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Mating response and homosexuality

Chris, at the blog Signal + Noise, wrote a post entitled Mating Response, in which he wonders how a man knows that a woman is a potential mate (in contrast to a man, or whatever else you might look at that's not a woman).

I guess it should be obvious that our brains are genetically programmed to find the opposite sex attractive. Species in which the opposite sexes aren't attracted to each other would die out pretty quickly.

I suspect that male and female brains start out relatively similar, but the sex hormones in our bodies cause the brains to develop differently, resulting in men and women having biologically different brains. Much of this sexualization happens in the womb before we are even born.

What about gays, who are attracted to their own sex instead of the opposite sex? Do gay people have a biological condition that causes their gayness, or is it an environmentally learned response? If gayness is biological, why haven't the genes that cause gayness been eliminated from the human race a long time ago? Because gays don't have children, they shouldn't be passing on their genes to the next generation.

What if the genes that predispose people towards gayness also provide some kind of survival advantage? This could explain why the genes that cause gayness have not been eliminated from the human gene pool. This conjecture would even be consistent with real world observations! Gay men seem to be more intelligent, have a better sense of style, more artistic talent, etc., than regular men. They are even supposed to be better looking. That's the stereotype. Is there a genetic basis for the stereotype?

I suppose this post is possibly "politically incorrect" because it talks about the genetic basis behind human differences. If anyone is offended by this post, please Email me and I will try to address it. Please indicate if you are straight or gay, because if I've only offended straight people, but not gay people, then it's not really politically incorrect, because the rules of political incorrecentess state that it's OK to offend the majority, only the sensitivity of minorities need to be taken into consideration.

posted Wednesday, December 03, 2003