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Saturday, December 10, 2016

Cause(s) of homosexuality

It is a difficult subject to get people to be objective about.  Many see it as sinful or some other such bigotry, and therefore such people can be dismissed out of hand.

On the other side of the coin, however, homosexuality does need explaining.  It would not seem, at least on the surface, to be something natural selection would allow.  The claim that it is just a matter of taste is well known to be false; homosexuals (and other flavors of human sexuality) are not chosen -- people are born with it, and, at least for males, the trait seems to come from the mother.

One interesting theory, based on the observation of females maintaining the "genes" for the trait in the population (since until recently women rarely had much choice in childbearing so even gay women would have children) is that mothers of gay men tend to have more children than normal -- not by a lot but enough to keep the tendency in the pool.

This is but one of a whole class of theories that speculate there is some offsetting advantage for the homosexual traits -- better birth term survival, more robust babies, and, as described above, mothers who for some reason have more children.

There is also a set of theories that involve survival of hunter-gatherer cultures -- ideas like the homosexual (again, the male) serving a special role (shaman, pseudo-woman, etc.) and therefore allowing the other males to leave the group for extended periods without fear of being cuckolded.  (Personally I find this one a bit of a stretch).

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