-heterosexuality’, causing women to have more sex with men and thus have more offspring.”