Evolutnary Origs of Homosexualy - The Gay & Lbian Review

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• GAY RIGHTS
• THE EVOLUTNARY PARADOX OF HOMOSEXUALYBEG GAY NO LONGER HOLDS THE STIGMA ONCE DID, BUT EVOLUTN, WHY DO A NON-REPRODUCTIVE TRA PERSIST?TOM WHIPPLEPUBLISHED: MAY 8, 2018 AT 11:00 PMTHE EVOLUTNARY PARADOX OF HOMOSEXUALY

GAY RIGHTS

In theory, humans and other animals who are exclively attracted to others of the same sex should be unlikely to produce many blogil children, so any gen that predispose people to homosexualy would rarely be passed on to future generatns. Yet same-sex attractn is wispread humans, and rearch suggts that is partly a study of data om hundreds of thoands of people, rearchers have now intified geic patterns that uld be associated wh homosexual behavur, and showed how the might also help people to fd different-sex mat, and reproduce. Most of the participants were born durg a time when homosexualy was eher illegal or culturally taboo their untri, so many people who were attracted to others of the same sex might never have actually acted on their attractn, and uld therefore have end up the wrong group the Monk, an elogist and evolutnary blogist at Yale Universy New Haven, Connecticut, thks that the veats are so important that the paper n’t draw any real nclns about geics and sexual orientatn.

Instead, he thks the rearchers have found geic markers associated wh openns to new experienc, which uld expla the overlap between people who have had a homosexual partner and heterosexual people who have had many partners. KeywordsGay braGay geneGenr intyHomosexualyPrimatTransgenrCed by (0)∗Bee of s subject matter, the edors utn that some rears might fd the language to be strong and the material to be full textCopyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc.

Here we discs a body of scientific evince that directly ntradicts this assertn and stead argu that homosexualy has emerged through evolutn as a normal variant that nfers survival benefs to the fay, particularly certa settgs. In the largt and most rigoro geic lkage study foced on this topic, Sanrs and lleagu sctized the DNA om 409 pairs of gay brothers, searchg for shared sgle nucleoti polymorphisms (SNPs)—substutns of a sgle letter the geic (Sanrs, 2015).

THE EVOLUTNARY PARADOX OF HOMOSEXUALYBEG GAY NO LONGER HOLDS THE STIGMA ONCE DID, BUT EVOLUTN, WHY DO A NON-REPRODUCTIVE TRA PERSIST?TOM WHIPPLEPUBLISHED: MAY 8, 2018 AT 11:00 PMTHE EVOLUTNARY PARADOX OF HOMOSEXUALY

Androphilia—strong sexual attractn to mal—has been proposed as a geilly termed tra that when hered by a woman creas the number of children she will bear, but when hered by a male will predispose to homosexualy. Studi show that mothers of gay men are much more likely to have skewed X-activatn than mothers who had no gay sons, another strong ditn that male homosexualy is a partially herable ndn, and gen on the X-chromosome are likely to be volved termg sexual orientatn mal.

Compellg evince dit that epigeic mechanisms are fundamental to the genis of homosexualy, which helps expla both s partially herable nature and the -utero environmental effects that seem to predispose a male to same-sex orientatn. Although the creased odds may seem outsized, they are relative to a basele rate of homosexualy of about two percent for a first son; the probabily of havg a gay son reach fifty percent only after ten olr blogil brothers.

In a se-ntrol study, 100 homosexual or bisexual mal were pared to 100 heterosexual mal wh rpect to the level of strs their mothers’ liv durg pregnancy, as ascertaed by terviews wh the study participants and their parents.