Didasko said:
There is no undeniable evidence! There are a few studies in the area but it is definitely not undeniable.
It seams no matter how hard we try, we always end up off topic...lol. This is off topic and my discussions with DV have gone off topic.
No, methinks this is very much on topic. But anyways, I happened upon a old post of mine to Kidan...evidently I saved it to my hard drive. Most of it is from a psychology essay of mine, so if it sounds essayish, that is why.
Cultures vary in their in their attitudes toward homosexuality, but whether a culture condemns or accepts homosexuality, heterosexuality prevails and homosexuality survives. This is what first triggered me to delve deeper into the subject…and I found that homosexuality likely to be (at least in part) caused by natural processes.
Most psychologists today view sexual orientation as neither willfully chosen nor willfully changed. Sexual orientation is in some ways like handedness: Most people are one way, some (mostly men) are the other. A very few are truly ambidextrous. Nor is sexual orientation linked with some psychological disorder or sexual crime. “Child molester” is not a sexual orientation. Some child molesters are homosexuals, but most are heterosexual males (Gonsiorek, 1982). It was partly for these reasons that the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 dropped homosexuality from its list of “mental illnesses.”
Consider the findings of lengthy Kinsey Institute interviews with nearly 1000 homosexuals and 500 heterosexuals (Bell and others, 1981) The investigators assessed nearly every imaginable psychological cause of homosexuality—parental relationships, childhood sexual experiences, peer relationships, dating experiences. Their findings: Apart from homosexuals’ somewhat greater nonconformity, the reported backgrounds of homosexuals and heterosexuals were very similar. Homosexuals were no more likely to have been smothered by maternal love, neglected by their father, or sexually abused. In more recent studies, as I’ve said before, scientists have found that sons of homosexual men were NOT more likely to become gay if they lived with their gay dad, and that 9 in 10 children of lesbian mothers developed into heterosexuals (Bailey and others, 1995; Golombok and Tasker, 1996). If even being reared by a homosexual parent has no appreciable influence on sexual orientation, then having a gay or lesbian teacher also seems unlikely to have an appreciable influence.
Gay men and lesbians often recall childhood play preferences like those of the other sex (Baily and Zucker, 1995). Gay men have fingerprint patterns that are very similar to those of heterosexual women (Hall and Kimura, 1994). Curiously though, the same is not as true for lesbians. Lesbians do have a more male-typical anatomy though..for example..the cochlea and hearing system of lesbians develop in a way that is “intermediate to those of heterosexual females and heterosexual males” (McFadden and Pasanen, 1998, 1999) But these things are mere trifles in light of other physiological differences. Researcher Simon Levay discovered that certain sections of the hypothalamus is different in homosexual and heterosexual people. He was a gay scientist though, which raised suspicions to the reliability of his controversial findings. But know that he did his experiments blindly for that very purpose, as in he did not know which donors were gay and which were not. As he says in his book, The Sexual Brain, “Gay men simply don’t have the brain cells to be attracted to women.” Laura Allen and Roger Gorski offered a similar conclusion to Levay’s after discovering that a section of the fibers connecting right and left hemispheres is one-third larger in homosexual men than in heterosexual men. “The emerging neuroanatomical picture,” notes Brian Gladue (1994), “is that, in some brain areas, homosexual men are more likely to have female-typical neuroanatomy than are heterosexual men.”
It should not be surprising that there are physiological differences…as the science of psychology’s maxim says, “everything psychological is simultaneously biological.” And of course, this evidence does much to imply that there is a genetic influence in sexual orientation. (Notice I keep using words like ‘influence’ and ‘plays a role’…it’s not all genetic; environmental factors do play a role, but almost no scientists believe that it’s entirely environmental or entirely natural) One research team studied twin brothers of homosexual men. Among their identical twin brothers, 52% were homosexual, as were 22% of fraternal twin brothers (Bailey and Pillard, 1991, 1995). In a follow up study of homosexual women, 48% of their identical twins were homosexual, as were 16% of their fraternal twins (Bailey and others, 1993). Clearly, with more than half of the twins differing in sexual orientation, we know that genes are not the whole story. But since approximately 3.33% of the world population is homosexual, it is also very clear that there is some sort of biological, or genetic influence. Moreover, as you probably know, scientists can with a single transplanted gene cause male fruit flies to display homosexual behavior (Zhang and Odenwald, 1995). A single gene, yes..but that was for fruit flies..an organism of paralyzing simplicity on the genetic level when compared to that of humans. So it is completely reasonable for a ‘gay gene’ to be so far undiscovered…because there very likely to be more than one. Research is indicating that there is a level of heritability though, so something more complicated than a single gene can manage is going on.
Another theory for the causation of sexual orientation deals with abnormal prenatal hormone conditions. With humans, the critical period for the brain’s neural-hormonal control system may exist between the second and fifth months after conception (Ellis and Ames, 1987; Gladue, 1990; Meyer-Bahlburg, 1995). Exposure to the hormone levels typically experienced by female fetuses during this time appears to predispose the person (whether male or female) to be attracted to males later in life. Some tests reveal that homosexual men have spatial abilities typical of heterosexual women—a pattern consistent with the hypothesis that homosexuals were exposed to atypical prenatal hormones (Gladue, 1994l McCormick and Witelson, 1991; Sanders and Wright, 1997).
Regardless of the process, the consistency of the genetic, prenatal, and brain findings has swung the pendulum toward a physiological explanation. Nature more than nurture, most psychiatrists now believe, predisposes sexual orientation (Vreeland and others, 1995). If biological influences prove critical (perhaps especially so in certain environmental contexts), such would explain why sexual orientation is so difficult to change. Yes, I said difficult, not impossible. It is possible to change one’s sexual orientation, but such an ordeal is dauntingly difficult and traumatic.
Clearly Didasko, there is
SOMETHING going on here that is more than a complete arbitrary choice.
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Maybe I'll just stick with those 10 laws that God laid down for us.
The 10 commandments are a small part of what we try to live by.
