7 ms·

I think it is worth looking for the rational (that is to say, non-moralistic) cause. The fact the gays are pressured to act straight across in nearly every soci

I think it is worth looking for the rational (that is to say, non-moralistic) cause. The fact the gays are pressured to act straight across in nearly every society in such similar and intense ways indicates that there's likely a common cause. e.g. If one culture hates dogs and kills them on sight, you might say that culture has a prejudice against dogs. If 95% of cultures hated dogs and killed them on sight, you should start to think there is a deeper reason for that (especially considering how useful dogs can be). In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids. If your kid is gay, and decides to go off and have gay sex for the rest of his/her life, he/she won't reproduce. Your gene line ends. However, if you pressure/shame/tyrannize your gay kid into a reproductive relationship, your genes replicate into grandkids (who likely won't be gay themselves). Your gene line continues. This also applies to brothers, sisters, and other kin. The reproductive benefit of pressuring a gay relative to act straight is comparable to saving them from death, since the outcome of 'acting gay' and 'dead' is evolutionarily similar. (Of course a living gay relative can help other relatives raise their kids, so it's not identical to being dead. Some have argued that the "helpful gay uncle" effect would counteract the evolutionary cost of homosexuality. But the math doesn't work; a childless relative isn't so much more helpful than a relative with kids that deliberately childless individuals replicate their genes better than ones who have their own kids.) This explains why the pressure to act straight is so strong and vicious - it comes from the same place as the pressure to not die. So, given a population of people, some who have a gene that makes them pressure gay kids to act straight, and some who don't, over time the pressuring gene will spread through the population. And here we are. And just to ward off the reflexive moralizing and personal attacks: There's no moral content to our evolutionary history, any more than there's moral content to a lion eating a baby gazelle alive. Please don't fall for the naturalistic fallacy and start attacking as though I'm saying natural equals good. Lots of things that are natural are not good. Understanding the world requires us to be able to separate rational understanding what is, from a moral judgment of what we should do. We should be adult enough here to make that distinction.

phakding 8y ago
> In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids. I have to disagree. I don't think people who opposr and hate gay people are doing it for evolutionary purposes. I haven't met anybody who thinks this guy is gay which meand he won't be making any kids, so let's hate him. Hate comes from much more fundamental place than that. For majority of people it's not "normal" hence different. And for majority what's different is scary. The same reason why immigrants of different skin color than majority population are hated. The same reason applies to extremely short, extremely tall, people with deformities, person with vitiligo in black/brown countries etc are treated differently, made fun of.
- yorwba 8y ago
  > I don't think people who opposr and hate gay people are doing it for evolutionary purposes. I haven't met anybody who thinks this guy is gay which meand he won't be making any kids, so let's hate him. That's not how evolution works. Unexpected movement on the ground near your feet doesn't scare you because you have carefully thought about how it will affect your chances to reproduce, but because the siblings of your ancestors didn't pay attention, were bitten by snakes and didn't get to reproduce.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "Hate comes from much more fundamental place than that. For majority of people it's not "normal" hence different. And for majority what's different is scary. The same reason why immigrants of different skin color than majority population are hated." I don't agree at all, and I agree with the original post. I think a slight majority of men have an 'instinct' against gay sex that is not learned or socialized. The 'hate' is another thing , as something maybe more developed. I think at least 50% of the population has an emotional revulsion to the notion of 'male same sex' (not female same sex) and but only a tiny portion for whom that turns into something more aggressive. Also 'gay' is not just 'different'. It's not like someone wearing a different hat. Reproduction is at the core of the survival of the species, much like oxygen, food and water are at the core of your individual survival. Those instances are extremely powerful, the most powerful social motivators of all. So I actually do buy that 'moral shame' towards those who are seemingly 'opting out' of reproduction is part of a kind of darwinian social evolution. FYI - it's mostly the same reason that people who are 'obviously abnormal', ill or deformed. Women and Men want healthy children, that's a very deep instinct. Nobody (and probably not you) is actually attracted to deformed or obviously ill individuals. We may feel sympathetic to them, and want to help them - but we are definitely not attracted to them. 'Mocking them' - that's just people being crude. So obviously it's all armchair whatbout thinking ... but I'm inclined to think that this issue is deeply rooted in evolution and cultural evolution. But yes it's good news for gay Indians.
panic 8y ago
> So, given a population of people, some who have a gene that makes them pressure gay kids to act straight, and some who don't, over time the pressuring gene will spread through the population. And here we are. There's no gene like that, though. I'm skeptical of evolutionary explanations like this -- it's easy to come up with one for almost anything.
Jedd 8y ago
> In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids. If this were the case, we'd have 'bred out' the gay, surely? Acceptance of difference, including different sexual orientation, is higher in secular societies. Religion seems to be a much more obvious, much more common, correlation to intolerance of homosexuality -- in no small part because the most popular written texts that form the basis of the bigger religions dictate an intolerance. The fact that reflects and feeds an innate distrust of different I think is important in the sense of maintenance of these beliefs, but can too easily conflate causality.
- jm__87 8y ago
  > If this were the case, we'd have 'bred out' the gay, surely? This assumes that there is a gene that determines whether someone is gay or not. I was under the impression that gay and trans are an epigenetic phenomenon that occurs during early development. In the womb, a male brain develops too much along the female trajectory or female too much along the male trajectory, either due to presence of hormones that should not be there or the lack of hormones that should be there.
  - Jedd 8y ago
    > This assumes that there is a gene that determines whether someone is gay or not. This was evidently parent's assumption, per the claim that gay-shaming was evolutionary. I've taken some liberty by inverting the former and conflating the latter (evolutionary / genetics) but my point is that there's no evidence for (and quite a bit against) the claim that any of this is 'evolutionary'.
    - jm__87 8y ago
      Yeah, looks like I replied to the wrong one. Sorry about that.
spamizbad 8y ago
There were quite a few cultures that accepted homosexuality, most famously the ancient Greeks. But also parts of India as well. They got their anti-sodomy laws from the British and just kept them until recently. I can’t speak to the cultural components however.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  The Greeks also sent their young boys off to have sex sex with much older men, as part of their path to becoming adults. We'd consider that repulsive by today's moral mores - so I'm not exactly sure that 'they once did it' makes it 'ok'. They also had slaves and were cool with that. But more broadly, the notion of sex, sexuality, social mores, relationships varies a lot and it's difficult to contextualize. While the Romans had a lot of 'same sex' and generally mightn't have been ashamed of it, they didn't have same sex marriage and there's nothing to indicate that people thought it should be appropriate either. So we have to think a little bit about how a society with so much 'same sex' would have thought of 'same sex marriage' as utterly bizarre and possibly immoral. Even in 2018 these things are still contextual from one place in the world to the next. That makes it hard.
aluren 8y ago
I have always had issues with justifications of moral systems containing the word 'evolutionary', especially when it comes to things like homophobia. First, because it sounds incredibly simplistic. Time after time new findings show that there's more to evolutionary processes than we thought, and there's more to the human brain than we thought, so imagine the sheer complexity of understanding both at the same time. It strikes me as suspcious, if not intellectually lazy, that an explanation for a phenomenon involving incredibly complex fields that have stumped generations of scientists can fit in a few sentences. Second, because people using these kinds of arguments are not, in fact, biologists. As it happens, I know a fair few myself, and although it's not exactly the field of all of us, none are willing put this kind of argument forward. Not that it is necessarily wrong, but it speaks miles that people who would feel more qualified to give their opinion exercise much more caution than people who aren't. Third, because many behaviors that don't make sense from an armchair evolutionary biologist's point of view are commonplace in nature. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_displaying_homosexual_behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_displaying_hom... There are many more such kinds of behaviors and we don't really understand where they come from or why they exist (if there's even a reason). I don't want you to take it wrongly or read my post as dismissing what you said off-hand with arguments of authority etc. Nor should you take it personally, as there are many posts like yours and I simply chose to reply to the more detailed one. Again, it's not necessarily completely wrong, but probably simplistic to the point of being harmful. Just please be mindful of that the next time you're invoking the word 'evolutionary' in an argument to justify something.
- mallomarmeasle 8y ago
  Here is an insightful book on homosexual behavior in other animal species, to add to your wiki link: https://www.amazon.com/Biological-Exuberance-Homosexuality-Diversity-Stonewall/dp/031225377X https://www.amazon.com/Biological-Exuberance-Homosexuality-D...
- tome 8y ago
  jlawson was very specifically giving a non-moralistic explanation.
tallanvor 8y ago
This is simply not true. There is no evolutionary cause that rationalizes prejudice against gay people. The simple fact that homosexuality has been observed by individuals in many species without similar reactions says a lot. Ancient Greece and Rome did not have significant stigmas against homosexuality, although it may not have been as common as some stories would suggest. Native Americans tended to respect homosexuals because they contributed to the tribe and helped care for the tribe's children - they put in more than they received. Prejudices against homosexuality coincide with the development of monotheistic religions, first with the Jews when the old testament was written, and this continued with the development of Christianity and Islam as they also consider the old testament to be a holy text. Modern Asia (specifically regarding China and Japan, but others as well) still has some issues with homosexuality despite not having the same religious influence, but those cultures tend to strongly emphasize conformity and not standing out. These cultures also tend to still expect the elderly to be taken care of by their children, while the Western world has moved towards helping the elderly retain as much independence as possible rather than mixing multiple generations together.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  It's a pretty short list of species that have anything like the complex social behaviors of humans. (I mean to comment very narrowly about looking to other species for shaming behaviors, I'm not trying to argue the broader issue either way)
tome 8y ago
In these replies: everyone misunderstanding what jlawson actually explained.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

phakding 8y ago

> In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids. I have to disagree. I don't think people who opposr and hate gay people are doing it for evolutionary purposes. I haven't met anybody who thinks this guy is gay which meand he won't be making any kids, so let's hate him. Hate comes from much more fundamental place than that. For majority of people it's not "normal" hence different. And for majority what's different is scary. The same reason why immigrants of different skin color than majority population are hated. The same reason applies to extremely short, extremely tall, people with deformities, person with vitiligo in black/brown countries etc are treated differently, made fun of.

yorwba 8y ago
> I don't think people who opposr and hate gay people are doing it for evolutionary purposes. I haven't met anybody who thinks this guy is gay which meand he won't be making any kids, so let's hate him. That's not how evolution works. Unexpected movement on the ground near your feet doesn't scare you because you have carefully thought about how it will affect your chances to reproduce, but because the siblings of your ancestors didn't pay attention, were bitten by snakes and didn't get to reproduce.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"Hate comes from much more fundamental place than that. For majority of people it's not "normal" hence different. And for majority what's different is scary. The same reason why immigrants of different skin color than majority population are hated." I don't agree at all, and I agree with the original post. I think a slight majority of men have an 'instinct' against gay sex that is not learned or socialized. The 'hate' is another thing , as something maybe more developed. I think at least 50% of the population has an emotional revulsion to the notion of 'male same sex' (not female same sex) and but only a tiny portion for whom that turns into something more aggressive. Also 'gay' is not just 'different'. It's not like someone wearing a different hat. Reproduction is at the core of the survival of the species, much like oxygen, food and water are at the core of your individual survival. Those instances are extremely powerful, the most powerful social motivators of all. So I actually do buy that 'moral shame' towards those who are seemingly 'opting out' of reproduction is part of a kind of darwinian social evolution. FYI - it's mostly the same reason that people who are 'obviously abnormal', ill or deformed. Women and Men want healthy children, that's a very deep instinct. Nobody (and probably not you) is actually attracted to deformed or obviously ill individuals. We may feel sympathetic to them, and want to help them - but we are definitely not attracted to them. 'Mocking them' - that's just people being crude. So obviously it's all armchair whatbout thinking ... but I'm inclined to think that this issue is deeply rooted in evolution and cultural evolution. But yes it's good news for gay Indians.

panic 8y ago

> So, given a population of people, some who have a gene that makes them pressure gay kids to act straight, and some who don't, over time the pressuring gene will spread through the population. And here we are. There's no gene like that, though. I'm skeptical of evolutionary explanations like this -- it's easy to come up with one for almost anything.

Jedd 8y ago

> In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids. If this were the case, we'd have 'bred out' the gay, surely? Acceptance of difference, including different sexual orientation, is higher in secular societies. Religion seems to be a much more obvious, much more common, correlation to intolerance of homosexuality -- in no small part because the most popular written texts that form the basis of the bigger religions dictate an intolerance. The fact that reflects and feeds an innate distrust of different I think is important in the sense of maintenance of these beliefs, but can too easily conflate causality.

jm__87 8y ago
> If this were the case, we'd have 'bred out' the gay, surely? This assumes that there is a gene that determines whether someone is gay or not. I was under the impression that gay and trans are an epigenetic phenomenon that occurs during early development. In the womb, a male brain develops too much along the female trajectory or female too much along the male trajectory, either due to presence of hormones that should not be there or the lack of hormones that should be there.
- Jedd 8y ago
  > This assumes that there is a gene that determines whether someone is gay or not. This was evidently parent's assumption, per the claim that gay-shaming was evolutionary. I've taken some liberty by inverting the former and conflating the latter (evolutionary / genetics) but my point is that there's no evidence for (and quite a bit against) the claim that any of this is 'evolutionary'.
  - jm__87 8y ago
    Yeah, looks like I replied to the wrong one. Sorry about that.

spamizbad 8y ago

There were quite a few cultures that accepted homosexuality, most famously the ancient Greeks. But also parts of India as well. They got their anti-sodomy laws from the British and just kept them until recently. I can’t speak to the cultural components however.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
The Greeks also sent their young boys off to have sex sex with much older men, as part of their path to becoming adults. We'd consider that repulsive by today's moral mores - so I'm not exactly sure that 'they once did it' makes it 'ok'. They also had slaves and were cool with that. But more broadly, the notion of sex, sexuality, social mores, relationships varies a lot and it's difficult to contextualize. While the Romans had a lot of 'same sex' and generally mightn't have been ashamed of it, they didn't have same sex marriage and there's nothing to indicate that people thought it should be appropriate either. So we have to think a little bit about how a society with so much 'same sex' would have thought of 'same sex marriage' as utterly bizarre and possibly immoral. Even in 2018 these things are still contextual from one place in the world to the next. That makes it hard.

aluren 8y ago

I have always had issues with justifications of moral systems containing the word 'evolutionary', especially when it comes to things like homophobia. First, because it sounds incredibly simplistic. Time after time new findings show that there's more to evolutionary processes than we thought, and there's more to the human brain than we thought, so imagine the sheer complexity of understanding both at the same time. It strikes me as suspcious, if not intellectually lazy, that an explanation for a phenomenon involving incredibly complex fields that have stumped generations of scientists can fit in a few sentences. Second, because people using these kinds of arguments are not, in fact, biologists. As it happens, I know a fair few myself, and although it's not exactly the field of all of us, none are willing put this kind of argument forward. Not that it is necessarily wrong, but it speaks miles that people who would feel more qualified to give their opinion exercise much more caution than people who aren't. Third, because many behaviors that don't make sense from an armchair evolutionary biologist's point of view are commonplace in nature. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_displaying_homosexual_behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_displaying_hom... There are many more such kinds of behaviors and we don't really understand where they come from or why they exist (if there's even a reason). I don't want you to take it wrongly or read my post as dismissing what you said off-hand with arguments of authority etc. Nor should you take it personally, as there are many posts like yours and I simply chose to reply to the more detailed one. Again, it's not necessarily completely wrong, but probably simplistic to the point of being harmful. Just please be mindful of that the next time you're invoking the word 'evolutionary' in an argument to justify something.

mallomarmeasle 8y ago
Here is an insightful book on homosexual behavior in other animal species, to add to your wiki link: https://www.amazon.com/Biological-Exuberance-Homosexuality-Diversity-Stonewall/dp/031225377X https://www.amazon.com/Biological-Exuberance-Homosexuality-D...
tome 8y ago
jlawson was very specifically giving a non-moralistic explanation.

tallanvor 8y ago

This is simply not true. There is no evolutionary cause that rationalizes prejudice against gay people. The simple fact that homosexuality has been observed by individuals in many species without similar reactions says a lot. Ancient Greece and Rome did not have significant stigmas against homosexuality, although it may not have been as common as some stories would suggest. Native Americans tended to respect homosexuals because they contributed to the tribe and helped care for the tribe's children - they put in more than they received. Prejudices against homosexuality coincide with the development of monotheistic religions, first with the Jews when the old testament was written, and this continued with the development of Christianity and Islam as they also consider the old testament to be a holy text. Modern Asia (specifically regarding China and Japan, but others as well) still has some issues with homosexuality despite not having the same religious influence, but those cultures tend to strongly emphasize conformity and not standing out. These cultures also tend to still expect the elderly to be taken care of by their children, while the Western world has moved towards helping the elderly retain as much independence as possible rather than mixing multiple generations together.

maxerickson 8y ago
It's a pretty short list of species that have anything like the complex social behaviors of humans. (I mean to comment very narrowly about looking to other species for shaming behaviors, I'm not trying to argue the broader issue either way)

tome 8y ago

In these replies: everyone misunderstanding what jlawson actually explained.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]