Mathematical Proof that Homosexuality is Genetically Determined

Before the stock market developed a severe case of Baracktile Dysfunction, I was starting to invest in a company called Illumina.  Even though the stock for this company has crashed pretty hard, I still believe that the long term potential for this company is pretty good.  Their mission is to revolutionize the healthcare industry by providing personal medicine solutions tailored to your DNA.  In other words, it is likely that in the not too distant future when you are born they will take a blood sample and map your DNA right after they record your fingerprints.  They will then use this DNA sample to determine which chronic diseases your are susceptible to.  They will also develop medical treatments based specifically on your DNA.  I imagine that within the next 20 years we will look back at our current healthcare system the same way that we look back on the intinerant quacks of the 19th century.  We will joke about how we used to go to a doctor, recount our symptoms, and the doctor would prescribe us medicine after some educated guesswork.  I believe that Illumina, if it fulfills its mission, will be a giant like Merck or Pfizer.

However, this post isn’t to encourage you to go buy Illumina stock (even though it is a relative bargain).  This post is intended to be a response to the comment that Wallace left on my post, “Homosexuality is Demographically Doomed.”  In the comment he said that homosexuality isn’t going away, and he linked to an article called “Sexually Antagonistic Selection in Human Male Homosexuality.”  The article makes a compelling argument to demonstrate that homosexuality is genetically determined.  The writers of the article admit that the stable permanence of homosexuality in all human populations presents a puzzling Darwinian Paradox.  Where the article itself was quite fascinating, the following passage was the most interesting to me and probably reflects the main point the Wallace was trying to get across:

Sexually antagonistic selection is at present recognized as a powerful mechanism through which genetic variation of fitness is maintained despite sexual selection in biological populations, in insects, birds, and mammals, leading to population divergence and possibly speciation. Our findings firmly establish, with a particularly relevant example, the occurrence of sexually antagonistic characters in humans. This point of view may help shift the focus away from male homosexuality per se: rather than concentrating on the sole aspect of the reduced male fecundity that it entails, we can place it within the more general framework of a genetic trait with gender-specific benefit, which may have evolved by increasing the fecundity of females. A consequence of this is that the entire population exhibits a high fecundity variation, and, as we show, the trait can neither disappear nor completely invade the gene pool. Indeed, the GFMH may belong to a possibly wide, but at present still poorly understood, class of sexually antagonistic characters that contribute to the maintenance of the observed genetic variation in human populations. As such characters are mostly expected to have a sex-linked component, the present treatment of the GMFH should provide basic understanding also of the dynamics of any such general sexual antagonistic traits.

To unpack the latent ideas in this quote might take several posts, or you can just watch the third installment of the X-Men trilogy.  However, in response to Wallace, I agree that homosexuality isn’t going away, but I also agree with the article that homosexuality will not completely invade the gene pool.

The point of my post was to point out that the demographic foundation upon which the current gay rights movement stands is tenuous.  Many of the social groups who are most hostile to homosexuality have the highest birthrates in the world.  While it is true that America in 2008 is relatively tolerant of homosexuality in a historical sense, I don’t think tolerance is the end result of some linear form of progress.  It is probably more likely that tolerance is a cyclical phenomenon.

If it is true that homosexuality is a genetically determined, then in the brave new world being engineered by a company such as Illumina, homosexuality will be able to be treated as a genetic medical condition.  If this is the case, then the Darwinian paradox of humans evolving to the point where they can determine evolution with technology might trump the Darwinian paradox inherent in the idea of sexually antagonistic selection.  In other words, the studies that are being conducted to determine that homosexuality is a biological condition rather than a choice might be the same studies that lay the groundwork for some sinister future generation to be given the choice to eradicate homosexuality from the gene pool.

Whether homosexuality is biologically determined or not will become less important than the question, “Will homosexuality choose to not offend its host society (fully empowered with tools of genetic engineering) to the point of annihiliation?”