Wednesday, December 12, 2012

A New Scientific Theory On Why Some People Are Gay

While the hate merchants of the Christian Right and the snake oil merchants of the reparative therapy crowd continue to fraudulently claim that homosexuality is a "choice" and that sexual orientation can be "changed," a new scientific study further supports the biological basis for homosexuality.  The gay haters can claim whatever they want to further their political agenda and/or line their own pockets by fleecing the gullible, but this scientific study further indicates that their mantra is nothing more than delusional religious based bullshit.  An article in U. S. News looks at the findings.  Here are some excerpts (some of the comments to the article underscore the rank ignorance and hate filled nature of many self-anointed "godly Christians"):

A group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuals get that trait from their opposite-sex parents: A lesbian will almost always get the trait from her father, while a gay man will get the trait from his mother

The hereditary link of homosexuality has long been established, but scientists knew it was not a strictly genetic link, because there are many pairs of identical twins who have differing sexualities. Scientists from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis say homosexuality seems to have an epigenetic, not a genetic link.

Long thought to have some sort of hereditary link, a group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuality is linked to epi-marks — extra layers of information that control how certain genes are expressed. These epi-marks are usually, but not always, "erased" between generations. In homosexuals, these epi-marks aren't erased — they're passed from father-to-daughter or mother-to-son, explains William Rice, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California Santa Barbara and lead author of the study.

Rice and his team created a mathematical model that explains why homosexuality is passed through epi-marks, not genetics. Evolutionarily speaking, if homosexuality was solely a genetic trait, scientists would expect the trait to eventually disappear because homosexuals wouldn't be expected to reproduce. But because these epi-marks provide an evolutionary advantage for the parents of homosexuals: They protect fathers of homosexuals from underexposure to testosterone and mothers of homosexuals from overexposure to testosterone while they are in gestation.

"These epi-marks protect fathers and mothers from excess or underexposure to testosterone — when they carry over to opposite-sex offspring, it can cause the masculinization of females or the feminization of males," Rice says, which can lead to a child becoming gay. Rice notes that these markers are "highly variable" and that only strong epi-marks will result in a homosexual offspring.

"Most mainstream biologists have shied away from studying it because of the social stigma," he says. "It's been swept under the rug, people are still stuck on this idea that it's unnatural. Well there are many examples of homosexuality in nature, it's very common." Homosexual behavior has been observed in black swans, penguins, sheep, and other animals, he says.

The bottom line is that the knuckle draggers need to face the fact that God/nature makes some of us gay despite the ignorant writings of Neolithic nomads who were utterly ignorant of science and biology.   Clinging to Bible inerrancy is like shouting from the roof top that one is either a cretin or suffers from severe psychological disorder. 

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