Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
It's nice to see people have ideas and hypotheses on why homosexuality is here, but without proper knowledge of evolution, it's likely to be incorrect.  |
It always troubles me a wee bit when a discussion of sexuality comes down to genetics as I'm troubled by biologism in general. The approach seems subject to being overly deterministic, subject to marginalizing other significant factors (I'm more a social constructionist in this sense), and tends to gloss over the fact that the act of scientific discovery itself isn't entirely objective or outside the reach of sociocultural interpretation.
To wit, if a series of genes were isolated as being a high indicator for homosexuality, could there not be people who engage in homosexual behavior or identify with the associated culture who don't have those genes? And if such people were to exist, would they be somehow "less" gay? Who's qualified to make that determination? Etc.
To be clear, I'm not ruling out a biological component in the formation of sexuality, nor the importance of that component in shaping a society that is--for better or worse--biologistically minded. It's just a statement like that (the quoted one) strikes me as dangerous because it plays to an oversimplification of human behavior along one axis, which is always open to exploitation.