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My go-to link for countering "<insert sexual practice> is unnatural" was [1], this article seems like a great one to add to the arsenal :). That's not to say I

• ng12 8y ago
  > it's just fun to point out to someone that even their ridiculous point is technically incorrect. What's ridiculous is looking to the animal kingdom to judicate what's normal for human homosexuality in either direction. Lots of mammals eat their young, I wouldn't use this as evidence to normalize infant cannibalism.
  • zwkrt 8y ago
    I get your point but this seems to also be an argument in bad faith. The point is to show that it is likely that homosexuality is more innate than "a choice" or something you can catch, for the purposes of informing our moral judgements.
    • ummonk 8y ago
      Wait, how does its existence in the animal kingdom affect the likelihood that it is innate vs. environmentally acquired?
      • zwkrt 8y ago
        In a baysian mindset, I could have the hypothesis that homosexuality in humans is innate. At this point in time I have no proirs so I think the chances are 50/50. After gathering additional evidence that other animals "natuarlly" have same sex relations, that should shift the needle for me some amount in one direction, seeing as how I do not believe humans to be "more" but just differently evolved, and having evolved on the same planet in a complex web of species divergence with these other animals.
    • andrewflnr 8y ago
      "innate" is another word for natural; they have the same root. That doesn't even matter for the question of whether homosexuality is beneficial or moral. Completely orthogonal questions.
      • zwkrt 8y ago
        As a gay person myself I agree conceptually, but it is hard to back the "even if it's a choice what do you care" argument when discussing something that from my perspective is so obviously and irrefutably not a choice. I liken it to saying that someone shouldn't be judged by having a face tattoo, because it is a personal choice that affects no one negatively. In practice however people with face tattoos are judged pretty harshly, and in a way that people with alopecia or facial birth marks are not, specifically because choices carry moral weight. Another issue is that the choice argument comes with a lot of baggage for people who take it to mean that I am somehow intentionally upending what would otherwise be a lovely, traditional family with 2.3 kids and a dog because I chose to fraternize with men instead, but that since it is a choice it is also one I could undo at any time (see gay conversion therapy).
    • thaumasiotes 8y ago
      I think concordance of homosexuality in identical twins is something like 30%, which is... incredibly low. The argument that it's innate isn't on strong ground at all.
      • zwkrt 8y ago
        Wait, if twins got the same type of cancer at a 30% rate we would definitely consider a genetic factor. When you say "innate" that can mean many things, do you wish to elaborate?
        • thaumasiotes 8y ago
          The comment I responded to contrasts "innate" phenomena with "a choice" or "something you can catch". I think the argument is very strong that homosexuality (as an inclination) is not "a choice" -- people don't decide on what they want. And 30% concordance for identical twins is much, much higher than the concordance for random strangers drawn from the same broad demographic pool, so it's clear that there is genetic influence in a sense. But it's also clear that there is not genetic influence in the ordinary sense that most people will imagine if you say a trait is genetic. Compare the question "is this person gay?" to "does this person speak French?" -- Can we predict whether a person speaks French just by looking at their DNA? Yes. How good will the prediction be? Decent. French is mostly spoken by people in countries where French is the language of daily life. There is noise from a few sources: some people are naturally attracted to learning languages; some countries are more recent than others and the genetics of their residents are less informative; some countries have an imperfect layer of French on top of some other language(s). (You can easily identify a Frenchman by looking at his genes. It's harder to identify a French-speaking Canadian in Quebec that way. And it's much harder to identify a Vietnamese collaborator family that way.) There is a genetic influence (in the intuitive sense) on whether you speak French. I mentioned it above -- some people are inclined towards learning languages. Within any given non-Francophone population, those people are more likely to speak French than everyone else is. But the very weak genetic signal amounts to nearly nothing because it is overwhelmed by very powerful environmental influence. If your parents speak only French, and everyone you ever meet speaks French, you will speak French too. And if none of the above is true, you're unlikely to speak French even if you might like to do so in the abstract. So the fact that you can predict French-speaking from a person's genetics is mostly spurious -- it comes from the fact that genetics and French-speaking coincide without much direct influence of one on the other. The concordance of French-speaking in identical twins is much higher than 30% -- it is nearly 100%, despite the fact that the trait is not much influenced by genetics, because identical twins almost always grow up in the same country. And this is for an entirely non-genetic trait! Where a trait is genetically determined, you would see similar concordance levels -- since identical twins have the same genetics, their concordance on genetically-determined traits must be close to 100%. Studies of identical twins raised apart always find that a twin pair coincides on a creepily large number of apparently inconsequential behaviors, like habitually wearing seven rings. They should coincide more on very consequential behaviors such as refusal to breed. 30% concordance is so low as to preclude the idea that genetics is causing the one twin to be homosexual. It suggests instead that genetics is giving both twins a weakness, but a minor enough weakness that even when one twin succumbs the other twin usually stays healthy. There are two models that could match this: - Homosexuality might strike at random, like radioactive decay. Genetics set the odds of it happening to you, and every day God rolls the dice to see whether you suddenly become gay. - Homosexuality might be transmissible ("something you can catch"). Genetics set the odds of your successfully resisting infection. The first option could reasonably be described as "innate". It cannot, however, be described as "born that way", which as I understand it is the argument that people are making when they say that homosexuality is innate. 30% concordance in identical twins conclusively demonstrates that homosexuals are not born that way. An adult's homosexuality is not specified by their genes -- it is a failure state to which their genes left them more or less vulnerable, and which needs some kind of trigger (possibly chance). Summing up: We were given three options: that homosexuality is "a choice", "innate", or "something you can catch". As you note, "innate" is not particularly well defined. Neither is "a choice". But we can still reject the "choice" option pretty easily. From a common sense perspective, it is clear that people don't choose their wants. And the MZ twin concordance rate is too low -- where identical twins get to make choices, they generally make the same choices. While "innate" can mean several things, it is very often used to mean an "intentional" effect of the genes, a body that faithfully executes its genetic plan (regardless of whether that plan is good or bad). (This isn't well-defined either, sadly.) The MZ twin concordance rate is much too low to support this for homosexuality. It is also used to mean an effect which will manifest regardless of circumstance. This is easy to reject, as there are no such phenomena. But with a more liberal interpretation of "regardless of circumstance", we can rule this out too. I don't think anything discussed here is evidence for or against the idea that homosexuality is "something you can catch". I will also note that this trichotomy fails to include some obvious types of causes. If, say, a rock falls on your arm and you lose the arm, I think that's better characterized as an "environmental shock" than as a disease, a genetic effect, an "innate" effect, or a choice, even though there is genetic and "choice" influence on the event. I tend to agree that 30% MZ twin concordance is too high for the environmental shock model to make sense in the US context. But as I said above, the evidence in favor of "innate" as an explanation is not very good.
  • dTal 8y ago
    The comment you're replying to literally called it a silly concept. Their point was that, in addition to being silly, it also doesn't even support the position of those who typically invoke it.
  • betenoire 8y ago
    Who said anything about "normal", such a useless term. The argument is that it is unnatural, when clearly that's not the case.
  • saalweachter 8y ago
    Just as importantly, science is always open to revision. You have to be careful how you use science in informing your morals for that reason. If in ten years, this research into animal sexuality was show to be falsified, misinterpreted, or just not representative of a wide range of nature, would you then decide human homosexuality is morally wrong? That's the real risk of taking something which should be more of a moral axiom and claiming it derives from science and nature; you risk having it overturned in the future.
    • d0mine 8y ago
      > "science open to revision" It doesn't mean that you can't make statements that are always true (today, tomorrow, in a hundred years, etc). Once something is discovered and we understand the limits of the model, it is true forever e.g., Newton's laws under appropriate assumptions (not too fast, not much mass).
      • majewsky 8y ago
        Yeah, but most social sciences are nowhere near the standards that physics imposes on what it holds to be true. That's not a flack. It's inherent to the nature of the social sciences. Since every individual is part of a complex social system, it's incredibly hard to make repeatable experiments to test assumptions in the same way that physicists do every day for breakfast.
        • d0mine 8y ago
          It doesn't matter how complex a studied phenomenon; if proper methods are not used, it is not science. Both astrology and astronomy can study the same stars -- the difference is in methods they use (and only one is science).
  • cain 8y ago
    I agree. This is precisely why it is nonsensical to make a natural vs unnatural comparison for human activity.
• refurb 8y ago
  Animals also intentionally kill their own species for no other reason than they want to to prevent competition and secure mates. So using that same argument, murder is “natural”, too.
  • everdev 8y ago
    Right, if we only measure what's "natural" by what exists in the broader animal kingdom than anything uniquely human (commerce, religion, science, a written language, morality, philosophy, etc.) would appear to be "unnatural".
  • taneq 8y ago
    Murder, infanticide, rape, torture (parasitic wasps, ugh) are all natural. Appeal to nature is only compelling if you believe in happy-fun Disney 'nature'.
• acangiano 8y ago
  There are even transgender cases in nature (e.g., Clownfish). But yeah, the Appeal to Nature fallacy is pretty silly.
• zamalek 8y ago
  I have no scientific rigor for this, but the possibility for relationships that do not bear offspring makes a ton of evolutionary sense. By including homosexuality into a species, you have members who are able to gather and process energy without contributing to population growth. Population growth is a good thing, but too much is detrimental to the species (at least if you don't have access to agriculture). In addition, if the species is a social species, you can have richer communities without the burden of additional offspring, including non-binary genders (as primitive gender roles need not apply to homosexual members). This is especially true for humans, as our offspring is unusually vulnerable for an unusually extended time. Include adoption into the equation, and your species would have a bank of potential parents for abandoned (due to death or otherwise) offspring: in humans, bearing offspring is risky and consumes a lot of energy. Evolutionary speaking, it's not a good thing if all the energy expended in that newborn is left to waste. The possibility of homosexuality is mathematically optimal and it is therefore a deeply natural phenomenon. You don't even need to look at the animal kingdom, it's right there in nature (assuming I'm correct, but I think my argument is compelling).
  • toasterlovin 8y ago
    Natural selection happens at the gene level. A behavior has to beneficial to the gene or genes that cause it for it to propagate via natural selection. It’s hard to model homosexuality as anything other than detrimental to the gene or genes that contribute to it. The only model that accounts for this would be if homosexuality is an occasional side effect of some other traits or behaviors that increase fertility.
    • bencollier49 8y ago
      Whither worker bees?
      • toasterlovin 8y ago
        Haplodiploidy. Specifically, the relatedness section on this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy
• fastball 8y ago
  I'm not sure I've ever heard "homosexuality is unnatural" as a serious argument. I've absolutely heard "homosexuality is immoral", but the two things are not really related.