SCIENTISTS CONFIRM:: NO “GAY” GENE.

GAY BEHAVIOR RESULT OF CHOICE:, NURTURE—NOT NATURE

(See Wash Post, L. Bever, Aug 29, 2019, “There’s  No single Gay Gene”)  

According to a recent study of nearly a half a million individuals under the auspices of the National Institute of Health (UK) conducted by geneticists psychologists and others, there is no “gay” gene. ( The full report of the study was published in the prestigious journal Science, August 29, 2019). The trait of being attracted to same sex sexual partners can not be demonstrated  in the genetic pattering of the unusually large group of men and women studied.   It is this author’s  opinion that biologists conversant with the concept of natural selection  would have —early on—assumed that to be the case—since, if indeed such a “gay” gene arose—-normal selective evolutionary processes would have very quickly eliminated it— for obvious reasons.  So it’s non-existence is no surprise to biology. 

The massive study did reveal some minor genetic differences in those who admitted to same sex behaviors.  The UK study also correlated these minor genetic patterns with certain mental health issues such as depression and schizophrenia,  and personality traits such as risk taking and loneliness among others.  Though any scientist worth thier salt would warn that correlations such as they document are complex and do not signify causation.  

After analyzing the genetic data of over 400,000 British men and women in the UK Biobank database accumulated between 2006 and 2010 in a study that was much larger and more diverse than any other of the past,  the scientists of this study concluded that they could hot define a genetic link adding that “there may be thousands of genes which (may) influence same sex attractions and behavior in some minor way. They also state that these minor relationships that they documented may account for less than a third of the impetus toward same sex behavior.  Within this genetic component they discovered DNA varients which were not genes but “single letter differences in DNA sequences” and “others they could not identify” (?). (If they could not identify them how did they know they existed?)    However, these findings were of demonstrable  minor import since using these same data sets the investigators could not predict how people in unrelated data sets would report their sexual behaviors.  There was obviously too little genetic data  to be predictive.   It remained unstated, but it was thus clear that the remainder of the causative effects for such same sex behavior as described in the study i.e. the remaining two thirds of the causes thus must be related to environment, upbringing, social and nurturing patterns of those who report same sex attractions.  

Thus from this report we can conclude, as was expected—that there is no demonstrable genetic basis for same sex behavior.  The study attempts to quantify the admittedly weal and unclear genetic factors at 1/3  —leaving the readers to conclude that over 2/3s of the effects according to the authors must be other than genetics, or  the result of upbringing, home environment, familial nurturing and so forth.  The study seems to clear up what had been the  old recurrent question of “nurture vs nature”.  This report seems to put the nature side of that equation to bed for good.  

The gay community I suspect would like the results to have supported the contention that same sex sexual behavior is “simply a natural part of our diversity as s species”.  But there is no support for this contention in the results of this study of almost half a million men and women.  Were such behaviors a “natural part” of our diversity as a species and not a learned trait—evidences would exist in our gene pool.  It does not.