Eh…. told you so. Absent fathers make for lousy heterosexual husbands, nothing more.

BTW…. reports of my death are an exaggeration… though losing 10 pints of blood made me a little woozey.

From your comment 117548 I get the idea that you believe in the influence of parental relations on a child’s future sexual orientation and/or behaviour.

“Personal history and home environment will have an effect on gradient of attraction. Family stability/instability has a proven effect on behavior, and good or bad choices of response to attracting stimuli, including relationships.”

The Langstrom et al study points to 0 shared environmental influence on twins’ same-sex sexual behaviour. You can, at most, claim that somehow parental influence gets into different treatment of each twin or different response of each twin to similar parenting (with one twin being more vulnerable to a particular parental approach). But you would have to produce some empirical evidence for that.

A twin can at will either choose to emulate his brother, or go in a different direction to express his individuality, while interacting with his home environment. One might choose to regularly read Popular Mechanics, and the other Playboy. This choice will set different directions for behavior, as well as values and convictions. The free will factor cannot be discounted or eclipsed by congenital or environmental conditions.

New York Times, Gene-Hunters Find Hope and Hurdles in Schizophrenia Studies

You might find this one interesting because it says a lot about how the gay gene is going to work out. Cliff notes… it aint happening.

“We’ve looked for common variants in schizophrenia and get almost nothing,” said Dr. David Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke University and one of Dr. Stefansson’s co-authors. “This means natural selection has done a really good job of purging them away, and we’re left with rare variants, a constant flow of them, as the principal driver of the disease.”

The search for common variants in schizophrenia, however, has not been very successful so far, though not for want of trying. There have been more than a thousand studies, implicating 3,608 genetic variants.

But when all the data are pooled, only 24 of those variants turn out to be statistically significant, according to an analysis in the current issue of Nature Genetics by a group led by Dr. Lars Bertram of Massachusetts General Hospital.

One last note, if you read the story one scientist theorizes that since common genes don’t lead to Schiz it must be caused by thousands of rare mutations. Guess what? WRONG! Mutation isn’t nearly common enough to give 1% of the population a mental disorder. Schiz is triggered by environmental damage and he knows it. He’s trying to protect the funding for his his gene research.

Cool, I hope you build the site.

BTW, on that mouse, fear of cats instinct…

This shows that long ago a mouse had a random genetic mutation that gave it an intense fear of cats. Because cat-phobia works wonders for the survival rate of mice this gene and corresponding trait spread around the globe.

If the same “fear of cats” mutation happened in people doctors would consider it a mental illness. It’s interesting to me that a genetic trait can be viewed as healthy and natural in one organism and a mental disorder in another.

=)))
I lolled at the jokes.

Interesting diagram. Why did you make it? College presentation?

I was planning on setting up a website project on sex & gender-related issues as reflected in research and culture, so I had some prepared materials on attractions and behaviours. I’ll see if I get the time windows to get it done.

Someday soon the mate selection wire is going to be discovered.

That should send sex researchers on the dole queue.

They can also work against evolutionary forces using cultural means.

Culture could also accelerate evolution because civilization selects for certain traits.

Side Note:
Archeologists have uncovered the oldest known joke circa 1900 BC.

It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

Another one from 1600 BC Egypt

“How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”

This fascinates me because although the language doesn’t hold up the basic concepts do. These are the kind of funny ideas that people talk about in the modern world. People’s humor doesn’t seem to have changed much over the last few thousand years.

I remember that story about the fearless mouse. It was done on monkeys too, by tampering with a few amygdala genes, which resulted in either too fearful or too tame monkeys. But it’s an extreme approach which makes them stupid risk-wise. They become unable to tell who’s friend or who’s gonna eat them up.

On the other hand, scientists are still working for better chemical approaches to help fear extinguishing therapy in humans. Research on humans is typically slower and not so bold.

Interesting diagram. Why did you make it? College presentation?

BTW…
Another complex mouse behavior (fear of cats) comes down to a simple, instinctual wire in the brain. I’m sayin’ it right now, this is the way the train is headed. Someday soon the mate selection wire is going to be discovered.