Posts Tagged ‘gay’

A bill is currently making its way through the various structures, to pardon Alan Turing.

What a load of nonsense.

Alan Turing was guilty of homosexual activity. He was. Of course nobody for even a moment would pretend that is something that should be a criminalise offense! But to pardon one person is essentially saying “you did wrong, but you did a lot of good so we’re going to let you off”.

Is this the message we want to put forward? If so, I think it’s time we pardoned Julian Assange for those rapes he may or may not have committed. Clearly, we’re not going to be doing this.

What we we should instead by saying is “this law was nonsense, and anyone convicted of it is now exonerated of any wrong doing, regardless of how many German codes you broke”.

Don’t pardon Turing – pardon everyone. They never did anything wrong.

Well said.

Worfolk 18 is pleased to announce we’re expanding our existing range of adult entertainment websites with our first gay offering – Gay Men 365. Updated with a new photo every single day!

In my post on the taste of meat I briefly mentioned the problem of homosexuality and natural selection. That is to say, why does homosexuality persist, given you think natural selection would weed it out because gay men are not having babies and therefore not propagating their genes.

Many people have taken this to mean that homosexuality is some kind of defect, where something has gone wrong because the ultimate goal in life is making babies and these people aren’t doing it.

Luckily, Rich had written a talk to explain all about it. Having first delivered it at Rationalist Week 2009 he also delivered it to Leeds Skeptics later that year.

I’ll skip the interesting, but never the less skippable introduction and get straight to the answer.

Genes do different things based on their environment. So in one person with one set of genes, a specific gene may do one thing – but take that gene out and put it in someone else with a different set of genes and it may well do something else.

This is what we find with the so-called gay gene. In men, it is more likely to make them homosexuals. But put that same gene in a woman and it actually makes them more fertile. Therefore a woman carrying the gay gene is more likely to have children and even though some of them may turn out to be homosexual men, the women will continue to propagate the gene because of their increased fertility.

There are other factors at work as well of course – homosexuality is a combination of both nature and nurture. Having the gay gene doesn’t mean you will be gay – it just increases your chances. But that is Rich’s argument as far as the genetic side goes.