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[Reelya]

If pedophiles don't breed, wouldn't their prevalence be significantly lower than it appears to be? Darwin 101, as you've mentioned before. And homosexuals, for that matter, shouldn't breed by definition. And yet up to 20% of respondents in modern anonymous polls report some level of homosexual tendencies these days.

Well the thing is, natural selection can only work if total breeding success < 100%, therefore no species optimizes for 100% survival / procreation. There's also the fact that any number of developmental issues can make an organism turn out sub-optimal, even if there's one "perfect" way to turn out.

Wanting to have sex is the primary thing: without that you're not having many babies. Separately, the system needs to code in your primers for attraction. And concepts like "male" and "female" don't actually exist as objective binary categories. So evolution can only code for things like "attracted to faces", "attracted to a nice butt" etc etc. Because those categories aren't real things, evolution tries to correlate your attraction to physical traits of the other gender, but it's only a correlation, not a binary thing.

Evolution doesn't deal in absolutes, only averages. Things aren't needed to be perfect, only to be good enough to replace the last generation. It requires two things: interest in sex, and who you're interested in. Those things are programmed in the womb by hormones, not directly by genes. That's the main thing to understand: genes do very little directly, they do everything through intermediary chemicals, so they can only control things within a certain level of tolerance. The brains of everyone male and female start out neutral and they get imprinted by various chemicals. Genes can only loosely control that, and anything that perturbs the levels of those chemicals can make things turn out different.

So say the genome that turns out the horniest straight men and women 90% of the time also turns out 10% of people who are gay. Well, the birthrate just evolves to be 10% higher than it would otherwise. Humans have a lot more sex than most related primates, it might be that our much higher sex drive in general gives a survival advantage, but also causes higher rates of same-sex attraction and other sexual attractions.

It's a cost/benefit thing. Evolution has a cost-effective strategy to deal with some organisms not maturing into active breeders: have more babies. That's a lot cheaper in evolutionary terms than "evolve to be 100% perfect and flawless".

[Harry Baldman]

Well, that's a weird thing to suddenly bring back up. I remember that discussion - we kind of went heavily off-base on that if I recall correctly, and it started with me summoning a rather uncharacteristic level of heavy distaste for evolutionary psychology approaches. So rather than go on with this, let's just get back to what my point ultimately was:

You can't in good faith invoke evolution to try and explain why non-binary genders are uncommon because it's pretty much guaranteed to have a very high degree of environmental influence much like any psychological or neurological factor, which means it's hardly well-regulated by evolution even if it did confer a measurable change in fitness (which is also not at all guaranteed). For example, a study of all adult twins in Sweden checked for concordance of homosexuality, and what they ultimately found was that genetic factors explain 34-39% of the variance in men (individual-specific environmental factors mostly) and 18-19% of the variance in women.

These are fairly moderate numbers comparable to, say, autoimmune disease, and the key difference here is that an autoimmune disease and queerness are both somewhat easily distinguished phenotypes, as opposed to non-binary genders, which are concepts with limited bearing on behavior that often don't really make a lot of sense upon closer examination. The evolutionary argument, my point was, is a pretty fallacious thing to invoke for something only barely controlled by evolution, so this is why I took issue with your criticism of the article. Not only would non-binary gender be poorly regulated by evolution at best, there's no actual guarantee that it's in any way maladaptive to be a demigirl as opposed to a woman. Or even agender, or any other intriguing variation. Especially not in an ancient world (the kind that you'd expect such selective pressure to take hold) where procreation was a much less liberally approachable question than it is in our modern society rich in choice and alternatives.

I want to just point out that Jared Fogle (Subway Man) had a wife and children. I say had because they're divorced and he's in jail for pedo-ing. Mind you, he was just going for less-than-the-legal-age girls, who are/were in parts of the world and much of history considered suitable for marriage, sex, reproduction, etc. Our modern western civilization is more civilized, IMO, since it recognizes that underage people are not emotionally mature and are too easily manipulated by their emotions.

I have also heard of homosexuals historically (even recently, or even now in less accepting society) having wives and families because it was expected of them.

I really don't like discussing pedophiles and homosexuals near each other, because they're nothing alike, despite attempts by some religious groups to demonize homosexuals by claiming that they are all pedophiles.

Which was exactly my point - even something that you would very reasonably expect to negatively impact your reproductive fitness, such as a sexual preference for children or the same sex, does not necessarily do any such thing. So thus I challenged the overly simplified assumption by Reelya that it would, and that this would create selective pressure against it as opposed to it being just a case of drift over time combined with environmental factors favorable for the emergence of non-binary genders.

And yeah, I'm not actually equating pedophiles with homosexuals, it's just that homosexuality is rather unusual in that it is a non-pathology that gets tracked quite a lot, and thus when trying to bring up statistical data for psychological factors it invariably ends up in similar company as pedophilia, schizophrenia, depression and other such things.

[Reelya]

Well Shadowlord quoted it just now so I thought I'd lay out my argument in full there, for him mainly.

What's that about non-binary genders being rare because of evolution? I don't get it. It's a complete tangent to what I just wrote.

[Harry Baldman]

Well Shadowlord quoted it just now so I thought I'd lay out my argument in full there.

Although the context in which Shadowlord cited your quote wasn't about non-binary genders at all here, and I didn't reference "non-binary genders" either
in what I wrote so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up.

Because that was what the original argument was about - how to explain that an overwhelming amount of people fall into the two main genders while a relatively small minority say they are actually in different places on a hypothetical gender spectrum. The author maintained that they were making shit up to differentiate themselves in a quest for identity, you maintained that it was evolution. And I said that it's probably not evolution because evolution doesn't work like that for factors as complex as subtle psychological differences, and that Darwin 101 does not apply at all well to multifactorial inheritance, especially the kind with a large environmental component. And also that evopsych is a crock of shit, of course, but I always say that in any argument.

[Reelya]

Well then you're derailing what I just wrote to bring back an argument we had a long time ago. If you check, what I wrote here has almost no connection to the "refutation" you just gave.

But i guess I still stand by what I wrote before anyway.
 

Especially not in an ancient world (the kind that you'd expect such selective pressure to take hold) where procreation was a much less liberally approachable question than it is in our modern society rich in choice and alternatives.

I'd agree that it would be more regulated in agrarian societies, but I think if you're talking the 500,000 years before that things would be very different, and basic mating instincts would be much more important. And that's the key period for evolution, not the last 10000 years where mating has been regulated by agricutural life.

[spümpkin]

I've known a fair number of furries on the internet, but I am not one myself, so I don't really want to speak for them, but could this actually be them?

'Furry' is a vague term, at best. Some people are 'kin' and would rather be an animal/character or something (I'm not gonna judge, whatever makes them happy), but I don't think either of these things have to do with actual physical brain structure. Of course, not every person who experiences gender dysphoria gets a brain scan, so who knows if they're really lying or not?

If I'm honest, I've doubted myself in the past on my gender, and spent the last 6 years doing so. But here I go on again about my own story, so I'll cut to the chase :V

People who are trans-{x} have to feel consistently dysphoric to be classified as officially trans-{x}, so I dunno if it counts, no.

Well then you're derailing what I just wrote to bring back an argument we have a long time ago. If you check, what I wrote here has almost no connection to the "refutation" you just gave.

I think he's more refuting your point against his old point in-context of the original argument.

[Harry Baldman]

Well then you're derailing what I just wrote to bring back an argument we have a long time ago. If you check, what I wrote here has almost no connection to the "refutation" you just gave.

I carry very long grudges and I'm easily riled up by people conveniently simplifying evolution for the purposes of argument

I think he's more refuting your point against his old point in-context of the original argument.

Yeah, I thought he was just picking up where we left off when he quoted me. Hence attempting to contextualize the whole thing for anybody who blissfully missed the first go-round. I think I was mistaken?

[Reelya]

Well i think the argument is kinda poor

You can't in good faith invoke evolution to try and explain why non-binary genders are uncommon because it's pretty much guaranteed to have a very high degree of environmental influence much like any psychological or neurological

This seems to be opinion/circular reasoning.

For example, a study of all adult twins in Sweden checked for concordance of homosexuality, and what they ultimately found was that genetic factors explain 34-39% of the variance in men

But that's not the only biological factor. There's the fraternal birth order effect, which reportedly increases the chance of being homosexual by 28%-48% per older biological brother (adopted or step-brothers doesn't affect it, and it doesn't matter if your raised in the same house or separate. So it's fairly conclusively biological). Take the base of 35% for genetics times 1.4  from one older brother and we're already up to the majority of homosexuality in some males being explained by two known biological variables.

But "genes" and "biological older brothers" aren't even the direct variables, they're merely secondary or even tertiary variables. The proximate causes are hormones. And if things which are merely loosely correlated with hormones can already account for 50%+ of homosexuality then how much better a predictor would good knowledge of the hormones involved give us?

[Harry Baldman]

This seems to be opinion/circular reasoning.

Not quite - the simplest genetic issues are monogenic illnesses like cystic fibrosis, where straightforward alterations in a key protein disable functions insufficiently critical to outright immediately kill you. You can't explain higher brain functioning quite as easily because it's not just determined by genetics but also by the neuronal pathways that see active use in your development. Hence anything that involves your mental functioning and little else tends to be multifactorial as a rule because the proteins involved are subtle in their effects and your mind is a product of its environment to a high degree. Hence why eugenics and other such things failed - many of the things they were interested in, such as heightened intelligence, was a product of nurture as much or more so than of nature. Similarly virtually anything complex or anything that integrates information from the environment - autoimmune diseases being a great non-neural example - are very environment-dependent.

But that's not the only biological factor. There's the fraternal birth order effect, which reportedly increases the chance of being homosexual by 28%-48% per older biological brother. Add in your base of 35% for genetics with +38% from one older brother and we're already up to 70+% of homosexuality in males explained by two known biological variables. And we'd be fools to think those are the only biological variables at play. Genetics only influences development one-step-removed from the actual hormones and developmental chemicals. So if we knew which chemicals were the important ones the genes were affecting, then the correlation between that and sexual orientation is probably a good bit better than the 35% correlation with genome.

I'm pretty sure that's shitty math at play there (although concordance math is pretty simple as well), but then I'm not a mathematician, so we'll leave that be.

I'm also fairly sure that fraternal birth order counts as an environmental effect (in that it presumably arises from hormone levels as you say), and singling it out as a biological variable is another way to confuse the issue - all significant variables are biological variables because all signals that have an effect are integrated into your biology.

You might as well say that the inhibition of action for VEGF, cereblon and bFGF is a significant biological effect with relevance on the birth of short-limbed individuals. You'd be right, but what inhibits that and is the real thing to look out for is that you took thalidomide during a pregnancy that acts as the inhibitor in question. You're taking the middle of the signal pathway as all the explanation you need to dub it a biological factor, when in truth it's anything but.

When people talk about genetic effects, this is what they're referring to. Let's assume that homosexuality is determined by androgens/estrogens in the womb. When people talk about genetic effects on this, they would mean relative loss of function or gain of function in pathways that affect said androgen-estrogen ratios, and thus predispose the fetus for exposition to unusual concentrations of these factors during development even under circumstances that normally would not cause them.

Meanwhile, environmental effects are also completely biological factors, but they're in turn caused by changes in the environment - such as the birth of a previous boy or a particularly good/bad day at work causing alterations in your stress reaction pathways - rather than predicted by faults in your genome. And this evolution has very little to do with (unlike controlling the integrity of active sites of key proteins in endocrine pathways), although you could make the argument that group-level selection might apply if homosexuality provided a net effect on fitness for groups containing them (not entirely implausible that this might be an increase in fitness, truth be told, but all of that is merely guesswork).

COUNTEREDIT: as for needing to study what really causes all of this, I wholeheartedly agree. I find the hormone link terribly interesting myself, and look forward to any science on the subject, whether through mapping the gayest known SNPs and indels and figuring out their respective pathways or through any other method.

[Shadowlord]

I've known a fair number of furries on the internet, but I am not one myself, so I don't really want to speak for them, but could this actually be them?

'Furry' is a vague term, at best. Some people are 'kin' and would rather be an animal/character or something (I'm not gonna judge, whatever makes them happy), but I don't think either of these things have to do with actual physical brain structure. Of course, not every person who experiences gender dysphoria gets a brain scan, so who knows if they're really lying or not?

If I'm honest, I've doubted myself in the past on my gender, and spent the last 6 years doing so. But here I go on again about my own story, so I'll cut to the chase :V

People who are trans-{x} have to feel consistently dysphoric to be classified as officially trans-{x}, so I dunno if it counts, no.

My understanding is that there are trans-people who didn't/don't feel consistently dysphoric, that it isn't a requirement (I saw some people saying that euphoria at the thought of being female was also a sign, but I think perhaps not as certain a sign as dysphoria). The ultimate test, though, that would be starting on the hormone therapy - if someone does that and THEN feels newly dysphoric*, then they're not trans, and continuing the hormone therapy (which isn't really a therapy anymore at that point?) would only be mentally harmful.

* To be clear, I mean because suddenly they have the wrong hormones. It's still possible, and I expect some here have experienced it (I talked with someone to whom this has happened), to start on hormones and have dysphoria mostly go away but not entirely, or come back to some degree, because that penis is not a vagina. I also get the impression that it's possible to not have dysphoria from being a woman with a penis, but I have not talked to anyone like that, but "trans-women I have talked to extensively about how they feel" is a sample size of one right now.

[Reelya]

Yeah, I thought he was just picking up where we left off when he quoted me. Hence attempting to contextualize the whole thing for anybody who blissfully missed the first go-round. I think I was mistaken?

I hadn't actually recalled the details of the previous conversation in the slightest until you reminded me, i was just picking up with a fresh train of thought since Shadowlord linked a quote of yours that I thought was interesting to elaborate on.

[Shadowlord]

I just remembered something that I don't think was discussed yet: I have read before that mens' sex drives start high and decrease slowly over time, and womens' sex drives increase over time (until menopause).

From a quick search:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libido#Impact_of_age
which cites https://books.google.com/books?id=lZ_u181EM_IC&pg=PT196&dq=&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zSowT5SHCMeP0AXYu5StCA&ved=0CFwQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=&f=false

The reason I bring this up is because I don't remember mine starting ridiculously high (I wasn't terribly interested in sex, never even kissed a girl, though I 'dated' a couple girls in high school), but it's increased over time and affects my thoughts far more now than it did when I was a teenager. I'm not really expecting anyone to have an explanation for that, I'm just wondering if that has been the case with anyone else here of a similar age or older (I'm 34).

_{I'm also not seeing anyone currently.}

[Reelya]

Not sure about that, but that reminded me of some statistics which are BS by definition - straight males reporting many more sexual partners than straight females in their lifetime. By logical necessity, those numbers must be equal - each time a man has a female sexual partner, score one on for the men. Each time a woman has a male sexual partner, score one for the women. Count up the scores. How can they be different?

http://www.livescience.com/7038-men-report-sex-partners-women.html

The women reported on average 8.6 lifetime sexual partners. The men claimed 31.9.

I think last time I brought that one up, Smeeprocket or someone similar claimed the average male was counting the prostitutes he's slept with against the total, but I think it's hard to claim that the "average" joe blow sleeps with 23 prostitutes in their lifetime (in fact only 20% of American men on surveys say they've ever used a prostitute, so those 1/5 would have had to have had 100 prostitutes each to reach the total that way). So, that's another myth that's out there: the vast majority of American men use prostitutes.

[Shadowlord]

Reelya, well, this is distributed over time, so if it was accurate (or adjusted to account for that), this would work if "cougars" hooking up with guys younger than them? Also sexual desire doesn't necessarily correspond to sexual activity, but I assume that is obvious.

Edit: I see you edited your post! I don't have the statistics from any studies that may have formed the basis for the age-difference in libido, but I would assume they could adjust for people over/underestimating their partners by taking the total partners stated for each gender, and adjusting up/down so that the totals matched? Except I don't think they were basing it on number of sexual partners at all?

[Reelya]

Well, the short answer is you can't trust people's responses in these surveys.

The survey with 8.6 vs 31.9 was actually life-time prevalence for a cohort in their late 40's. The numbers represent the average number of individual sexual partners in their lifetimes. Coming up with explanations is always interesting because the explanations usually defy common beliefs, or are at odds with other research.

I don't really know about the libido thing. But the fact that women systematically seem to minimize the number of sexual partners they have might mean their answers on "libido" surveys are also suspect. After all, if men are actually counting the number of ladies they've been with, those ladies must have been with the same number of men, yet they only report 1/3rd the number of partners, so they're under-counting by 2/3rds. And even if men are exaggerating: they're probably exaggerating their libido on those surveys as well.