Here is a three part interview with Joseph Nicolosi, who discusses his views of homosexuality and his approach to therapy.
I don’t agree with the basic theory but I wanted to provide the links for those of us who study the various approaches. When I study an approach, I like to have the current information, and these appear to be very recent.
Let’s have an open forum on this…
Okay Evan…. but:
Ok…. but if your gender sense/switch was lost, what took over in terms of instinct for other non-conscious mammals before leading to man?
And why should some Native American tribes have had ceremonies to identify their “two-spirit” persons (usually men) at a rather early age. And then once having identified a “two-spirit” male, ascribe to them a female role? I think that goes against one’s instinctual ideas on gender
Otherwise, conscious gender differentiation in human societies is just as likely to be a reaction to a strong instinctual response (derivative of hormones?), perhaps even against any non-normative gender roles (as is in the Bible, for instance).
Evan said in post 123747:
I already said that people had not been considered individuals until a number a centuries ago and that had a lot to do with one’s freedom to pursue one’s sexual interests.
I don’t follow what you are talking about when you say people had not been considered individuals. Perhaps you can provide some specific examples of what you are talking about and how it pertains to the discussion.
Past centuries have seen different hierarchies of wishes, in which sex was not just one’s own business to be pursued as one saw fit.
I don’t buy this argument at all. It certainly wasn’t true in ancient rome or greece. So again, perhaps you can be a little more specific as to what you are talking about.
It’s not stated explicitly, but it’s implied that if some theorists argue for the existence of gays created by genetic effects operating at an evolutionary level, then they must assume those people were exclusively same-sex oriented and had biological reasons to be so.
While many (maybe most) evolutionary theorists look at genetics, as I specifically pointed out in my original post, the theory relies on heritability not simply genetics.
Further, nothing in your response addresses my statement that the theory does not require the “same animal strength in each epoch” as you claimed.
You mean gays were treated wonderfully before modern times and then everything suddenly changed and drove them away? You see, you cannot prove that, which makes the argument useless.
I don’t have to prove it, I never said anything about “treated wonderfully” or “sudden change.” Those are straw-men you added. What I said was that past attitudes towards gays may have been less likely to drive away gay uncles, which is why studying modern gay uncles would not work. Perhaps you need to brush up on your history of gays in other (non-christian) societies, I’d suggest examining attitudes towards gays in ancient rome and greece, native american tribes, and India (pre-british colonization).
But what Bailey and Rahman proved is that in two countries in which homosexuality is treated a lot better than it’s treated in other less developed countries or than it was treated in the past in the same countries,the richer gay uncle investment in his relatives hypothesis doesn’t hold any water.
Rahman said, in his own study, that the study may not apply to ancient hunter/gatherer societies. And neither Bailey nor Rahman claimed that gays in the societies they studied were treated better than in the times when such an evolutionary effect would have had the most impact.
This scraps the whole argument.
No those studies do not. And all you have done is provide straw-men to the arguments I made as to why those studies don’t disprove the theory. You are reading those studies a conclusive proof because you want to, not because they are. Even the authors of those studies don’t consider them enough to disprove the theory.
Lynn David wrote:
It’s the old problem of the missing link. What we have is this picture: a number of smaller mammal species which still have the old olphactory system used to tell genders apart, and a number of higher mammals which lost that system and largely rely on the visual system. This is also reflected in the organisation of their sensory modalities in the brain. In the first case there is empirical data which proves the role that the olphactory system plays in the maintenance and functioning of gender behaviours and sex discrimination of conspecifics (you can check this paper published by Catherine Dulac from the Harvard Medical School and see the arguments for this position). In the second case, we only know that, for instance, higher primates have lost the pheromonal system and that they rely on the visual system to recognise genders. We also know that humans and other primates have a greater variety of sexual behaviours, which points to the absence of a gender switch in the brain or connected to the brain. We have a greater gender variety than other mammals – a continuum – not binary states like they have. Probably, after the gender switch was lost higher primates defaulted on gender determination by genetic-hormonal effects. This may account for the greater complexity of intra-species relations modulated by aggression and sex: the necessity to adapt by using more elaborate interactions between members of the same species.
Another argument in support of the thesis that humans may rely on cultural practices of gender segregation to compensate for the lack of fixed gender sense and sexual instinct is the fact that we are the only species which have this developmental stage called adolescence. Humans need a longer time to nurture a child before he/she becomes an adult. This is reflected in a protracted period of brain development, which is also reflected in the development of sexual feelings. Most children with Gender Identity Disorder grow out of it until they reach adulthood. If their gender sense was programmed to feel discordant with their body, then it would have remained so until adulthood. But feelings evolve, including gender feelings, this is what experience shows, at least for children.
I don’t deny that atypical individuals existed in ancient times. There is an even more prominent example, that of Elagabalus. But what we disagree on is the prevalence of the phenomenon. Since we don’t know what creates gender atypicality and if it’s genetically transmitted or not, it’s speculation built on speculation to say how many existed and whether their existence was purely biological. The strongest correlation right now for male homosexuality which hints at one biological vehicle is the older brother effect. This one does not necessarily require a specialised genetic component to create the trait.
But the existence of the “two-spirited” men doesn’t run counter the idea of less biologically predetermined human instincts. The situation you described is simply about looking for gender variance in relative terms at a certain point in time in a given community. A typical boy today might have been gender variant 20000 years ago.
I think it’s a mixed situation. Usually ceremonies, education and other socially normative practices are established by adults. If they became aware of a strong necessity to segregate genders in order to compensate for a less pre-programmed gender sense and sexual instinct, they did it because mixing genders during early formative period might have lead to less exclusive sexualities. It was probably about boosting gender sense, not confirming it. It wouldn’t have been necessary to reinforce a predetermined instinct unless it was actually not fully predetermined. I quoted here the extreme case of feral children. These children were deprived of human contact and interaction during early development. As a result they learned to recognise the species they grew up with as their conspecifics and failed to adapt to a human environment much later. This is another indication that the human brain is not innately hardwired for social recognition, more specifically, for the recognition of genders in a certain way.
Ken wrote:
Until the 18th century, the meaning we ascribe today to the word “individual” in the sense of “person” was absent. “Individual” meant “indivisible” and it was mainly used in relation to objects. But this was not just a semantic change that took place in a certain language at a certain point in time, because there had been no other word before to describe this new social reality of a person who was a self-determined agent of his interests. This was a European concept and social reality nurtured during a long period of time, which can be said to have started in cultural conscience as early as the Renaissance (the creative role of the individual, the self-realising role of human potentials, etc) and was given an economic status first in England, after the ideas of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham gained influence. I must point that there were very fine historical and social dynamics which lead to this development of the idea and social reality of individuality.
A very important and parallel role was played by religious tolerance, which was the product of political and religious clashes in Europe, leading to the development of mixed religious communities. The idea of individual salvation, which is of Christian origin, was very influential in contributing both to the concept of individual and then later the secular concept of individual rights. These ideas and social realities were not by any means universal at that time, but their proponents started having universalist claims especially after the French Revolution.
I can give a documented example I remember from one historical source I read some years ago to support the idea that in past societies there were no individuals in the modern sense. The Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest known ancient law codes, ascribes very clear roles for fathers, daughters, sons and wives. They were not by any means individuals. Their actions had to be sanctioned by paternal decisions or by masters’ decisions. They had very precise procedures for marriage, property transmission, sexual conduct, apprenticeship, which did not allow much space for personal preferences. Only in some extreme cases, for instance, a girl gained the right to marry whom she wanted because she had been wronged by the man her father decided to marry her with.
Ancient Rome or Greece are quoted as examples of freedom and tolerance, but they were far from that. Not all men were free and surely not any woman. Freedom was related to status. In Ancient Athens only weapon carriers had political rights, for instance. So it was not as simple as being born there and doing whatever your guts dictated you to do. There were rules and practices and certain behaviours were the object of scorn. In Ancient Rome, the man who was penetrated in a homosexual act was considered less of a man and more like a woman. It was a great shame to have people know that you have been sexually dominated by another man. There is one documented anecdote about Caesar which said that he may have played a passive role with another noble man; he strongly and angrily denied the whole story, which shows that it was a very serious matter of one’s status to be considered that way.
OK, but how does the inclusive fitness argument fare if for a long period of time, during which gays have been “driven away” by social rejection, they did not support their relatives? I mean, it doesn’t make sense to say that they played a role and then they stopped plaing that role. When did this happen?
Bailey said in his book, The Man Who Would Be Queen:
Lynn David,
The term “olphactory” shoud read as “olfactory”. It’s a misspell – I don’t use the term so much.
Hmm… if you were to look at lemurs, I wonder what sense they have. The “missing link” idea is not the best way of putting it.
So, the idea that gay men are attuned to the smell of men rather than women would not be derivative of the instinctual sense? More likely to then be an environmental change in the brain? Or did we gay men “dig up” the lost sense? Or…..? They seem to be in agreement with what I would propose…..
I think Dulac & Kimchi would agree that there may thus be multivariant biological pathways to homosexuality, primarily gene expression or hormonal causes, and anything which might “institute” those causes, such as environmental factors causing the proper stress which is a part of the older brother hypothesis.
But they are talking about gender, and they are not speaking about sociological factors in which “humans may rely on cultural practices of gender segregation to compensate for the lack of fixed gender sense and sexual instinct .” You are implying that, and that does not come from their work. They say there are in higher mammals instincts based in either genetic factors, based in the X &/or Y chromosome, and/or hormonal effects. Just because we have certain cultural practices which emphasize gender doesn’t mean we rely upon them. They may just be a restatement of what is instinctually internalized to an outward conscious level. Man simply restating the obvious. Which we seem to do quite often.
But which are we talking about, homosexuality or problems with gender identity? Or are they one in the same? Bailey at Northwestern seems to think they are. I tend to think it is representative of a continuum, but then I’m sorta stuck in the middle myself. Still there is the rare transexual who is only then to become homosexual once a gender change is effected. I dunno, I guess I had (yet have?) a mild case of GID, if minor cross-dressing and “gender-inappropriate” play in my youth is symptomatic. It just wasn’t all that overwhelming. But then I also wanted to be a cowboy.
See this makes no sense to me. Man suddenly woke up one day from an instinctual stupor and realized he wasn’t being manly or womanly enough? Were we rampantly bisexual like the bonobo? I don’t think it works that way. We simply restate consciously what we subconsciously understand, instinctually. That is one reason why gay people get stuck in the closet. We know the difference between our subconscious needs and desires and those our conscious mind (and our family and friends) tells us we should have.
If so much of our social structure derives from extra-somatic learning then we must necessarily also say the same for elephants, dolphins, wolves, baboons, chimps, and apes among other social animals. As humans we are now just realizing that the feelings we attribute to these animals, especially when they are segregated from others of their kind, are real, not anthropomorphisms. Is all of that behavioral need learned? Are psychological disorders due to withdrawal from others of their kind because of a learned sense or instinct?
And feral children don’t seem to tell us much. They are mentally ill due to their deprevation, not necessarily working solely on instinct. Just doesn’t fit.
I’m thought out… and “ph” or “f” doesn’t mean much difference to me…. ;~)
. . .
David Lynn,
Savic used a very high concentration of “putative pheromones” in that study to determine that. You couldn’t find that in an ordinary environment. It shows something, but no one knows exactly what right now. It could be a conditioned preference. Or it could be a variation in perception as a result of different amygdala functioning. There is one study which showed that anxiety changes olfactory perception. Savic also reported this year that gay men’s amygdala has connections similar to women’s and greater regional cerebral blood flow in the same area than straight men.
But what Dulac proved about the gender-switching role of the vomeronasal organ cannot be translated in any way to humans or primates. Therefore, I don’t see how it could be made an argument about human pheromones and sexual orientation or gender recognition.
They didn’t approach sexual orientation, they focused on clarifying what creates gender-specific behaviours. And what they discovered puts the hormonal dogma to rest, at least in mice (but it’s bound to be confirmed in other mammals). It’s not hormones that cement gender sense, because both genders could have circuitry for both sexes, it’s a switch which turns on only one part of the network and keeps the other one reserved. Of course, the brain still needs to go through hormonisation to have what to switch on or off (that’s why those early experiments with hormonal manipulation showed that hormones can mess with sex behaviours, which made researchers erroneously conclude hormones have the final word), but it’s not hormones which decide gender in the species we discussed. In the last years, more researchers have been going back to genetics to understand sex determination. They no longer believe that female foetuses are the default template and there is just one gene for testosterone which masculinises the brain. There’s a whole class of pro-male, pro-female, anti-male and anti-female genes which work in complicated ways to determine gender or a particular variation of gender. It’s plausible that homosexuality has to do with gender recognition, because gay men’s brains respond to certain stimuli like straight women’s brains and they also have some structural similarities. The documented sex atypicality of most gay people also points in this direction, that gender sense has to do with sexual orientation. You say it must be instincts biologically programmed to feel one way, but I don’t see how biology would program a brain to use organs which have developed as adaptations for reproduction to be used in a non-reproductive way. It doesn’t look like instinct, we are just using the concept from animals which are 100% instinctual and which have a limited range of behaviours, like mounting, thrusting or lordosis. Why do humans need almost 20 years to grow up emotionally? Did we go through a special and harsh selection in the past for neotenous phenotypes which develop a lot slower than any other primates, learn more and live longer, given the proper environment? Could this come at a cost in the variability of gender determination, because longer development of the emotional brain depends a lot more on environment than in other species? My answer was one conjecture among others. We’ll see what the genetic studies come up with.
Genes work with environment, therefore whatever practices work with the environment are likely to have a word in development.
Maybe they noticed that boys who grew up with girls didn’t pursue them as much when they became adults.
Conversely, could our cultural practices be the product of genes and hormones? Then why didn’t dolphins, elephants or chimpanzees build empires, go to the moon and discover electricity? What about marriage or masochism, are they instinctually programmed or cultural/developmental? We can’t fully explain humans using other animals’ behaviour, something is always missing.
What mental illness do they have? Some children in the town of Chernobyl in Ukraine, where the nuclear plant exploded, were left without parents in early age. They gone missing and continued to live in the ghost town together with dogs, eating the same things as them and learning the same behaviour. They were normal kids before their parents died according to their relatives’ accounts, but they did not develop like the other children during a critical period. Later, when some of them were retrieved, they did show difficulty in adapting to the new environment, especially in learning language. They didn’t have symptoms of mental illness, otherwise they were treated for that. Instead they were placed in their relatives’ families in order to adapt to human behaviours under professional supervision. Psychologists did have some success in conditioning them to learn human behaviours, like using a spoon to eat or playing with other children, but these kids still didn’t know how to channelise aggressiveness in a human way, they defaulted on animal display of aggression. Unfortunately, these cases were not studied seriously, so one cannot use this as empirical proof, but there are some documentaries and they do indicate that the early formative period in children is critical for appropriation of human behaviours, that these behaviours are not instinctual. They might have basic animal substrates, just as Daryl Bem asserted about the development of sexual orientation starting from differences in aggressiveness and activity levels, but they need a lot of human conditioning to reach a certain outcome. Remember that ancient Greece men who practiced same-sex behaviour did not engage in anal intercourse, but in intercrural intercourse, so the behaviour was not instinctual like lordosis in mice.
David Lynn,
I think this debate comes down to a few questions. Do humans have programmed instincts? Do genes dictate sexual orientation? I think many would agree that it would be odd in natural terms if genes would program someone to be exclusively homosexual. It would be a biological contradiction. That’s why they study rams, because it might be the product of something specific to some mammals or to their environment. What if non-domesticated sheep in the evolutionary past did not produce any same-sex oriented rams? Could domestication, enclosed environments and agricultural factors lead to hormonal or genetic changes which would create homosexuality? Coincidentally, we only have historical sources to document homosexual behaviours among humans since people have been living in cities, in enclosed and clustered environments and mainly in agricultural civilisations. Could stress and certain environmental factors lead to organic changes that produce homosexuality? There are many questions that science proved unable to answer. After the psychodynamic fashion failed to explain human homosexuality, so seems to fail molecular biology after a few decades of research. The answer may be more in the environment, if we look at the latest Swedish study.
You can skip everything down to the line….
Yeah, I more less said that. I was commenting on the idea that their research was in tune with my own thinking. Nothing you can say will dispell my thinking in that matter.
No… what they said was, “new advances in molecular and genetic strategies demonstrate that gonadal hormones are not the sole factor responsible for the emergence of sex-specific brain function.” You seem to want them to say something they did not. It doesn’t mean these hormones have absolutely no play in the meaning.
Yeah to the first, totally with you, except it may not be all there is. Not so sure about the second (gender recognition or whatever) being the entirety of the “bio-genetic” arguement about why some men are homosexual.
Huh? You make no sense. One, I was speaking about humans in general not homosexuals in the specific. Two, you just said above that gender recognition might be a part of why men are gay, their brains being more like a woman. Thus they would have a woman’s instinct, would they not? The why it happens is gene-expression, not a gene, but an expression of genes which in men should be methylated, “turned off,” which are not.
Which is to say, why is it always about gonadal sex with so many of you people. I’ve never said anything about human sexual contact being necessarily instinctual. If it’s the brain that is different, then the brain in the sex organ, gonads are just sensory extensions of the brain….. geesh.
It is my understanding that adolescence began about 750,000 years back probably within our ancestor Homo heidelbergensis and was also present in our brother species H. neanderthalensis. That is based in tooth growth and the rate of enamal where, I think. Why? Adolescence is important for learning, humans have a lot to teach. Why you think we have to teach people to know what gender they are is beyond me. Have you read Glenn Weisfeld’s book on the subject? I don’t know what he has to say.
Our brain gets in the way of that though.
Ehhh….. red herrings stink. I was commenting upon social structures in animal (and human) societies and comparing them. You aren’t….
*sigh* dang terms, what’s wrong with frotting. Greeks weren’t necessarily homosexual, it was institutionallized pederasty. They considered anal intercourse demeaning for the receiver. On the other hand I consider it to be dang exciting. So…. what does that get us?
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Yes, we do have instincts. I’m like Dr T, I don’t quite know what sexual orientation – I prefer gender orientation – is. I think there is a complex of items in the brain which are controlled by our genes which may add up to gender orientation.
I totally agree. There is no gene for a same-gender orientation. It’s the same genes that produce an opposite gender orientation in women which create a same-gender orientation in men.
Pure bull. Homosexuality only shows up in more urbane human cultures because the concentration of peoples allows those with homosexual orienations to find each other. Otherwise human taboos keep homosexuality at bay in less populated areas. It’s the whole thing about the habiru (Hebrews) being disgusted with cities that the Canaanites inhabited. It’s why the Bible spoke out against cities and kings for so long.
Who is that environment working upon? And what is that environment? The womb? Is it working on the mother or the individual?
Again I say eh….
@Warren Throckmorton
I remembered… Been browsing through some links in a folder and I came upon the evidence I lacked back then.
You wrote:
Yeah
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070302111100.htm
Not a behaviour per se, but common genetic stuff making both parents and children predisposed to the same thing.The difference is in how they adapted. A parent’s wrong or maladapted behaviour is felt by the developing kid who is impacted by his parent’s maladaptation. The lame father -lame kid hypothesis in all its glory.
There you go, doctor, it’s documented.
Evan – THanks chiming in again.
There is something similar with depression and abusive relationships as well. The thing is that here we have a genetic pathway and in the case of depression can identify the naughty allele. With SSA, we have no such pathway. The reparatives simply assert it in keeping with their development scheme in the face of contrary anecdotes. Now could there be some kind of sensitive child issues and any kind of fathering would be likely to trigger something genetic? I suppose. However, one would need to isolate what was different about the genes that create the vulneability. We are a ways from that.
Nicolosi suffers because he wants to put everyone in one box no matter how much damage you do to the box or the contents.