Yet another attempt at scientific gaydar

Always amusing...

I especially love the "big brother" thing.  I'm an only child, yet I'm gay.  My cousin is the oldest of three, and he's the gay one.  I have at least two other gay friends that are only children.  

But then again, if I remember the finger length study correctly, I do have that goin' for me...

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by: xequar @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 08:07:40 AM CDT

I'm bucking the trend too.

Apparently if your left hand is your dominant hand and you're a woman, your chance of being gay increases by 90%. (That didn't work out for me - I'm a deviant righty, lol).
I'm left handed.  So much for that.  Maybe my left handedness was the cause of you being a lesbian.  (These "scientific" studies are hilarious to anyone with any training in science, mostly because the math behind the statistics gets abused.)

The results, published in 1999, showed that gay men had longer, thicker penises than did straight men
:^(

My America includes LGBT families.

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by: Mena @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 08:39:06 AM CDT

Ah...

so it's all because of my huge penis. hmmm

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by: hank @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 09:34:43 AM CDT

Yes,

No wonder those religious nuts are so against gays. They are jealous!

watashi no yomeiri wa doko desu ka

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by: belfrieboi @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 09:49:48 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Found this this morning

I don't know how to do a link, so sorry if I mangle this.

http://www.time.com/time/healt...

This was an article from tiem about a study saying gay mens brains closer resemble straight womens, and straight men and lesbains share a similar brain size.

Another round? But what I think is interesting is:

Until now, the brain regions that scientists have come to believe play a role in sexual orientation have been related to either reproduction or sexuality. The Swedish study, however, is the first to find differences in parts of the brain not normally involved in reproduction - the denser network of nerve connections, for example, was found in the amygdala, known as the emotional center of the brain.

So according to this being gay should have more to do with emotions, than sex?  

watashi no yomeiri wa doko desu ka

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by: belfrieboi @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 09:36:22 AM CDT

Population Studies

I find this work fascinating, because it points so clearly to the biological mechanisms behind sexuality. Clearly, the findings mean nothing for any individual (e.g., the older brother phenomenon does NOT mean first-born boys are NEVER gay, just that the chances go up with each succeeding male birth) but they do point out something biological is going on when gays and lesbians (and presumably the B and T of the LGBT alphabet) are created. The fact that not every gay or lesbian person shares each of these traits, however, shows that the underlying biological mechanism still has not been determined. Rather, we have discoved patterns of trait inheritence and development that must be explained by any causal theory of homosexuality (and that includes the "choice" theory espoused by the fundies).

The brain study noted above also intrigues me because another blog, I think it was Ex-Gay Watch, linked some months ago to a theoretical paper that also linked homosexuality and brain symmetry. I cannot find the link to it now, but IIRC the theory looked not only at homosexuality but also traits like high IQ, left-handedness, leadership ability, schizophrenia and autism. All these traits have the same twin inheritence patterns (identical twins about 2 - 3X as likely as fraternal twins to share a trait, while fraternal twins are 2 - 3X as likely as non-twin siblings to share that same trait, and non-twin siblings are about 2X more likely than any two random strangers to share the trait) and tended to move together (hence the increased likelihood of left-handed homos - and did you know that something like 1/3 of all Presidents have been lefties?). People with these traits also were more likely to use their brains symmetrically, and the theory was that there was a gene for symmetrical brain structure behind it all. If an individual did not get the gene for brain symmetry, they were boring, right-handed, average breeders. If they got the gene (or actually two copies of it, as a recessive trait) they might be left or right-handed, gay, straight or somewhere in between, high or low IQ, etc.

Certainly something like sexuality is so complex that it defies easy explanation. However, I do believe that the more evidence behind the clearly biological nature of homosexuality, the weaker are the fundie arguments that we are not part of the natural order of humanity.  

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by: CPT_Doom @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 09:54:35 AM CDT

What to look for

The studies that Pam linked to above are something to not take on face value.  I don't know about the one about big brothers because in order to see the data you need to buy the article and the penis size one wasn't from a scientific journal but the hair whirl one was kind of iffy.  Read the "materials and methods" section of that.  He mentions that he assumes that the men there were all gay because of the way they acted, that there were hardly any women or children there, and that it was a well known gay beach.  You can't assume anything in order to collect data, you need actual known facts.  Correlating hair whirls to people you see on the beach, even if it's over three years, just tells you that 39% of the people on that beach had their hair going the same way.  That was the only one (other than as an anecdote in the penis size article) that mentioned anything about sample size.  None of these studies showed anything about confidence intervals or degrees of freedom.  Sure, I can prove anything with enough degrees of freedom or a lower confidence interval.  Besides, the trait they are talking about may or may not have anything to do with homosexuality.  It would be like saying that a certain percentage of gays like chocolate so if you like chocolate, you have that percentage of a chance of being gay.  Sorry, not impressed by the studies above but I'd be willing to look at the brain study.  I do think that you are right with your last comment.  Skin color is controlled by at least a dozen genes, I'd be surprised if sexuality wasn't determined by at least that many genes.  

My America includes LGBT families.

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by: Mena @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 12:56:42 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

"...and bisexuality doesn't seem to exist at all."

Except when they want to prove it doesn't exist (in men) and that it does (in women, cause that's hot).  

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by: Parapluie @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 11:01:49 AM CDT

reproducibility of these weak studies hasn't been done

Now I will say that scent studies (pheremones?) have some rationale. Beats me how people decided on the other hypotheses.

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by: NancyP @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 12:15:04 PM CDT

Hmm

A link between male homosexuality and finger lengths isn't holding up,  and a claim that gays have distinctive fingerprint ridge patterns is largely discredited

But what do the phrenology results say?

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by: mcc @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 12:18:21 PM CDT

Phrenology

I'm surprised no has yet resurrected the lost science of phrenology and compared the bumps on the heads of gay people to straight people.

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by: Stephanie @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 12:29:59 PM CDT

Complications

Well, There was talk of it, but there were complications with the study, mostly in determining which were natural bumps, and which were caused from being struck by a bible.

watashi no yomeiri wa doko desu ka

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by: belfrieboi @ Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 12:45:39 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

If you don't mind wading through the dusty research papers

I've blogged about the issue here, with numerous quotes from abstracts and sometimes main articles about TS, IS, and to a lesser extent, GLB. There's far more research results on this issue than make the headlines.

I don't really care as to whether this does good or harm to any particular political cause. The only area where J Michael Bailey and I agree is that all we should be interested in is the facts. I'm trying to make sense of a complicated picture, and likely have things wrong in some areas. The sample sizes are all too small for comfort. And none of our findings should be used as excuses for acting without humanity.

It's my best guess, and I reserve the right to change my opinions as more data comes in. I do feel though that at this point in time, the evidence for biological causation is at least very convincing, if not irrefutable. The evidence for a 'gay gene' is not though, pre-natal hormone influences would be enough to account for all observed phenomena. If a 'gay gene' exists, it would only be enough to slightly increase probabilities. Gays would continue to be born without it, and straights continue to be born with it. So the eugenicists are out of luck.

I'll no doubt be called an "essentialist" over this. The thing is, in biology, there are few binaries. Most things are matters of degree, often with a bimodal distribution (ie 2 definite peaks), but with some measures invariably in the middle. Our biology shapes us, but our choices and our environment shape us too, within the broad and fuzzy biological bounds.

There is no situation so complex it can't get even worse

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by: ZoeB @ Thu Jun 19, 2008 at 01:37:56 AM CDT