[FRIAM] gene complex for homosexuality

[Marcus Daniels]

Well, now that I've taken one extreme position, let me take the other extreme position!   This essay reflects, IMO, an arbitrary preference for social affinities of a certain sort, and it is only one sort of valid class of relationships.  Relationships that have benefits, but also costs.   It's not just overbearing on how men should be, but also on how women should be.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/toxic-masculinity.html

________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of glen <gepropella at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2022 7:47 AM
To: friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] gene complex for homosexuality

Excellent! Both EricS' and Marcus' answers to the "dumb", "bizarre", "boneheaded", etc. descriptors helps explain why they have that reaction. Both answers allude to higher order operators and the (often abusive) motivations for choosing homosexuality instead of a more tractable aspect like parochialism or identity. EricS' includes a concept of scope - material-functional distance. And I particularly like the reference to "silverback" *templates* - to those with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thanks for these answers.

One thing that sticks out, though, is the undeniable fact that "experts" are out there providing evolutionary explanations for X even if the experts know that what the "experts" are saying is bullshit. We, the laity, can't tell one from another. When hucksters like Jordan Peterson tell their lobsters and lipstick stories, we (the laity) need some non-expert heuristics to help us tell who's bullshitting us and who's not ... something more refined than calling the laity's questions dumb or bizarre.

When I commiserate with my gay friend about how some "experts" use "science" to bully them, he, being a literary philosopher not trained in biology at all, tends to argue against Scientism. So, I have to do this gymnastic circus act to defend science, deconstruct Scientism [⛧], explore the extent to which our templates do and don't apply across orders of the hierarchy, *and* do it all without saying anything supremely stupid that damages our friendship.

It's a bit like the conversations we've had, here, about ivermectin and the unfortunate correlation between right wing politics and distrust of the government [⛤]. E.g. calling the ivermectin fans (like Bret Weinstein) idiots is too blunt a criticism. What we, the laity, need are heuristics like the 5 W's for journalism, but for intricate, oft-abused concepts like biological evolution.

I really appreciated EricC's validation that evolutionary explanations for homosexuality don't *have* to be super convoluted. And alternative/possibilistic explanations, parallax, within the same arching narrative, *facilitate* demonstrating to people like my friend, the point EricS' makes that our templates work well for some questions (like viruses) and ill for others.



[⛧] Even though I often defend a form of weak Scientism.

[⛤] As I argued recently to a right-winger in the pub, we ALL distrust the government. That's why there are so many left-leaning "watchdog" groups ... and the left's support of a free press. The righties seem to think they have a monopoly on distrust of the government. Pfft.

On 1/13/22 03:35, David Eric Smith wrote:
> 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 15:13, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I don't have any problem looking for genetic correlates for things.  To tease apart the psychological and biological basis for an affinity toward some behaviors more factors need to be considered.   How does a genetic variant relate to many psychological properties and how often do those biological/psychological co-occur without the genetic variant?  It is suspicious to ask about a religious or culturally charged question about one behavior, rather than the dozens of correlates to less culturally charged properties that could be colinear with it or fail to show that the behavior can result from many kinds of influences.   Nothing needs to be "explained" about homosexuality in the sense of "You have some explaining to do."   Don't go there.   Let's do some data mining on the causes for parochial behavior.  Maybe if we can identify the variants, we can stop the pregnancies before it is too late?  Parochialism is probably a deep psychological property and not a superficial one, like homosexuality.
> ________________________________


--
glen
Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.

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