I've got to get this post out of my system... the gay gene thing.
I was interested to see this comment at the bottom of a "scientific" blog post:
While on the subject of press reports, I can't resist repeating the classic headline from Sunday's über-tabloid, The News of the World: 'Cocaine Kate's 3-in-Bed Lesbian Orgy'. (The 'Kate' is Kate Moss, in case you hadn't guessed.) Nothing to do with GNXP, but it's a dream come true!
GNXP.com
This triggered a discussion on why lesbians make men so horny.
I have a number of "how does evolution account for xxx" questions but the attraction of men to lesbians has never been one of them. The answer seems obvious: guys who were attracted to lesbians and twosomes passed on more of their genes.
What is more interesting is why there so many men and women who are gay. I have heard a number of theories beginning with "The reason for gay people is ..." but this is wrong. This "reason for" thinking is such a trap. In the context of evolution, there is no reason for anything. Things just ARE. The question is "How would this trait result in a successful strategy for perpetuating genes in the next generation?" For those in the know this is pedantic, but to a lot of people this explanation is essential.
For starters, I'm not going to debate the fact that homosexuality is heritable because I think that has been well documented elsewhere.
So what of the genes? It's possible that there is a single or combination of genes that results in homosexuality regardless of gender… or there could be gender specific gay genes. Given the different roles of men and women in reproduction, I'm going to assume that the gay genes are gender specific. Saying that, I know a number of families where the siblings of both genders are gay.
A few points which theorists may like to address but which I just add as a mental note:
- there are way more predominantly gay men than predominantly gay women
- men tend to be gay or straight – few men are bisexual
- a large number of women are bisexual and few are exclusively gay
Untested but worthy of further investigation:
- Gay men are better looking than straight men. Has anyone done a symmetry test?
Ok the theories...
Lesbians
- Women who bonded as a couple would have been more successful in rearing children than women who were alone. With men buggering off on silly hunting trips or otherwise indisposed due to war and the like, this may have proven a successful survival strategy.
- Where men had multiple wives, the wives were less likely to kill each other if they were having sex together.
[Somewhere in the middle here I assume that the male taste for lesbians evolved. Men who got jealous seeing their wives at it would have passed on less genes than those who joined the party]
- And here's the very politically incorrect "I know my friends won't speak to me for 3 months" theory. Let's say that in every tribe, there are a few women who are unable to find a mate. The men aren't selecting them (we'll assume there is some modicum of male choice at work). If the rejects just go about their business and become spinsters so be it. But lets say a couple of them get together. If the male trait for attraction to lesbians and threesomes has already developed, this girlie action could be all the extra incentive some guy needs for getting them pregnant.
Gay Men
I think the only thing that makes sense here is kin survival ie if a gay man helps provide for his sibling's family, his genes may be more successful in the next generation.
Ironically, religious pressure to marry and procreate may have helped propagate gay male genes as it no doubt does today. All those X-gays are just a breeding ground for little gay boys and girls!
From these theories, it would seem there would be many more avenues for a lesbian gene to propagate than a gay male gene and yet the opposite seems to be true. Saying that, there are likely many more bisexual women than gay men.
There are probably mathematical ways this would work out… the genotype of a woman need only have one lesbian gene to be bisexual but needs two to be a hard core "men stand back 300 feet" type. With men, on the other hand, the gene may be completely recessive and when it shows, it's the real deal.
And that's THAT.
To end off, perhaps you could answer a question for me...
How does evolution account for the fact I find baby mammals of other species so damn cute?
Labels: genetics, science
Last night the choir worked with John Nelson for the first time. Lim Yau has been preparing us for Elijah these last few month but has now handed over the reigns.
Usually when another conductor takes over from Lim Yau, we only get him for one rehearsal or less prior to the tutti rehearsals with orchestra and soloists. However Nelson is taking us for two full rehearsals before the SSO joins us. To this Lim Yau remarked "I suspect he's a choral man."
Nelson's directions to the choir were almost identical to Lim Yau's though expressed differently. While we acquitted ourselves well for the most part, I should think Lim Yau was rather embarrassed when the choir couldn't get their timing right on a passage with a basic 6/8 time signature; I know I was. Lim Yau had us work on it beforehand but even Nelson had to get people to tap it out by hand with limited success. The only other moment of cringing was when Nelson pointed in the general direction of the first sopranos and said he was hearing too much vibrato. Lim Yau had made this point several times and although he said he "didn't know who was doing it" he practically did a bee dance in front of the individual. He knows; we know; everyone knows.
Nelson was energetic and charming. Making the transition from one conductor to the next is not always straightforward but Nelson made it easy. He was very demonstrative of the passion he was looking for from us... this included a lot of entertaining hopping around, kicking Shane off the piano to bang out a few bars and even shouting at the top of his lungs a few times. It is a very different style of conducting to what we're used to!
The contrast of approach makes me understand Lim Yau's style more clearly. Nelson asks us to project the story through the music... he goes to the drama of the story line to illustrate the dynamics he's looking for.
Lim Yau, on the other hand, looks more directly to the music. It's as if the story is already saturated in the music and now all we need to concentrate on are the notes. When Nelson was describing the dynamics, he talked about the emotion of the story. When Lim Yau was describing dynamics, he talked about the colour of the music – the imagery evoked by the sound itself. It's probably a subtle difference that nobody paid much attention to but I now wonder how this has influenced me over the years.
I've come to regard music as a communication of emotions – ideas and concepts like "I love you" "this is fantastic" "the sea" are only derivatives of the direct communication which strikes our hearts and a very primal part of our minds. Trying to grasp an intellectual meaning from music is like trying to grasp streaming water in your hands. You can get your fingers wet but you can't really grab on to anything.
Words change all that. Focus on the words and the bird is caged. Focus on the words and you catch a thimbleful of the ocean.
For a non-christian who is rather uncomfortable with the messages Elijah has to offer on religious tolerance and the wrath of God, Lim Yau's approach is easier on my conscious. Communication of emotions seem to occupy a higher ground even if the underlying inspiration was, say, the slaying of pagans. The musical message comes from a timeless archetype. The specifics of the story are incidental.
Saying that, there's something very punchy about a direct reference to the story. Or perhaps that's simply a reflection of Nelson's style. I am happy for the exposure to both approaches as the contrast gives me a better understanding of each and in turn of the music.
Now if we could just get everyone to cope with compound timing, we might actually have something. One-two-three, one-two-three...
Labels: music
God the Pachinko Player
It's time to come clean. I've been bashing Intelligent Design a lot lately and I'm starting to feel bad about it. It feels like being mean to small helpless animals. Of course I realize that some of these poor creatures aren't so helpless and actually run the American government. Still it seems nasty to pick on simple folk. They know not what they do.
As for my own beliefs, it's just not possible to spend 5-6 hours a week singing choral music and not be a spiritual suspect. So I admit to a lingering feeling that this overwhelming sense of awe and beauty can't simply be attributed to thousands of generations of sexual selection for musical sensitivity.
I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.
Charles Darwin, 1860, source
I like the idea of a God having created all the natural laws with the rest of time evolving like a giant Pachinko Game. I don't think the ID-ologists (not to be confused with Caroline Sami) would approve however. Their God seems to be more of a chess player. Plus he comes with a lot of anthropomorphic traits I can't take too seriously including bad moods, desire for lots of praise and open-toed sandals.
Whether God created life, created the natural laws, is the natural laws or is simply a security blanket to lost souls cast upon a meaningless universe, is besides the point. That is a philosophical discussion. ID does not belong in science class.
I'm happy to debate this but there are limits. My list of dumb arguments I won't bother having include the following:
- Evolution didn't happen. Well it did and if you are too pig-headed to recognize this and think dinosaur bones are part of some elaborate Dan Brown like plot carried out by God, then there's nothing to discuss. Disagreement by scientists about the specifics of the process does not disprove its existence any more than one church faction diverging from another disproves the existence of God. If your God doesn't have the capacity to create evolution then you need a new God.
- Random Disasters, Black Holes, Multiverses, etc. , etc. disprove the existence of God. No they don't; they simply redefine his powers. It's an endless argument.
Ironically, I'm not confident we could have evolved the capacity to grasp reality. We experience 3 spatial dimensions and have a linear grasp of time. We have big brains because they helped us find fruit and perhaps helped us charm the pants off the opposite sex. Would it be a happy side-effect that this could equip us with the ability to really grasp the nature of the universe? I guess we'll know when we get there.
Either way, debates about metaphysics are totally subjective. They don't affect reality either way so there's no point getting dogmatic.
You Asked for It
It upsets me that some religions teach their followers to not think and to rely on blind faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But likewise I get fed up with scientists who attempt to veer their work on a collision course with God. Why bother? Why are people so wrapped up with trying to disprove the existence of something that could never be proved to exist in the first place?
Was evolution characterized by a number of mass extinctions? Yes. Were these caused by random events – perhaps huge meteors hitting the earth? Yes. Does this disprove the existence of God? Why are we even asking the question in the course of a scientific discussion? If you're going to open up that can of worms then quite frankly, you've just invited them into your classroom... and we don't want them there.
Labels: religion, science
