by Alien4420 » July 27th, 2009, 8:52 am
[quote="Jeshi"]
That would be because the website is about changing things.
About using hypnosis to change people to be more obedient or more primal or so they freeze when they ehar a word.
And people that focus on "Straightening" out people are all religious nuts who think of homosexuality as a behavior like scratching your nose or being an alcholic and thus use the same techniques to break habit or from an AA meeting to try and change people, although they use hypnosis sometimes as well =/
The thing is that "Scientist" can be anybody, and there are many issue where study after study reveals something SHOCKING about a topic and then a new one says the opposite, many time people are caught testing something and then publishing fake results because they have a bias.
Global warming and the oil crisis are a good example, Al gore sponsors a study and it says oil is killing everything, but ExxonMobil sponsors a study and it finds the opposite.
Believe it or not there ARE religious nuts who call them selfs "Scientists" who do "Studies" and then publish results that confuse the idea.
And it doesn't help that what YEAR a study is from doesn't seem to matter to a lot of people, how many times has fox news quoted studies on homosexuality from the early 2/\[url=(https?:\/\/[^\s\[]+):$uid\](.*?)\[\/url:$uid\]/ith century that say homosexuality is caused by a lack of father figure?
I mean, at the school I went too there was an OLD OLD OLD dusty book about sex that said Homosexuality is caused when the son falls in love with his mother but then realizes that incest is wrong and then blocks out suppresses his attraction to her and therefore all woman, and then right next to it a book saying it was natural from birth.
=/ Also too the identical twins thing everybody keeps mentioning, I don't have a PHD or anything and I'm citing a show on National geographic but on this show it was a hour long special about identical twins and they talked about homosexuality issue and said that because they were identical they could seclude other factors for the testing and found that it was caused by a gene in one of the twins DNA activating that didn't activate in the other, which caused one twin to absorb less testosterone, and this pair of twins said they were raised in the same environment being treated as the same person pretty much.
The 5/\[url=(https?:\/\/[^\s\[]+):$uid\](.*?)\[\/url:$uid\]/i% number is an estimate{Of course} which is to say that if one twin had the gene activate then there is half a chance the other one had it activate too.
The show kept mentioning that identical twins come in many different forms and they aren't always really "Identical", another example besides the gay twin was a set of identical twin girls from a couple in which the mother was black and the father was black, but the mother's mother was white. and while the twins were identical in every other way, one girl was black and the other was white, because the gene from their white grandmother only activated in one of them.
So really it does come down to the gene's activating thing, after all, familys tend to have very similar genes, if it didn't come down to genes activating differently then having one gay relative you descended from would cause almost the entire male part of the family tree to be gay, as they would all have the "Gay gene" {Which is more like a failure to absorb testosterone into the entire brain gene}[/quote]
I agree that religious nuts try to shanghai science, as do activists of all stripes, including those with whom I have more sympathy. That's why I prefer to judge the science itself.
It's not true, BTW, that scientists can be anybody. They're almost routinely guys with PhD's and if they're real they publish in reputable peer-reviewed journals. In hard scientists like biology, the threshhold is very high. (Soft sciences like psychology are a different story.)
(I'd like to note, though, that virtually no reputable climate scientists are warming deniers. That's a lie that's been spread by energy companies and the right wing media. Essentially the same thing as what the tobacco companies did years ago.)
One of the things that many people without scientific training don't know is that most scientists are deeply skeptical of studies and experiments until they've been independently confirmed. The press routinely ignores that, trumpeting every new and unverified result as if it were earth shaking (how many times have I read articles that announced that the cause of homosexuality had been discovered?). The press and public also draw conclusions that aren't warranted by the evidence.
Re genes and gene expression: I think gene expression is a possibility, though it would require a mechanism that affects the egg after its first division and before the embryo has differentiated too far. So are other developmental abnormalities, e.g., transcription errors. But there are other possibilities as well. For example, it's possible that some genes make the fetus more susceptible to environment, pre- or post-natal. It's also possible that multiple genes are involved, or recessives, etc. Sickle-cell trait is a famous case, in which a single copy of the sickle cell gene confers a survival advantage by making the red blood cells resistant to the malaria parasite, but two copies of the gene cause sickle-cell disease. The gene survives because the reproductive advantages of having a single copy outweigh on average the reproductive disadvantage of having two copies. So a gay gene might, in people who have a single copy, confer a reproductive advantage, while people who have two copies are more likely to be gay. The reproductive advantages of the single copy would outweigh the reproductive disadvantages of two.
Anyway, just pointing out that there are lots of possibilities. What I do think the evidence says at this point is that there is something genetic, or having to do with gene expression or perhaps an unknown mechanism, involved, since if there weren't, identical and fraternal twins would have the same incidence of correlated homosexuality, and they don't.