Why am i gay science
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They run separate statistical tests on each one to see if it correlates with some outcome of interest, using extreme confidence levels to reduce the number of false positives. GWAS is fairly straightforward: scientists start with a standard catalog of a million or more individual spots on the genome that are known to vary among people, called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs).
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This brings me to a substantive discussion of research methods. While many of us think of X and Y chromosomes as controlling human sex, most of what is sexually distinctive about our bodies involves complex interactions with genes on our other 44 chromosomes.) (Sarah Richardson’s Sex Itself and Joan Rougharden’s Evolution’s Rainbow are good introductions to the complexity of genetics as they relate to sexuality, gender, and even sex. Gregor Mendel deliberately selected peas to study because they had simple inheritance of easy-to-measure traits. That is, it works very differently than most of us were taught in high school biology, more akin to what is often called “ complex systems.” Many separate genes interact with one another, the environment, and intermediaries in intricate feedback processes, many of which are still unknown. Very little about genetics, especially as it relates to complex human behaviors, is additive or Mendelian. While the witches’ brew frame serves to spin disappointing results as justification for increased funding and publication, rather than as a failure of the research paradigm, it has some truth. Such complex “ witches’ brews” are often invoked to explain why the results of behavior genetics research generally do not support the simple relationships proposed and tested by scientists. In the words of Ganna et al., the fact that the significantly correlated genes they found account for less than 1% of variance in behavior “suggests that same-sex sexual behavior, like most complex human traits, is influenced by the small, additive effects of very many genetic variants, most of which cannot be detected at the current sample size” (p. They’re optimistic that genetic effects exist, and if only we invest in larger samples and higher resolution technology, we will find them. Behavior geneticists cope with “past disappointments doubling down and scaling up” (p. Despite the grandiose promises molecular genetics researchers make about understanding human behavior to justify grant funding and public attention, the correlations they find generally explain only a tiny fraction of the variance in human behavior. As interviewees tell Aaron Panofsky in Misbehaving Science, neither do people studying genetics and behavior. But Science does not like to publish null findings or replication failures. In that sense, it is a large-N replication failure and should be used as evidence against prior studies of genetic bases for sexuality. do not claim to have found a single “gay gene.” In fact, they did not find support for any of the previously touted gay genes.
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By 1993, the Human Genome Project was in full swing, Dean Hamer claimed to have found the “gay gene,” and the Daily Mail celebrated its potential for enabling selective abortion.Īstute readers will notice that Ganna et al. Many pro-gay scholars leaned into “born this way” rhetoric to resist the stigmatizing categories of psychological disorder and the conversion therapy it supported. Conversion therapists sought mutable, nonhereditary causes in order to justify cures. Eugenicists sought hereditary origins in order to eliminate homosexuality.
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Tom Waidzunas documents the last 70 or so years of it in The Straight Line, demonstrating that this science (like all science) has been shaped by competing social interests. Scientific research on the causes or etiology of “homosexuality” is nearly as old as the category of “homosexual” itself, as Foucault argues in the History of Sexuality vol. But rather than frustration, I’m taking my cue from XKCD: this is an opportunity to introduce others to an exciting area of Science and Technology Studies. uncritically cite and perpetuate research with deep theoretical, methodological, and ethical flaws, like the Wang & Kosinski “gayface” paper.
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While many are just encountering this area of research for the first time, numerous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of sexual orientation have been published since the invention of GWAS in the early 2000s. on the “gay gene,” and major outlets like the New York Times have picked it up. It is that time of year again: Science has a new study by Ganna et al. The following is a guest post by Jeff Lockhart.