My view on HOMOSEXUALITY.... Am I wrong? how?

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I don't believe in religion and I am pretty open-minded, but I come from a Science background and I've always studied Biology, so I think that'sformed my ideologies.

I am interested to hear opposing views and see if I can change the way I think about gays, if it is wrong.

Basically, I have always thought that being gay is a genetic defect in the human species. Much like how many animals are born with genetic mutations in thewild. But since humans, unlike other animals, have the ability to reason with thoughts and feelings, this mutation is given life. And it's given apolitical backing and the support of fellow humans who have this same condition. I also kinda feel like it's a way to control over-population.

For example, if a gazelle is born in the wild with three legs, it would be left to be eaten by a lion. But in the human race, a person born with one arm islabeled "disabled" and still would be able to carry on life.
That's what sets apart humans from other animals, but the defect is still a defect
I hope this is making sense.

I believe that if every human was gay, there would be no human race, therefore, being gay is unnatural.

Please let me know why you think I am wrong, I just want to know other viewpoints to grow as a person.
 
Being as this is the first time I've heard this theory, I do kinda agree. But then the question would be, do you believe it is chosen to be gay or are theyborn already gay? By them having this "mutation" (as you put it), would acting out on it mean they are choosing to be gay or not?
 
Interesting. This is gonna get locked after the rush of stupid people soon though.

What do you think about bisexuality though?
 
thats almost like saying veggies are defected people, they dont eat meat like regular humans.
Oh and what about those lactose intolerants, off with their heads.

what sets us apart from animals is that we think and feel in a whole different way.
animals dont feel sympathy, compassion, emotions like we do. (atleast we dont know they do)
 
p0tat0: I believe they are born with it and have no choice but to act on it. they can pretend they are straight and have a wife and kids (asmany gays do), but they will always be gay deep down and sometimes divorce later on down the line.

basically, yes they are born with it. who would choose to go through a gay lifestyle of hate from others?

as far as vegetarians, that's a dietary choice that doesn't really affect society or the species on the same level as sexuality. Being gay haltsprocreation, eating broccoli doesn't.

humans were originally vegetarians anyways, since we cannot digest raw meat. our systems were made to be vegetarian, then we learned to cook meat.

and no one is saying off with anyone's head, no hate whatsoever.
 
Originally Posted by fittednoob

lol at calling homosexuality a mutation
laugh.gif
and at the guy sayin' NT is lookin' gay tonightcuz it is.
but i think you might be right. they didn't CHOOSE to be homosexual, they were born with a "mutation" i suppose
 
Dam.

I never thought about it that way makes sense though i can see why u might call it unnatural but im starting to look at it as more of a defect.

I say that because i believe Homosexuality has been around since the beginning of mankind.
 
But this is exactly what separates us from the animals you speak of. The fact that we have reason allows us to understand the basic concept of human rights.Therefore while in your opinion this is a defect, to someone else who is homosexual it is natural. It is entirely based upon the perspective that you areviewing it from.

Also, another flaw is that white people used this exact rationale against "the other", meaning people who weren't white. They felt that becausethey were the majority, and they had the power, all others were inferior and in fact the product of a great defect.
 
You clearly failed biology class....I agree that homosexuality probably has genetic components howeverif it was as harmful to the fitness of the individual or its kin as you say it is, it wouldn't continue to be propagated in nature and wouldn't be ascommon as it is now. Homosexuality is way too prevalent to be a regular anomaly like the 3 legged giraffe you speak of.


How is homosexuality "unnatural"? it is very prevalent in nature.
 
Originally Posted by fittednoob

lol at calling homosexuality a mutation

thats not a far fetched idea...you havent heard of scientists trying to find if there actually is a "gay"gene?
 
Well since there is proof that in identical twins when one is gay than the other has a high chance of being gay as well. I have somewhat of a sciencebackground as I was pre-med for a while and I always read science articles to this day in the NYTimes and other magazines like the NE Science Journal that myboss gives me after he's done with it. I think it's a genetic defect as well. But there still has to be some will behind it. Look at people who arealcoholics. There is a gene. If your mother and father were an alcoholic, more than likely you might become one as well. There is a genetic defect. Buthere's the catch. Our will and choices can still stop us from drinking ever. Yes we are more prone, but we have a choice. I think being gay is verysimilar. It's biological, yet there is some type of choice involved in the matter.

Now I refuse the whole religious explanation of it being freely just a choice. There is a documentary on HBO that I saw once. This 7 year old boy was actingjust like a girl. Wearing pink, playing with dolls, ect. His aprents said they never even exposed the kid to anything gay. Yet the kid continued like that.Genetics def plays a larger role than people give it credit. Though I don't believe that it's the complete explanation.
 
Originally Posted by AntonLaVey

You clearly failed biology class....I agree that homosexuality probably has genetic components however if it was as harmful to the fitness of the individual or its kin as you say it is, it wouldn't continue to be propagated in nature and wouldn't be as common as it is now.


How is homosexuality "unnatural"? it is very prevalent in nature.
I have yet to see homosexuality in nature, and I've spent more time in nature than probably anyone else on NT. I've seen a male humpanother male to show dominance over the other, but I wouldn't call that homosexuality. There's no preference for having sex with the same gender,it's all about a dominance struggle.
 
Originally Posted by AntonLaVey

How is homosexuality "unnatural"? it is very prevalent in nature.

I believe he said that because u can't reproduce through homosexuality.
 
I just want to applaud you ahead of time for your careful diction.

Because you kindaaa just said gays are stricken with genetic defects and mutations lol. Oh and you also inadvertently compared homosexuals to freak one leggedgazelles lol.
 
Are you wrong?, No, it is your view. If everyone was gay, the population probably would stop growing.

But I don't think comparing homosexuality to a physical disability or defect is the right way to go about looking at the subject.

If homosexuality is a genetic "defect", it's not the same as a gazelle born with a 3 legs or a person with one arm.

It's more of a mental "thing" than a physical ailment. it's probably more of a psychological subject rather than a biological one.
 
Originally Posted by Tony Goalie

Originally Posted by AntonLaVey

How is homosexuality "unnatural"? it is very prevalent in nature.

I believe he said that because u can't reproduce through homosexuality.


A trait can confer genetic fitness without offering any obvious benefits to theindividual. Look up kin selection. life is all about propagating not only your genes but the genes of your kin (brother, sister, uncle, mother) etc. There aremany species in which most of the individuals do not reproduce but obtain genetic fitness by aiding their kin in successfully producing offspring.


[h1]Kin selection[/h1][h3]From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/h3]
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Some organisms tend to exhibit strategies that favor the reproductive success of their relatives, even at a cost to their own survival and/or reproduction.The classic example is a eusocial insect colony, with sterile femalesacting as workers to assist their mother in the production of additional offspring. Many evolutionary biologists explain this by the theory of kinselection. Natural selection should eliminate such behaviors; however, there are many cases, such as, alarm calling in squirrels, helpers at the nestin scrub jays, and sterile worker castes in honey bees, in which these animals cooperate despite an obvious disadvantage to the donor.

The earliest expressions of the basic concepts were by R.A.Fisher in 1930,[sup][1][/sup]J. B. S. Haldane in1955,[sup][2][/sup]but it was W. D. Hamilton who truly formalized the concept, in works publishedin 1963[sup][3][/sup]and-most importantly-in 1964,[sup][4][/sup] while the actual term "kin selection" may first have been coined by John Maynard Smith in 1964[sup][5][/sup] when he wrote:
[table][tr][td]"[/td] [td]These processes I will call kin selection and group selection respectively. Kin selection has been discussed by Haldane and by Hamilton. … By kin selection I mean the evolution of characteristics which favour the survival of close relatives of the affected individual, by processes which do not require any discontinuities in the population breeding structure.[/td] [td]"[/td] [/tr][/table]
Kin selection refers to changes in gene frequency across generations that are driven at leastin part by interactions between related individuals, and this forms much of the conceptual basis of the theory of social evolution. Indeed, some cases of evolution by natural selection can only be understood by considering how biological relatives influence one another's fitness. Under natural selection, a gene encoding a trait that enhances the fitness of each individual carrying it should increase in frequency within the population; and conversely, a gene that lowers the individual fitness of its carriers shouldbe eliminated. However, a gene that prompts behaviour which enhances the fitness of relatives but lowers that of the individual displaying the behavior, maynonetheless increase in frequency, because relatives often carry the same gene; this is the fundamental principle behind the theory of kin selection. Accordingto the theory, the enhanced fitness of relatives can at times more than compensate for the fitness loss incurred by the individuals displaying the behaviour.As such, this is a special case of a more general model, called "inclusive fitness" (in that inclusive fitness refers simply to gene copies in other individuals, without requiring that they bekin).
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[h2][edit] Hamilton's rule[/h2]
Formally, such genes should increase in frequency when
2e690ec7f3aad74e29913a0b16c96a7d.png

where
r = the genetic relatedness of the recipient to the actor, often defined as the probability that a gene picked randomly from each at the same locus is identical by descent. B = the additional reproductive benefit gained by the recipient of the altruistic act, C = the reproductive cost to the individual of performing the act.
This inequality is known as Hamilton's rule after W. D.Hamilton who published, in 1964, the first formal quantitative treatment of kin selection to deal with the evolution of apparently altruistic acts. Altruistic acts are those that benefit the recipient but harm the actor. The phrase Kinselection, however, was coined by John Maynard Smith.

Originally, the definition for relatedness (r) inHamilton's rule was explicitly given as Sewall Wright's coefficient of relationship: the probability that at a random locus, the alleles there will be identical by descent (Hamilton 1963, AmericanNaturalist, p. 355). Subsequent authors, including Hamilton, sometimes reformulate this with a regression, which, unlike probabilities, can be negative, and so it is possible for individuals to be negatively related, whichsimply means that two individuals can be less genetically alike than two random ones on average (Hamilton 1970, Nature & Grafen 1985 Oxford Surveys inEvolutionary Biology). This has been invoked to explain the evolution of spiteful behaviours.Spiteful behavior defines an act (or acts) that results in harm, or loss of fitness, to both the actor and the recipient.

In the 1930s J.B.S. Haldane had full grasp of the basicquantities and considerations that play a role in kin selection. He famously said that, "I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins".[sup][6][/sup]Kin altruism is the term foraltruistic behaviour whose evolution is supposed to have been driven by kin selection.

Haldane's remark alluded to the fact that if an individual loses its life to save two siblings, four nephews, or eight cousins, it is a "fairdeal" in evolutionary terms, as siblings are on average 50% identical by descent, nephews 25%, and cousins 12.5% (in a diploid population that is randomly mating and previously outbred). But Haldane also joked that he would truly die only to save more thanone identical set of twins or more than two full siblings.

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[h2][edit] Mechanisms[/h2]
An altruistic case is one where the instigating individual suffers a fitness loss while the receiving individual benefits by a fitness gain. The sacrificeof one individual to help another is an example of altruism.

Hamilton (1964) outlined two ways in which kin selection altruism could befavoured.

Firstly, if individuals have the capacity to recognize kin (kinrecognition) and to adjust their behaviour on the basis of kinship (kin discrimination), then the average relatedness of the recipients of altruism couldbe high enough for this to be favoured. Because of the facultative nature of this mechanism, it is generally regarded that kin recognition and discriminationare unimportant except among 'higher' forms of life (although there is some evidence for this mechanism among protozoa). A special case of the kin recognition/discrimination mechanism is the hypothetical'green beard', where a gene for social behaviour also causes adistinctive phenotype that can be recognised by other carriers of the gene. Hamilton's discussion of greenbeard altruism serves as an illustration thatrelatedness is a matter of genetic similarity and that this similarity is not necessarily caused by genealogical closeness (kinship).

Secondly, even indiscriminate altruism may be favoured in so-called viscous populations, i.e. those characterized by low rates or short ranges of dispersal.Here, social partners are typically genealogically-close kin, and so altruism may be able to flourish even in the absence of kin recognition and kindiscrimination faculties. This suggests a rather general explanation for altruism. Directional selection will always favor those with higher rates of fecunditywithin a certain population. Social individuals can often ensure the survival of their own kin by participating in, and following the rules of a group.

It should be noted that these mechanisms explain a relatively high r between interacting individuals. Absolute genetic similarity is not a measure of r;rather, r shows the "excess" relatedness between an actor and a recipient compared with the relatedness between an actor and a random member of thepopulation. Thus, in a clonal population with 100% genetic similarity, r = 0 (as strange as that may sound). This is because there can be no correlationbetween genetic similarity and interaction strengths if genetic similarity is constant. This is why it has often been observed that altruism cannot bemaintained in a population of randomly interacting individuals (see Michod [1982][sup][7][/sup] and references therein). In such a population, thecorrelation between genetic similarity and interaction strength is necessarily absent, thus r = 0 and rB < C for any C > 0. This is why mechanisms suchas spatial structure and kin recognition are so important for the long-term stability of altruistic traits, and why measures such as "population-wideaverage r" are meaningless in the absence of such mechanisms.

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[h2][edit] Kin Selection in Evolutionary Psychology[/h2]
See also: Evolution of morality

Evolutionary psychologists have attempted to explainprosocial behavior through kin selection by stating that "behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection." Human beings havedeveloped a tendency over time to frame and interpret their actions as an avenue to the survival of their genetic material, making kin selection not acompletely altruistic form of prosocial behavior and is perhaps better described as a component of social exchange theory. This theory does not necessarilyimply that people "compute" genetic benefit when helping others, but there is an indication that those who behave in such a way are more likely topass on their genes to future generations.[sup][8][/sup]

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[h2][edit] Examples[/h2]


Experiment about Kin Selection

Eusociality (true sociality) is used to describe social systems with threecharacteristics: one is an overlap in generations between parents and their offspring, two is cooperative brood care, and the third characteristics isspecialized castes of nonreproductive individuals.[sup][9][/sup]Social insects are an excellent example of organisms that display presumed kin selectedtraits. The workers of some species are sterile, a trait that would not occur if individual selection was the only process at work. The relatedness coefficientr is abnormally high between the worker sisters in a colony of Hymenoptera due to haplodiploidy, and Hamilton's ruleis presumed to be satisfied because the benefits in fitness for theworkers are believed to exceed the costs in terms of lost reproductive opportunity, though this has never been demonstrated empirically. There are competinghypotheses, as well, which may also explain the evolution of social behavior in such organisms (see Eusociality).

Alarm calls in ground squirrels are another example. While they may alert others of the same species to danger, they draw attention to the caller and exposeit to increased risk of predation. Paul Sherman, of Cornell University, studied the alarm calls of ground squirrels. He observed that they occurred mostfrequently when the caller had relatives nearby.[sup][10][/sup] In a similar study, John Hoogland wasable to follow individual males through different stages of life. He found that the male prairie dogs modified their rate of calling when closer to kin. Thesebehaviors show that self-sacrifice is directed towards close relatives and that there is an indirect fitness gain.[sup][9][/sup]

Alan Krakauer of University ofCalifornia, Berkeley has studied kin selection in the courtship behavior of wild turkeys. Like a teenager helping her older sister prepare for prom night,a subordinate turkey may help his dominant brother put on an impressive team display that is only of direct benefit to the dominant member.[sup][11][/sup]

Recent studies provide evidence that even certain plants can recognize and respond to kinship ties. Using sea rocket for her experiments, Susan Dudley at McMaster University in Canada compared the growth patterns ofunrelated plants sharing a pot to plants from the same clone. She found that unrelated plants competed for soil nutrients by aggressive root growth. This didnot occur with sibling plants.[sup][12][/sup]

In human fertilization, some sperm cells consume their acrosome prematurely on the surface of the egg cell, facilitating for surrounding, having onaverage 50% genome similarity, to penetrate the egg cell.[sup][13][/sup]

In the wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus), aggregatesof spermatozoa form mobile trains, some of the spermatozoa undergo a premature acrosome reactions that correlate to improved mobility of the mobile trainstowards the female egg for fertilization. This association is thought to proceed as a result of a "green beard effect" in which the spermatozoaperform a kin-selective altruistic act after identifying genetic similarity with the surrounding spermatozoa.[sup][14][/sup]

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