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Showing posts from March, 2014

Gay genes? Yeah, but no, well kind of… but, so what?

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Sexual preference is one of the most strongly genetically determined behavioural traits we know of. A single genetic element is responsible for most of the variation in this trait across the population. Nearly all (>95%) of the people who inherit this element are sexually attracted to females, while about the same proportion of people who do not inherit it are attracted to males. This attraction is innate, refractory to change and affects behaviour in stereotyped ways, shaped and constrained by cultural context. It is the commonest and strongest genetic effect on behaviour that we know of in humans (in all mammals, actually). The genetic element is of course the Y chromosome . The idea that sexual behaviour can be affected by – even largely determined by – our genes is therefore not only not outlandish, it is trivially obvious. Yet claims that differences in sexual orientation may have at least a partly genetic basis seem to provoke howls of scepticism a