[Phil153]

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Why do you see similar incidences of homosexuality across cultures

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Why do you see similar instances of any mental disease across cultures? Are they all largely genetic?
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why do some animals perform homosexual acts

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Animals are wired to mount and penetrate other animals, and to get themselves off. Animals also perform inter species sex with suprising regularity, both domestically and in the wild (moose/horse for example). Do genetics code for inter species sex as well? Or is it simply a mechanism that causes desire for copulation and penetration with something that loosely fits sexual criteria?

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with such massive selective weight as sexual attraction is left up to environment

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It's obviously not left up to the environment. The desire to copulate is extremely powerful. As is the human desire for social interaction and their almost instinctive susceptibility to social influence. Could encoding that normally causes female attraction be miswired in some cases? Sure. But humans are higher creatures driven in large part by social and emotional experiences built on the basis of various general tendencies. I basically think that the desire to copulate + the desire for various social ends results in gay behavior.

I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think it's likely that gays are specifically wired to want to copulate with males. I have no evidence for this assertion and am at a disadvantage debating a well educated expert in this field. If you tell me that they have found specific wiring that produces the desire for male copulation, then I'll believe you. However, I do think it's possible that traits for female attraction are miswired in some gays. If male bonding behavior is somehow wired into the brain, it's possible that problems in this area could become conflated with encoding for sexual urges and behavior. I'm not ruling that out.

My second, separate contention is that the majority of those identified as gays do it as a learnt behavior, so that claiming a genetic basis for these individuals is wrong. The prevalence of true, no female contact homosexuality is 1-3%, and lags behind the prevalence of regular bisexuality and well behind same sex experimentation.

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while something like variations in abstract intelligence, problem solving, etc. which are much more recent and unique, subtle, more malleable, and with far less weight is clearly genetic.

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I have no hard evidence for this belief, but it seems to me that human brains have few specific traits, and many general ones. It makes a lot of sense to me that (1) people generally reach their intelligence potential, in the same way that most reach their growth potential and (2) intelligence is largely limited by hardware - brain damage, drug damage and aging lend support to that view. And (3) hardware is largely inherited.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that cultural differences are the reason that poor, short Chinese (and probably short partly through malnutrition, according to the latest research) destroy relatively wealthy, larger sub Saharan African descendants in tests of intelligence, especially when those same Chinese score the same as the inhabitants of the most advanced and educated civilization on earth, Japan, with which they share a recent gene pool.

BTW I've been a lot of reading of actual papers on intelligence. My conclusions so far are that:

- this area is horribly politicized - you can't trust anyone's conclusions or data, on either side, even when printed in journals
- psychologists and anthropologists have a poor understanding of science and logic and little in the way of intellectual ethics
- the only way to make any kind of determination is to look at the raw data, and probably collect your own.

At this stage I agree that the evidence does not strongly support my contention of a largely genetic basis, but it's far from conclusive.