Re: Help needed with expletives

Gerry Quinn <gerryq@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Yep, there are a lot of conjectures. But the obvious null hypothesis,
at least as regards male homosexuals, is that something went wrong in
the womb, perhaps due to conflict between maternal and foetal sex
hormones etc.

I'd agree that's the "obvious" hypothesis (modulo various other places
things can go wrong: I don't think wombs have a monopoly on that).

But, off the cuff, the alleged/reported rates of male homosexuality seem
to me to be too high for it to be correct.

"Not reproducing" is fatal to the germ-line. At first glance, selection
pressures against it ought to be even higher than selection pressures
against haemophilia, cystic fibrosis and other unpleasant, fatal and
life-threatening conditions. They appear not to have been.

ISTM your null hypothesis is untenable.

And, of course, selection doesn't have a purpose. There could be a
thousand different "causes" why selection hasn't reduced it to one or
two cases in a million, each of which contributes only a tiny amount to
selection pressure. IOW, looking for "the" explanation may be
oversimplistic.

Jonathan

.

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