Obviously you can't will yourself into photosynthesis, but you can gain an aquired taste for alcohol, or eventually come to detest the same thing you've been eating every day for the past five years. People can change in thier preferences and ways of thinking, from everything from sexual orientation to food preference, to spirituality and the way the behave in interpersonal relationships. I have always thought that people can change, and people can change themselves, and yah, because of this I don't like the idea of someone saying that anything is predetermined by physiology. I understand that brain chemistry makes people predisposed to certain things, but I think that one's personality, self awareness, thier upbringing, the ways thier behaviours are reinforced, and one's own will, have more to doing with someone shaping who they are than their natal brain chemistry does.

The paper is a really interesting read.  The correlations are pretty sound, though it would be a bit nicer if they revealed their sampling methods.  25 heterosexuals of each gender and 20 homosexuals/gender leaves quite a bit of room for bias errors given the population size.

The paper, however, does not conclude this:

"As far as I'm concerned there is no argument any more - if you are gay, you are born gay," he said.

Especially since the paper itself gave this little disclaimer:

The present study does not allow narrowing of potential explanations, which are probably multifactorial...Whether they may relate to processes laid down during the fetal or postnatal development is an open question.

My apologies if I didn't cite the paper correctly.  Either way, how the heck did BBC draw the "gay from birth" argument when the paper itself clearly states that no such conclusions were made is beyond me.  Expert opinion from a Dr. Qazi Rahman?  That's still just conjecture - there is still no official citation that shows statistical evidence that this correlation is indeed before birth, during early stages of development, during the childhood years, or even during their adult years due to some nervous process.

It's pretty strong evidence that being homosexual is related to your body structure.  It still leaves a bit of skepticism - namely, the development could be related to non-genetic causes, but it's still good to wait to see how the scientific community follows this development.

Good to know that BBC still card-stacks, though =/.

pfffffffffffffft

call me when scientists discover that having sex with Transformers arises as a birth trait

I for one think that you become a homosexual when you engange in homosexual activity, and then it becomes a choice, when you choose to do those actions. Just like murderers are murderers when they choose to murder people or engineers are engineers when they choose to engineer things. Cause you're not gay (or no one could tell if you are or not, so how would anyone else know/care) until you start doing gay things (ie dongs in the mouth.)

This topic is about scientific evidence which strongly suggests homosexuality is not just a choice and that there are some real differences in gay and straight people's brains. It's up in the air whether this is there from birth or happens as you grow up, but by the time you are an adult the change is physical, not just some mental choice you make every time you decide to have gay sex.

It seems like you are saying that if gay people aren't gay if they don't tell anyone they are attracted to people of the same sex and don't do anything about it. Maybe to you this means they aren't gay, but to the gay person they will always feel the way they feel (unless they get brainwashed or something crazy), because it is real and not something they can switch off. Sexual orientation isn't logical.

You compared this to how murderers are murderers when they murder, but the difference is having consensual gay sex hurts zero people in any way so there is no reason why a gay person should deny their identity or deny themselves the happiness they should by all means have with somebody else. Denying yourself something as huge as sexuality is not the same as deciding not to eat chocolate or not to become engineer. It's a huge part of life and people should be free to explore it as long as nobody is getting hurt.

I'm not saying you are explicitly arguing that homosexuality is wrong, so please don't take it that way. I'm saying that this distinction of homosexuality being in the act or in the mind is really irrelevant to anybody who has a morality based on individual freedoms which don't hurt other people. Maybe you don't agree with me there, but if you do I don't see why you went to the trouble of making this argument.

If homosexuality is wrong and not natural, why do sheep have gay sex when they have no real sense of self, or of whats wrong or right morally or for themselves?

If homosexuality is wrong and not natural, why do sheep have gay sex when they have no real sense of self, or of whats wrong or right morally or for themselves?

i don't think anybody said it was wrong or not natural...

Ok if being gay is already determined at birth, what about furries and people with bizarre fetishes? I'm pretty sure they're not born with the bizarre fetishes, but stumble onto them later in life and choose if they want to continue with it.

I am just not one for such fatalistic arguments, because its like saying your brain physiology sets in stone the way you will behave and think, and I was always more optimistic, that people are capable of whatever they want to achieve in ways of doing or thinking or being, than we are supposed to be limited to by our physiology.

Really, my dislike for this theory has little to do with gays and more to do with the ability of one to shape his own psyche and self. It comes down the question that I have heard lots of gays pose, that we "can't change who we are", but I always have never given creedence towards that idea, and I think that people can change themselves in any way they like (short of growing back legs and stuff like that, but with science in the near future who knows).

Yes, yes! Why didn't we think of it before?! All those lazy fucks that have Down's Syndrome and autism, all they've got to do is shape their psyche and get out of the house!

Do you really think that something wrong IN THE BRAIN, which by the way is where your self and psyche comes from, can be fixed by some training program? Will this require a Rocky Balboa montage of people saying I CANT DO IT as "Push It To The Limit" plays in the background?

I'm not arguing that homosexuality is a disorder like autism, but if a person has some funky brain structure that causes them to be attracted to the opposite sex, there's not much you can do about it unless, I don't know, you perform some MAJOR brain surgery or something.

Yes, yes! Why didn't we think of it before?! All those lazy fucks that have Down's Syndrome and autism, all they've got to do is shape their psyche and get out of the house!

Do you really think that something wrong IN THE BRAIN, which by the way is where your self and psyche comes from, can be fixed by some training program? Will this require a Rocky Balboa montage of people saying I CANT DO IT as "Push It To The Limit" plays in the background?

I'm not arguing that homosexuality is a disorder like autism, but if a person has some funky brain structure that causes them to be attracted to the opposite sex, there's not much you can do about it unless, I don't know, you perform some MAJOR brain surgery or something.

I beleive he was saying was that he is not buying into the idea that the brain determends 100% what you like, it is still your choice and if you choose to surccum to those natural tendencies and say "it's just how I am" as an excuse, well it is still a choice.


Also the idea of using Down's Syndrome and autism as a refrence, then refute it and the end of your post is stupid. Because we know he was not talking about the mental disabilities--- you took it out of context.

That's like me saying I can be anything I want, and you saying I can't be a bird; totaly out of context.

maybe...

maybe God is homosexual??

and his CHOSEN PEOPLE are the homosexuals while heterosexuals are just meant for reproduction so that human race (actually all mamals) can keep producing homosexuals?????

This is my new theory.

I also have the brainpan of a stagecoach handler.  Phrenology rules.

I guess I just don't understand this mentality that some people have that we have no control over who we are (and in that sense, I mean who we are as a collection of thoughts, feelings, attitudes and behaviours). I know that I can shape who I am as an individual, when it comes to these things, and so others probably can too, in various respects. Yeah, so to me, you do have the power choose your attitudes, behaviours, feelings through self conditioning and self reasoning, in spite of the fact that that your brain size says you "should" do different. People learn, and I really do think because of this reasoning that sexual behaviours are learned (or at the very least can be learned or re-learned) and not entirely innate.

This is the kind of stuff that sociologists probably talk about on the highest level. Because of popular attitudes towards homosexuality being more accepting, people are more willing to find reasons that make gays "faultless". (I didn't want to say it cause it sounds bad but its the only way I can think of describing it.) But yeah, we define each other by the behaviours we observe (you're not gay until you choose to do something gay) and we can define ourselves by our thoughts and feelings and behaviours (which as far as I am concerend can be chosen, learned, and re-learned through external and self-conditioning). Because we define homosexuality in these ways, if you agree that people can shape these things themselves, then you can see why I think choice is involved in the development of homosexuality in the individual.

The study suggests that gays are born gay because of brain structure, but who is to say that the subjects brain structure wasn't influenced to shape itself in its formative years due to reinforcement of homosexual behaviours (or other behaviours that are associative with the cognitive processes that take place with homosexuality) that stimulated and encouraged growth in those parts of the brain?

I don't think the answer is ever as simple as being "born gay".

Do you really think that something wrong IN THE BRAIN, which by the way is where your self and psyche comes from, can be fixed by some training program? Will this require a Rocky Balboa montage of people saying I CANT DO IT as "Push It To The Limit" plays in the background?

The present study does not allow narrowing of potential explanations, which are probably multifactorial...Whether they may relate to processes laid down during the fetal or postnatal development is an open question.

The research (not Dr. Rahman, who has nothing to do with this) makes no conclusions about causality.

Blitz it's because we don't really have control over certain things, if you were schizophrenic you could take medicines but you would still remain schizophrenic, you can't learn to be it or learn to not be it. You can't learn to be gay or to stop being it either.

Attraction can be conditioned though through learning, like Pavlov made the dog salivate when he rung the bell. He was attracted (albeit in a different way) to the sound through a conditioned response. I am not a cognitive scientist, but I wonder if sexual responses are all that different. The idea is that as animals who are self aware we have the power to condition our own responses, because of this I don't think that the mechanics of attraction are completely left to the innate. This is why I don't think it is impossible for someone to learn or re-learn their way into or out of homosexual behaviours.

Attraction works through hormonal responses and instinctive qualities. Obviously it's different from person to person, but stuff like a straight guy liking a woman with bigger breasts comes from an instinctive quality that means they're going to be better suited as a mate and mother. I'm sure there are probably basic things you can change (habits, etc), but things like sexuality and such are hard coded into us from our primal beginnings.

Handsome lamb what about people who have different standards of beauty? (for example, they don't like big breasts)

Still, that doesn't refute the idea that someone can learn behaviours that are contrary to thier innate dispositions (ie gay men being straight, straight men being gay). In ancient Athens, most free men would have practiced some form of pederasty (erotic ideas about young men) , but is that attributed to thier brain size or the societal conditioning that gave rise to the self-replicating institution and that also ensured that people would fight more passionately for their fellow free men (because of the mess of romantic feelings that were stirred up in there)? What we would have percieved as homosexual or bisexual behavious were considered normal for a majority of the free male population, which most probably didn't have the brain-size difference ratio that this researcher was talking about.

And I wonder, if at any given point in history that the ratio of homosexuals to heterosexuals has increased or descreased with the social atmosphere of any given place and time towards homosexual/bisexual behaviours. They never did keep statistics on that kind of thing though (which is a shame because it would be pretty interesting.)