On the other hand, homosexuality seems to be caused by genes as well!

Studies coming out all the time. I posted the other day about a study which found that gay male brains share characteristics with straight female brains, and gay female with straight male, etc…so that’s interesting.

Well, now we have a new study coming out of Italy which suggests that the same hereditary genes which serve to make females more fecund, or fruitful, manifest as homosexuality in male offspring:

Homosexuality in males may be caused in part by genes that can increase fertility in females, according to a new study.

The findings may help solve the puzzle of why, if homosexuality is hereditary, it hasn’t already disappeared from the gene pool, since gay people are less likely to reproduce than heterosexuals.

A team of researchers found that some female relatives of gay men tend to have more children than average.

(…)

If the same genes create both homosexuality in men and increased fertility in women, then any losses in offspring that come about from the males would be made up for by the females of the family.

“Sexually antagonistic selection is an old idea by Richard Dawkins, but this has never been proven in humans,” Camperio-Ciani told LiveScience. “There are a large quantity of these traits found in insects, for example, and recently in deer sexually antagonistic traits have been discovered, showing that high-ranking males produce rather unsuccessful daughters. We found that sexually antagonistic selection is operating also in our species, and we found it in a very important trait, which is homosexuality.”

(…)

“I think this is an example where the results of scientific research can have important social implications…You have all this antagonism against homosexuality because they say it’s against nature because it doesn’t lead to reproduction. We found out this is not true because homosexuality is just one of the consequences of strategies for making females more fecund.”

So that’s fascinating. I’ve long suspected that the biological and neurological causes of homosexuality would ultimately be found to be very different in men than they are in women. What’s particularly interesting about this is that science is starting to scratch the surface of WHY sexuality works the way it does, and why it’s beneficial. In many animal species, homosexuality has been shown to be naturally occurring, and even necessary. It would make sense that human sexuality would also follow this pattern.

Here’s the full paper if you’re bored.