Boys and Girls in Space

On 6/20/06, terrierkeeper wrote:
(...)
> I would be very careful about using biology to justify behaviors. The
> Eugenics movement has left quite a mark in history a very bad and
> bloody one.

Talking about that, the great fear of gay activists against research
of biological roots of homosexuality is that conservative families in
the future may use knowledge obtained that way to abort children with
propensity to gay behavior. In short, Eugenics again. Indeed that
would be a puzzling situation for traditional conservatives: would
their disapproval of homosexuality be enough to win over their
disapproval of abortion?

(...)
> I certainly do not believe in the 'Gay Gene' since experiments to
> identify it have often failed to repeat successfully.
(...)

Well, I would say that the evidence is mounting and is being collected
independently by several teams around the world and in very different
lines of research. In fact, last I heard of that, the evidence was
that there are *several* of those genes in different chromosomes that
may indeed have evolved independently. See for instance
http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060224_gay_genes.html

Of course the term "Gay gene" should be put between quote marks - as
you did - for the most likely biological construct is a complex of
genes producing some behavior. Nevertheless, the use of "gene for
this" and "gene for that" has its semantic utility in Biology.