Chandler Burr on definition of homosexuality \doc\web\99\05\homodef.txt From: Chanburr@aol.com Date sent: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 08:00:48 EST To: h-bd@egroups.com Subject: [h-bd] Re: Homosexuality/intelligence/race Time to distinguish homosexuality-- or to be more accurate: human sexual orientation-- from intelligence and race. To criticize a message dated 99-03-22 from Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com, who wrote: "Concepts like "homosexuality", "race" and "intelligence" are categories derived from folk psychology and folk biology, not scientific concepts grounded in our knowledge of the underlying causal structure of these phenomena." Dr. Pitchford also equates it with the "wooly" concept of race. First, as both a science journalist and a homosexual, I can absolutely guarantee that homosexuality is not a "folk concept" (meaning, I assume, a myth). It's 100% as real and verifiable as consciousness. Second, sexual orientation is of a fundamentally different kind from intelligence or race, the latter of which is (my source here is David Botstein) not a trait at all but a "common inheritance," a collection of traits that generally segregate together. Consider: Biologists assemble clinical portraits of traits. After decades of empirical observation, researchers have compiled in the scientific literature a fairly complete external description of this trait. Here is the trait's clinical profile: 1) Referred to by biologists as a "stable bimorphism, expressed behaviorally." 2) Its exists in the form of two basic internal, invisible orientations, over 90% of the population accounting for the majority orientation and under 10% (one reliable study puts the figure at 7.89%) for the minority orientation, although there is still debate about the exact percentages. 3) Only a very small number of people are truly equally oriented both ways. 4) Evidence from art history suggests the incidence of the two different orientations has been constant for five millenia. 5) A person's orientation cannot be identified simply by looking at him or her; those with the minority orientation are just as diverse in appearance, race, religion, and all other characteristics as those with the majority orientation. 6) Since the trait itself is internal and invisible, the only way to identify an orientation in someone else is by observing in them the behavior or reflex that express it. However-- 7) --The trait itself is not a "behavior." It is the neurological orientation expressed, at times, behavioraly. A person with the minority orientation can engage, usually due to coercion or social pressure, in behavior that seems to express the majority orientation-- several decades ago, those with the minority orientation were frequently forced to behave as if they had the majority orientation-- but internally the orientation remains the same. As social pressures have lifted, the minority orientation has become more commonly and openly expressed in society. 8) Neither orientation is a disease or mental illness. Neither is pathological. 9) Neither orientation is chosen. 10) Signs of one's orientation are detectable very early in children, often, researchers have established, by age two or three, and one's orientation has probably been defined at the latest by age two, and quite possibly before birth. 11) Adoption studies show that the orientation of adopted children is unrelated to the orientation of their parents, demonstrating that the trait is not environmentally rooted. 12) Twin studies show that pairs of identical (monozygotic) twins, with their identical genes, have a higher-than-average chance of sharing the same orientation compared to pairs of randomly selected individuals; the average (or "background") rate of the trait in any given population is just under 8%, while the twin rate is just over 12%, over 30% higher. 13) The incidence of the minority orientation is strikingly higher in the male population-- about 27% higher-- than it is in the female population, a piece of information that gives indications to the biological conditions creating the trait. 14) Like the trait eye color, familial studies show no direct parent-offspring correlation for the two versions of the trait, but the minority orientation clearly "runs in families," handed down from parent to child in a loose but genetically characteristic pattern. This trait, of course, is handedness, a stable, behavioral bimodal polymorphism with the majority orientation, right-handedness, expressed in over 90% of the population and the minority orientation, left-handedness, in around 8%. There are very few truly ambidextrous people, and the art history evidence suggests these ratios or right-, left-, and ambi-dexterity have been constant for five millennia. Handedness is interesting in relation to the trait we will be looking at in this book, sexual orientation, because of the striking similarities between the two. Those who know the literature would know immediately that the trait profile above is not for sexual orientation, which differs from handedness in several ways: the population ratios for each trait's two orientations vary somewhat (while left-handed people comprise 8% of the population, the current figures for homosexuals is between 2 and 6%), and identical twin (MZ) concordance figures are radically different. Twin concordance for left-handedness is 12% against a background rate of 8% whereas for homosexuality, MZ concordance is 50% against a background of only around 5%, indicating that homosexuality has a much higher purely genetic component that left-handedness. (Also, and more subtly, the telltale "maternal effects" which both traits display are expressed somewhat differently.) But these are the exceptions highlighting the fact that the trait profiles of the two are extraordinarily alike, and virtually everything we know about the one, we know about the other. Neither left and right-handedness nor hetero and homo-sexual orientation can be identified simply by looking at a person. Since both are internal orientations, the only way to identify them is by the respective behaviors that express them, motor reflex and sexual response. Handedness shows up in children starting at age two or before, and John Money of Johns Hopkins University puts the age of the first signs of sexual orientation at the same age. Neither left-handedness nor homosexuality correlates with any disease or mental illness (although there are studies showing a higher correlation between left-handedness and, for example, schizophrenia.) The grammar school coercion of left-handed children to use their right hands was ended years ago. They also function well as working analogies. If you are right-handed, take a pen in your left-hand and try to write your name. With some effort, you can probably get it down semi-legibly, but the fact that you have engaged in left- handed behavior does not make you left-handed. Behavior is irrelevant; the orientation you have is what counts. And you are just as right-handed sitting still watching a movie as when swinging a tennis racquet with your right-hand. Did you choose to be right-handed? No? Then prove it. (You can't; as one clinical researcher noted tersely, "Science can't 'prove' you don't choose to have appendicitis.") Just as obviously, an interiorly heterosexual person is not homosexual even in the midst of homosexual intercourse, behavior (when it does not reflect the interior orientation) is irrelevant, and a homosexual is equally homosexual during the sex act and driving a car. Another biologically significant similarity between the two is their ubiquitous and consistent presence across populations. "Of particular interest," researcher I.C. McManus writes of handedness, "is the absence of geographical differences, a finding compatible with handedness being a balanced polymorphism present in all cultures." The point, then, is that few (no one?) doubts that handedness is a phenomenon with neurobiological roots in all human beings. Not its expression, but the interior fact of it. And no one who has looked at the clinical literature doubts that the same is true of sexual orientation, which is neither vague nor "wooly." Notice that I am not saying anything about either race or intelligence. I *am, however, saying that they are apples to the orange of sexual orientation, and that sexual orientation is quite specific, quite real, and will almost certainly have a much simpler and more direct genetic/ biological etiology than will those two, just as will the trait human handedness. --Chandler Burr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroups Spotlight: "Mirrentalk" - English actress, Helen Mirren. http://offers.egroups.com/click/248/0 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/h-bd Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com