You’ve probably already heard about it from GNXP or Sailer, but at any rate this week at 2Blowhards there’s a new interview with one of the authors (and snippets from the other). I really enjoyed the previous Cochran interview where he wasn’t even talking about a subject he’d written a book on, so this is guaranteed quality. I haven’t bought the book yet, but plan on getting to it after A Farewell to Alms, possibly mixing in Before the Dawn as well.
It appears that Greg’s collected rants on his pathogenic theory of homosexuality have fallen off the internet and are only available from the not-always-reliable internet archive, so I’ll stick them here.
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January 28, 2009 at 10:53 am
Those rants are hilarious, as is Greg generally. I wish we had a thousand of him. However, I’m still baffled by the combination of his strong Catholicism and excellent thinking most everywhere else.
January 30, 2009 at 8:24 am
“However, I’m still baffled by the combination of his strong Catholicism and excellent thinking most everywhere else.”
People have to want to think. If they don’t want to think on a particular subject, they won’t.
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Why couldn’t homosexuality just be a kind of birth defect, like a cleft palate? Even left-handedness can be a neurological defect — and it was once far more common than it is today.
Given that the male is the variation imposed on the basic physiological plan, it shouldn’t be surprising that men who are attracted solely to men are far more common than women attracted solely to women.
There’s also the possibility that exclusive homosexuality is induced by factors that may be adaptive. If it’s beneficial for humans to have less gender dimorphism than most other ape species, perhaps the trait of ‘thinking like a woman’ is strongly adaptive but occasionally (for whatever reason) goes too far?
January 30, 2009 at 1:05 pm
I have heard of a theory that homosexuality is congenital – i.e., induced by in-utero conditions – rather than genetic or caused by events in a child’s upbringing. The suggestion is that during times of stress associated with famine or economic depression, mothers are more likely to bear children who will turn out to be homosexual, and hence not likely to reproduce in the future. Other phenomena leading to decline in a population’s fertility, such as marriage later in life, are associated with this kind of stress, and women who delay childbearing are observed to be more likely to give birth to children with congenital defects.
I haven’t been interested enough in speculations about the causes of homosexuality to read very much about the subject, and I am not sure whether there a credible body of data exists to support this hypothesis.
January 30, 2009 at 2:06 pm
In an interview with someone I’ve forgotten, Steven Pinker speculates that homosexuality is about 30% genetic.
January 30, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I don’t know where Cochran exhibited such “strong” Catholicism. Evidence brought up before seemed ambiguous. I’m not saying I don’t think he’s Catholic, just not obviously so.
The hypothetical insult resulting in the brain damage may occur in the womb, but I believe Greg has said it doesn’t have to occur before birth.
The reduced gender dimorphism is a result of our relative monogamy. That and more is explained in Wrangham & Peterson’s Demonic Males.
Given a homosexual with an identical twin, the odds seem better than average that the brother will also be so but there’s much more dimorphism than other traits. So a low figure may be plausible, and those genetic factors may involve resistance to the pathogen.
January 30, 2009 at 11:07 pm
The suggestion is that during times of stress associated with famine or economic depression, mothers are more likely to bear children who will turn out to be homosexual, and hence not likely to reproduce in the future.
That makes little sense from an inclusive fitness perspective. Famine or not, being saddled with a viable offspring you’ll have to raise but who won’t reproduce is about the worst case scenario in terms of maximizing fitness. (And if the famine –> gay model were true, wouldn’t we expect the third world to be flaming, and rich countries to be sedately hetero? Yeah, that happens.)
You can’t think, what would be good for the long-term future of the group? You have to think, what would be good for the particular gene-bearer’s reproductive prospects?
it shouldn’t be surprising that men who are attracted solely to men are far more common than women attracted solely to women.
Haven’t you heard that all women, regardless of claimed orientation, are bisexual bestialists, but are not particularly attracted to depictions of human males? Shit’s in the New York Times.
January 31, 2009 at 10:31 am
I thought women generally weren’t interested in visual images — they’re supposed to be turned on by words and concepts rather than pictures.
Which is why visual pornography is much more popular among men than women, supposedly.
January 31, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Probably accurate to say we’re less interested in visual images in general. Plesythmography is of course “about as sound and solid as Citibank,” but you can see how great it would be to actually have a tool for objectively measuring arousal – the applications for studying gender differences and sexual orientation and all sorts of things.
I’d still bet it’s accurate to say that ordinary women are more interested in visual depictions of animal sex than men are. (I can barely get my male friends to sit through the whole Youtube video of the donkey trying desperately to copulate with a camel.) I’m not sure what that tells us evolutionarily.
And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that evo bio thinking has penetrated the field of sexology at all. So to speak. Which is probably true of most fields of social science.
January 31, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Good point on “good of the group” thinking.
February 1, 2009 at 12:45 pm
“I’d still bet it’s accurate to say that ordinary women are more interested in visual depictions of animal sex than men are.”
Men are notorious for occasionally resorting to animals as sexual partners.
Men who were easily aroused by sexual images involving animals might have been at an evolutionary disadvantage, either because of loss of opportunity or disease transmission.
Generally, I suspect that male sexuality is more visual and more specific than female, tending to center around certain sexual characteristics (often, but not always, breasts).
February 1, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Then danger of misdirected effort for men but not really for women would be my guess as well. I hadn’t even though about the pathogen angle.
February 2, 2009 at 2:19 pm
“Men are notorious for occasionally resorting to animals as sexual partners.”
Particularly in certain countries, as one of my friends pointed out to me… See Google insights.
February 3, 2009 at 8:57 am
Thanks for archiving these Cochran comments – priceless!
February 3, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I remember reading somewhere that during the “open bath house” era of San Francisco, gay men were experiencing orgasm at a rate about 20 times higher than for the normal heterosexual male. Ever since, I have wondered if the “gay gene” is not a gene for hyper sexuality which only occasionally manifests itself as obligate homosexuality. If such a gene consistently improved reproductive success in women while producing hyper sexual men who were only occasionally exclusively homosexual, it is not hard to see how balancing selection could keep such a gene in circulation.
February 3, 2009 at 4:42 pm
This is the theory that makes the most sense to me. Most of the gay dudes I know also have sex with women – and, disproportionately, it tends to be extra-nubile/fertile (usually 18 year old) women.
February 3, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Achieving orgasm is so easy for men that we do it in our sleep.
Unlike Sister Y I don’t know any gays, but I’ll try to take the high ground of the “outside view”. AIDS is apparently much more easily transmittable from men to women than the other way around, so the low rate of infection for women leads me to guess that the bathhouse denizens were obligate.
February 4, 2009 at 1:30 pm
“Achieving orgasm is so easy for men that we do it in our sleep.”
Joking aside, it’s fairly easy for men to reach orgasm through mental stimuli alone.
Far, far fewer women can manage that.
Which is part of why comparing genital modifications between men and women is so tricky — men can reach orgasm no matter what’s done to their genitalia, whereas damage to female genitals can be crippling.