Originally posted by Zantra
Not this old argument about homosexuality and hereditary vs environment. I'm a firm believer that it's all psychological. I'd like to see this proof of these discoveries. Something like that is difficult to prove. sure you can take a gay man and prove that his patterns and sexual reactions are different, but in order to prove it, you have to follow him along with a hetero test subject from birth to follow the development of a brain pattern. And since there's no way to tell if someone's gay until they know, there's no way to avoid contaminating the test and making it unbiased.
People discover their own sexuality through a process of learning and behavior by example. If people are "born that way" then how do you explain extreme instances of sexual deviance? You would have to acknowledge that they also, are "born that way", and that it is a function of genetics. So any type of "fetish" or sexual preferance, including hermaphrodites, transexuals, and others would have to be included in this premise. People's choices in these areas are influenced by surrounding environmental factors and learned behavior, not by genetics.
1) What about my male dog's attraction to female dogs? Is that instinct (biologically based) or is it learned from him watching other dogs?
2) If it's biological, then it stands to reason that if the dog is behaving differently, then that may also be biological. Indeed, we find about the same percentage of homosexual activity in the animal world as we do in humans.
3) If you say "people aren't animals", then you may be right to an extent. We do have the ability to learn and our behavior does have a wide variety of complex reasons behind it. Nevertheless, we also still have a lower "animal" brain with instinctive urges.
4) That being the case, do you think it was just cultural happenstance that men have learned to be attracted to women and vice versa? If so, that's a convenient cultural coincidence that really worked out for our reproductive benefit don't you think?
5) But since we know that men's attraction to women and vice versa DOES have a biological instinctive basis, then it stands to reason that, just as there are a minoity of people who vary in all sorts of biochemical and hormonal ways, there would be a minority who do not have such an instinct, or have the opposite.
When it comes down to it, you cannot claim that a homosexual's attraction to the same gender is not biologically based, unless you also say that your attraction to the opposite gender is not driven by biology as well.
If your ascertion were correct, then the presence of homosexuality would not be a constant over centuries and over different cultures, and would not be observable in all species in about the same proportions.
Now, certainly, humans - having more complex brains, have a number of different factors making up their behavior, and people can be swayed by learned behavior to act differently than their base instinct would urge them. Just as you could take a heterosexual and twist him into anything you wanted by putting him in a world condemning his urges and conditioning him, the same could be done to a homosexual. This is no different than conditioning a person to vomit when they smelled potatoes. But that doesn't mean that we don't have natural instinctive drives and it simply doesn't make sense to think that the drive of homosexuals is not instinctive but the drive of heterosexuals is. Only someone who has been "conditioned" by their society to think of homosexuality as wrong or unnatural would not be able to plainly see this, hehe.
It's this sort of silly view about homosexuality that leads people to fear that it will "threaten the family". As if they're going to "turn everyone gay", assimilating them like the borg - utterly ridiculous. There will be however many gays there will be - period. The only question is if they're going to live among us as equals or be treated as a permanent underclass. And families will get along just fine. Some seem to think that the only reason people form into families is because of government programs and tax incentives. Families form because that's what the majority of human beings have an instinctive urge to do. It would happen even if you had active government effort to stomp families out by force. So, just as it's silly to think that families are endangered just because we're not oppressing gays into living falsely as heterosexuals, it's also silly to think the government can "save the family" by programs and incentives.
But it's not totally inaccurate. certain fuctions of the brain in part relate to that function, such as the pituitary gland. And that goes to more basic function of the human mind. It's primal, like eating, or self-preservation instinct. 
