[FRIAM] gene complex for homosexuality

Thu Jan 13 13:12:13 EST 2022

All,

I continue to think this discussion is of a very high quality and ==> WISH <== some body  had the means to coherently archive it.  

I also wish EricS would not encourage this group to rail on academics.  For one, I am an academic. I am also about as silverbacked as it gets: I just don't have the harem of females and attendant juveniles to show for it.   For two, HE is an academic.  Steve Gould was an academic, and he hated all this "Panglossian" crap.  The people who developed epigenetics were academics, after all.  So cut the anti-academic crap guys.  We is what we is. 

 I do agree that some of us get confused between the project of seeing what a minimalist selection model can do, with making the claim that such minimalist models are how a system works.  That is why I will always honor Carl Tollander for giving me, "Imagine a spherical cow."  I used to have a bit of fox fur tacked to a board which when you petted it, arched its back.  That was very good for getting students to ponder for a moment, "Hey, wait a minute, what is going on when a cat arches its back when petted?"  What is a response, anyway?  Reductios have their uses.  

I did not know that Bret Weinstein was on the ivermectin train.  So now I REALLY DON'T trust him.  Alas, he seemed such a nice man before his brother told him to 'go seize the fame you justly deserve."   Fame corrupts; absolute fame corrupts absolutely.  

I have to go eat breakfast.  "Pfffft!"

But I love you all like brothers.  

Nick 

Nick Thompson
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2022 5:36 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] gene complex for homosexuality

This is why I found my annoyance hard to articulate.  I don’t think it is something about sensitivity.  I don’t have much affect one way or another about who is sexually interested in whom.  I find the system very interesting.  The thing that I think annoys me is that there is a kind of imaginationless boneheadedness that becomes common among academics as they go into their silverback phase, in which they take very crude models, and impose them on anything that can’t get away, whether the models belong or not.  It has the appearance of an all-destroying mental vanity at the cost of empiricism.

So, to be a bit more concrete:

If we are talking about viral lifecycles, where the main functions (and nearly the only ones) are: attach to cell surface, invade cell, use cellular machinery to produce proteins and a genome, maybe do some crossover with anyone else who might be in the same cell at the time, package it all into visions, escape and diffuse, generating some probability to repeat.

For that kind of model, the “replicator” in all its glorious minimality is a really great abstraction, and the notion of “Darwinian / Malthusian competition” among replicators with variant sequences is an abstraction that hews quite faithfully to much that is empirically real in the system.

But then, and here I want to be careful about a word you used and I didn’t, but should have been more specific about:

> On Jan 12, 2022, at 5:54 PM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> But why would this "evolutionary explanation for X”

I wasn’t objecting in any way to evolutionary explanations.  It is a style of boneheaded selectionism that annoys me.  Evolution can be all of whatever really happens; if we have some imagination we should want to expand our appreciation of what-all that includes.  That’s where silverbacks often fall down.

All this, it will not surprise you to read, is related to my discontent this winter about the way genetics handles “information” that — however it should be defined, and on that I have opinions and constructions — depends on variations distributed across pangenomes that undergo lots of material dynamical shufflings, and later social and cultural constructs as well.  Where functional variation is quite localized to material variation, our abstractions and the habits we have built form them tend to do okay.  Where it is highly distributed, we often lack good abstractions at all, and through having few good tools and solved cases, people often haven’t developed much of a systematic intuition.

> be any more bizarre than any other question? That's what's interesting to me. I don't see people claiming that asking about, say, a new virus variant is a bizarre question to ask. Why does the subject of homosexuality evoke accusations of "dumb" or "bizarre”?

So, the ad absurdum opposite to the viral replicator would be a feature somebody (Nick probably?) raised: sex is precisely _not_ heritable.  So to ask whether men or women are “fitter” in a Malthusian sense would clearly be a category error.

But that may not be quite the right thing to analogize to sexual orientation, because there are notions of heritability about it.  I am looking, for an analogy, to something more like:

Who is Darwin-Malthus fitter: people who engage in many punning dreams, or people who engage in many face-mixing dreams?  After all, I can declare a predicate; why am I not allowed to ask for a selectioinist explanation of it?

That seems like a boneheaded question (worse, a deliberately incurious one), because we have poor understanding even of what “a dream” is (as part of not understanding much about what cognition or states of awareness “are”), then about why dreams exist, what they do, how any given group are structured, how many structural groups one can put into a typology, etc.  It’s not that we understand nothing — we know a little and have some ideas — but we are _vastly_ further from being able to identify a formal model than we are for viral lifecycles.  To just blow by that distinction and try to treat punning dreamers and face-mixing dreamers as replicators in Darwinian competition seems “dumb” in the way I meant.

For the orientation question, it seems to me we have four maybe-dimensions we could identify that pertain:
Sexual morphology (physiological)
Sexual identity (complex physic/psuchological, but in some way maybe largely a “trait” of a “phenotype”) Sexual interest (the aspects that one might call an individual propensity) Sexual orientation (all the individual propensities embedded in all the layers of social engagement, convention, etc.)

Each of these individually, and certainly all of them as a pseudo-hierarchical tower, already draws from a host of developmental (either physiological or behavioral) elementary properties or capabilities that also participate in much else.  We’re going to somehow put an abstraction of replicators in Darwinian competition on that, and claim we have understood _anything_?

So that was the drift of my complaint.

Eric

> 
> My guess is it's yet another manifestation of how sensitive the topic is.
> 
> On 1/12/22 13:36, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> The framing that this question has has always felt so bizarre to me, but I have struggled to explain why, and what would not be bizarre.  It feels like a bunch of set-theoreticians sitting in armchairs arguing about what “awareness” “must be like” so that they can predict it from their habitual formulations in mathematical logic.
>> Why do male mammals have nipples?  Because mammals have nipples.  Why isn’t that odd, that a strict suppression of all the developmental machinery that creates nipples might not be “encoded” in some wildly fancy collection of genes all localized within a Y chromosome?  Because who the hell would bother with all that, when one can just form them and not use them in half the members, and not think about it further.
>> Correspondingly, what the hell is “attraction to men” or “attraction to women” (in real, nuts and bolts operational terms?). Do we know?  Does “evolution know?”  If nobody knows what it is, how could there ever be some maniacal effort to localize it onto a sex chromosome?  And even more, what to do when sex determination isn’t alternation of chromosomes, but something bizarre and asymmetric like XX/XY systems?
>> But if “nobody” knows what it is, and much of whatever “it is” is drawing from lots of stuff across autosomes, then:
>> Why are some men attracted to men?  Because lots of women are attracted to men.
>> Why are some women attracted to women?  Because lots of men are attracted to women.
>> How is the argument any different from any of D’arcy Thompson’s arguments?
>> If fish can determine sex facultatively according to environment, then the overall project of getting two mating types (as the genders are referred to in yeast) out of what is broadly “one genome” (+/- Y and +/- mitochondria) is a pretty complicated, plastic, and signalable capacity.  It seems like just the kind of thing that wouldn’t repay the cost of hammering it down into some strict program like nematode cell division or the lobster stomatogastric complex’s operations.
>> The whole bizarreness in this seems to me like it comes somehow from what people assign as “traits” and then insist there must be “explanations for”.  It would be as bad as taking a word (like “emergence”) and then going on and on arguing about what it “really means”.  Oh, sorry… that was a different hobby horse.
>> Eric
>>> On Jan 12, 2022, at 1:04 PM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Re potential evolutionary explanations for homosexuality: They really don't have to be very convoluted at all.
>>> 
>>> I prepared a worksheet for a class 15 or so years ago, after a bunch 
>>> of students starting trying use homosexuality as proof that 
>>> evolution couldn't explain (any) behavior. I'd rather just link to 
>>> the blog... but to make things easier for other's, I'll also 
>>> copy-paste below: Fixing Psychology: Evolution and Homosexuality 
>>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2ffixingpsycholog
>>> y.blogspot.com%2f2012%2f03%2fevolution-and-homosexuality.html&c=E,1,
>>> fjB6y7zacZOW2c99wRxey5Lby--zc7qrZ3QNS4epbVLVKj_YkeEkujyM9uAGrhOPS5wA
>>> lhjLdkWXrmPWxwBRI48IRm6U1Birh_yrq8AhxQB74qgzHQzsT2TH_mpF&typo=1>
>>> 
>>> ====================
>>> 
>>> Evolution and Homosexuality
>>> 
>>> Evolutionary theorists could potentially explain homosexuality using three distinct methods. The first two take the modern notion of homosexuality at face value, the third questions it.
>>> 
>>> 1.    Explain homosexuality as a benefit in and of itself.
>>> 
>>> The most straightforward way to explain the presence of any trait using evolutionary logic is to tell a story about how individuals with that trait reproduce their genes better than those without the trait. In the case of exclusive homosexuality, that is difficult, because homosexuals do not reproduce. However, it is still possible.
>>> 
>>> For example, a costly traits may be so helpful to your relatives (i.e., your kin) that it more than makes up for the cost you pay. This is called “kin selection”. Your children will share 50% of your genes, so we can give them a value of .5 in terms of your reproduction. A full sibling’s children share 25% of your genes, so we can give them a value of .25. That means that if you posses a trait that makes you have one less child on average (-.5), but you get three more nephews or nieces in exchange (+.75), natural selection will favor that trait (= .25). On average, the next generation will have more of your genes by virtue of your possessing a trait that makes you have fewer children. This explanation could be even more powerful when applied your own parents, i.e., helping raise your brothers and sisters, with whom you share as many genes as your own children (both .5).
>>> 
>>> If that was the explanation for human homosexuality, what might you also expect to be true of homosexuality?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 2.    Explain homosexuality as a byproduct of other adaptive mechanisms.
>>> 
>>> There are many types of explanations compatible with evolutionary theory, but that do not explain the traits under questions as adaptations in and of themselves. In one way or another, these explanations explain traits as the byproduct of some other adaptive process. The trait in question could be a necessary byproduct of two evolutionarily sound items; for example, an armpit appears when you combine a torso with an arm, but no animal was ever selected specifically for having armpits! Alternatively, the trait in question could be the result of an adaptive mechanism placed in an unusual context; for example, evolution favored humans that desired sweet and fatty food in an environment where such things were rare; now that we are in an environment where such things are plentiful, this desire can cause serious health problems. Homosexuality could be explainable in terms of biological or psychological mechanisms acting appropriately in odd circumstances, or as a byproduct of selection for other beneficial traits.
>>> 
>>> If that explanation were correct, what types of traits might humans have been selected for that could result in homosexuality when pushed to the extreme or placed in unusual circumstances?
>>> 
>>> 3.    Reject the notion of homosexuality as it is currently conceived and offer new categories.
>>> 
>>> Evolutionary thinking often necessitates a rejection of old categories and the creation of new ones. The current systems of dividing the world may not be relevant to answering evolutionary questions. The labels “Homosexual” and “Heterosexual” may be good examples. The modern notions of strict homo vs. hetero-sexuality arose relatively recently. It has never been bizarrely uncommon for women or men to live together or to set up long term relationships with members of the same sex. What is relatively new is the notion that this can divide people into types, some who exclusively do one thing and some who exclusively do another.  A so-called homosexual man need only have sex with a woman once to have a baby, and visa versa. While this is now the stuff of comedic amusement, it may be a much more natural context for homosexuality. There may be no reason to think that so-called homosexuals of the past got pregnant, or impregnated others, less often than so-called hetersexuals.
>>> 
>>> If this is the case, would there necessarily be any selection for or 
>>> against preferring the relatively exclusive company of same-sex 
>>> others? What possible benefits could there be to raising children in 
>>> a “homosexual” environment? (Hey now, don’t bring moral judgment 
>>> into this, it is only a question of surviving and thriving.)  
>>> <mailto:echarles at american.edu> ============================
>>> 
>>> On Sat, Jan 8, 2022 at 6:13 PM ⛧ glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> I'm in an ongoing argument with a gay friend about how tortured 
>>> Darwinian arguments are in accounting for homosexuality. He claims 
>>> they're VERY torturous. I'm inclined toward the first mentioned 
>>> here: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26089486 
>>> <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26089486>
>>> 
>>> But, were group selection and/or cultural evolution a thing, then my friend would be more right. Anyone here have a strong opinion?
> 
> --
> glen
> Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.
> 
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