This was actually a really good article! I guess as a staunch libertarian (not the cringe sort) I’ve always been suspicious of genetic arguments for largely social things. That and evolutionary psychology being such a… mess. But! It turns out that there is statistical, and somewhat replicated, evidence for at least a partial genetic component to homosexual attraction. That genuinely surprises me and I guess to have to readjust now.
The rest of this article introduced me to some genetics concepts: - polygenic: the idea that multiple genes/loci contribute to some phenotype - pleiotropy: the idea that a trait has multiple indirect contributions to fitness
So there are multiple genes which coded significantly for homosexuality in the dataset considered (which was UK biobank and 23andme) but the actual effect size in the study was very small. Very few of the people surveyed with significant gene reported at least one homosexual encounter. This supports a polygenic view; you’d need lots of the genes (and probably various environmental factors, too) to end up gay.
Interestingly, they found that of the people who had these genes, but who didn’t report same-sex encounters, those people reported more sexual encounters overall. This is a possible indication as for why natural selection selected for these genes. Plus, it being a polygenic trait make selection weaker, since you have to select like 10 different loci to result in a change rather than just 1.
Some issues with the study are that their definition of gay is like reported at least one homosexual encounter which is fairly weak (but a follow-up genetically profiled self-identefied gay people and found the genes had some predictive power, so nifty).
As for queer liberation, obviously it doesn’t mean much. I guess it is (even more) evidence that We’ve Always Been Here. But I still think arguments based on like respect and tolerance rather than ‘born this way’ are stronger and generalise better to other groups. Plus there’s so much of gender stuff especially that is sooo obviously social, you’re never going to end up with a clear genetic factor.