On the Crisis of Scientifically Studying Homosexuality

Crossposted, Original Link

Unless addressing HIV, AIDS, or sexual health, queer communities, at least in Lebanon, often disregard scientific interferences in our issues. Even though it is understandable, this hatred is still misleading, disturbing, and damaging to our movement. At the heart of my article is my scientific side trying to analyze and explain how scientists fucked up when they pointed their microscopes towards our identities.
If you bring up most scientific research talking about the genetic, psychological, or hormonal origin of our identities, you are most likely to get rolling eyes for a response. In some cases, you could harshly be reprimanded for being self-hating or naïve.
This scientophobia, if I may call it that, is a direct result of our bitter history with unethical or biased scientists trying to prevent us from accepting, or to heal us from, our identities.
In this article, we will not go over theories and studies that discuss biological and psychological origins of homosexuality. For those, you may find a well-referenced discussion about the subject on Wikipedia.
Scientific flaws permeate most of these research papers: The first being that they often study small groups of “homogenous” homosexuals. The studied homosexual is usually the stereotyped homosexual, white, cute, HIV+ and effeminate man.
There are rarely any mentions of other sub-communities, of lesbians, bisexuals, non-effeminate gay men, or transgender individuals. Perhaps, including everyone in one study would be too much of a hassle – I understand.
But here’s the catch: When you limit the scope of your study, you limit the scope of your conclusion. When you study a very specific population of homosexuals, you clarify the profile of that population.
After all, when science brags about finding an origin for homosexuality, and after looking at one sub-group in the queer community, random fucks, and their random assumptions about me, are legitimized, when in fact, science has barely ever studied people like me!
Of course, there are also issues of methodology that surface with some of the research. LeVay’s research* for example had a small sample of 7 homosexual men who died of AIDS. A sample of 7 is not enough to draw any conclusions whatsoever; the margin of error would remain too large. The differences observed could have resulted from sample artifacts, random population drifts, pure luck, etc.
Needless to say, these findings always fail the fundamental scientific test of replication. The laywoman may not know this, but for any scientific quantitative research to be acknowledged and for the scientist behind it to be accredited, it needs to be verified by another research team, while studying a different sample of the same population. If the conclusions fail to conform, then the theory is dropped.
The analysis of the results is also problematic. Scientists are allowed and encouraged to draw conclusions, as long as they, on one hand, keep their assumptions within the limits of reason, and on the other hand, they ought to clearly state they are speculating.
In addition, scientific research was always plagued with the overlap between causality and correlation, and that often led to numerous cruelties concealed behind the veil of science. As a biologist, there is nothing that shames me more. When we speak of causality, it means that A causes B, sticking a knife in someone’s skin causes a wound. Correlation on the other hand, means A is highly common when B is highly common in a specific population, for example, IQ results are often low in African American populations in the United States of America. Correlation may indicate causality, but scientists must be extremely careful when making a conclusion for a scientific research. Because s/he will steer the public opinion based on her/his research.
The African American IQ studies for example were disastrous and shameful for the scientists who performed them. Because of their racism and blunt bias, they frauded (they plea innocence on the basis of ignorance, but I personally refuse to let them off that easily) the results. Instead of drawing attention to some fundamental social problems affecting a minority’s ability to integrate the school system, such as language barriers, they chose to stigmatize the African American population and formulating correlation in the guise of causality.
Similarly, when scientists speak of homosexuality, they often speak of correlations with subtle phenomena such as unhealthy family dynamics, or a succession of older female siblings, and so on. They often fail to bring the social into the scene: After all, when parents notice that their son may be homosexual in a homophobic society, they often turn aggressive, if not violent.
You can also notice how some scientists, mainly genetic engineers, conduct certain “gay mice and homosexual flies” types of research and manipulation. It sounds interesting, that’s for sure, but when you think about it, what on earth do we have in common with mice? And flies? To top it off, the definition of a “homosexual fly” is one that just sticks its genital organ into another male. The same goes for mice. Such populations do not “choose partners” and have no preferential attitude towards anyone in the population. Give them a 100 mates and they will fuck 100 mates. I believe that the queer populations, throughout the different sub-communities, agree that what we define as sexuality is far more complicated.
Some argue that we look at animals in order to counter the normalcy argument. A comparison with insects and rodents is irrelevant for this purpose, because our social structures are fundamentally different from theirs: Drinking human blood is not rendered normal because mosquitoes ingest blood, is it?
If we need to better understand the evolutionary advantage our sexuality and identities present to society, then we can study animals that are socially closer to us, maybe primates. For such populations, non-heterosexual romance and sexual practice have been observed for as long as these animals have been observed.
For this, we also need to clarify, or maybe remember, that the concept of “normal” is void by definition, humans are normal, our non-conforming identities and orientations are by definition normal because a human being feels them, if these feelings were not “normal”, we wouldn’t be able to feel them. Psychological problems and illnesses are normal, they usually occur as a coping mechanism against stressful environments. Why do we treat them as illnesses? Because they pose a handicap to the individual’s life, hinder their ability to resolve the source(s) of stress, or causes danger to those around them. The same is not true for being queer. Rape, murder, violence, infanticide, pedophilia, necrophilia, and other unacceptable behavior have been observed and documented throughout history and across the ecosystems. This does not mean that we want to legalize them or defend pedophile rights, does it?
If we were to point out the patriarch of all scientific mistakes regarding homosexuality, it would be the desocialization of a deeply social matter. If you want to study homosexuality you need to know that you are stepping into an intricate field, where identity collides with a deeply heteronormative and homophobic society. You also need to understand that, whether or not you have a problem with homosexuals, and most modern societies have a problem with them, and that problem has a name, homophobia.
Unlike members of ethnic minorities, we are often born into heteronormative families, our persecution starts in our cradles. Such a struggle stains our whole life, it influences how and if we come out, it influences how we identify and how we interact with scientists, and other professionals. So the question cannot be what makes a man physically incapable of tolerating a pussy. The question is more complicated, I personally don’t know how to define it, and until you absolutely know what you are looking for, don’t venture into a world that you can’t even understand.
Just a friendly reminder, please stop mixing up gender identity, sexual orientation, and socially prescribed gender roles. A girl who likes to play football can be a person with an alternative gender identity or simply a child that likes to play football. She is not a homosexual, and the word “pre-homosexual” is one of the most disturbing and unscientific words I have ever come across.
And for all the queer folks out there, don’t fear science, dive headfirst and grab the beast with its horns. A PhD in neuroscience gives a white middle class man no advantage against you. Biology is a simple natural science, argue!

* LeVay, S., A difference in hypothalamic structure between homosexual and heterosexual men. Science 253:1034-1037 (1991)

Google is heavenly

I am a big google fan, like a really really big google fan, google is my platonic lover, really! Now I know that the wight background in the google search engine kind of consumes energy, because ... well it's wight. But you can't come to me and say making 2 google searches produces as much carbon dioxide as boiling water :(. That's irrational! give me facts or figures, PLEASE.
You see, a lesson I have learned in my pseudo carrier in science and journalism is that, when it comes to writing, science is still science but scientists are the world's greatest drama queens and when it comes to media, BBC is the ultimate opportunistic Diva.
So...No! I refuse to believe.

Smelling cheating, the amazing world of pheromones

So I was reading this article on the National Geographic website: Ants Smell Cheaters and Assault Them. It's always fascinating to read such articles.
The idea is quite simple, we all know that in an ants' community only the queen reproduces and in our minds the ants just obey, some talk about the hormonal castration ability that the queen has over the workers. But in fact, workers can reproduce, not the full kind of reproduction but a different, less efficient one called parthenogenesis, which, in a nutshell, means that their eggs will reproduce clones of the mother. That is not good in general and therefore it is only restricted to the extreme case when the queen dies with no one next in line.
It is in the community's interest to just have a queen that produces the good eggs and the workers that... um... work. But even with ants there is always the I that sometimes prevails over the us, and some workers try to cheat and to lay eggs.
So what happens then? The others just smell it. The special smells that ants detect in these cases is called pheromones they are not normal smells, they are not identified as such. For as far as fellow workers are concerned, this worker is trying to cheat and we must stop her... A hate crime by all means because there is no proof to the treason of the ant except for the pheromone. And when the researchers inserted this pheromone in innocent ants the others will attack them.
Now if you read the article you would notice the author of the paper makes conclusions about the potential role of pheromones on humans. Because there are studies that say that we still have receptors to pheromones in our bodies(the previous link is only one of a million). But of course, out of objectivity concern, the authors of the article quote someone that was not part of the research saying that we cannot jump into conclusions when it comes to human pheromones... And it's true, I don't want to give anyone the excuse to go and kill someone saying: my pheromone receptors informed me that he planed to kill me! Science doesn't need anymore abusive manipulators.
But it's quite intriguing, I mean smelling fear, smelling desire, feeling the chemistry, feeling that the partner is hiding something, alarming first impressions... all of these details on which tomorrow always proves you right! It's scary I tell you and the most rational and scientific way to explain it would be a combination of:

1. Prejudice: We always like to judge people in order to make our lives much easier


2. Stubbornness: If you see someone that has left a bad first impression you would always try to prove that person is bad


3. Something biological (maybe pheromones, why not?): I mean sometimes it is just beyond you as rational as you may try to be, you always come to the conclusion that the people that left a bad first impression are not good for you, even if for a while you are totally convinced that your first impression was wrong and you try to build your relationship with that person in a perfectly friendly way.

I don't know, that's what I think

So did they, or did they NOT interbreed?

A lot has been said though little is known. But our human curiosity obliges us to try and reach conclusions. When I posted almost a month ago that notorious piece: "Skulls Add to "Out of Africa" Theory of Human Origins", inspired by an article in the Scientific American bearing the same title (actually I stole the title from them, BITE ME!), I concluded, basing on the decrease of variability of skull morphology (as the author of the article did before me ), that interbreeding just didn't happen. Now I did mention in my piece that, in theory, interbreeding could have happened without leading to any offspring, without leading to any viable offspring, or without leading to any fertile offspring. To be perfectly clear, I am 100% sure that Homo sapiens individuals and Homo neanderthalensis ones had sex, that's certain, but the fact that coming out of Africa Homo sapiens populations kept losing diversity means that the Homo neanderthalensis genome did not enrich ours, or at least it did not enrich ours in the sections monitoring and dictating the structure of skull bones, with that being said I stand corrected. I had failed in my previous analysis to anticipate the fact that the study focused primarily on skull remains. It is possible that Neanderthal genetic material would have integrated ours but didn't do so in the section concerning skull structure (or, as it has become obvious for you, those that did inherit of DNA chunks from Neanderthals coding for the skull were not viable/not fertile).

However, a few days after I posted that article another one was published in the Nat Geo online edition this time titled: "Odd Skull Boosts Human, Neandertal Interbreeding Theory", written by Brian Handwerk. The author of the study, reported by Mr Brian, talks about a certain skull with a groove in the bottom of the back of the skull, look at this picture (taken from the same Nat Geo page):

Do you see the horizontal groove at the bottom of the head? This is not a normal groove, this is not a structure that serves a function. Let me explain this a little, Bones are a living tissue, its metabolism is pretty slow but it's alive! It contains cells and the hard substance is constantly melted down and built up again. The role of bones is to protect soft tissues and to support the muscle thus enabling the body to actually move. We usually attribute movement to the dynamic of muscles and not the static bones. But in fact bones and muscles are both essential to produce movement. Complimentary in role they are also complementary in structure. The larger the muscles are, the thicker the bones will be, because stronger, more powerful muscles require stronger more resistant bones, that's how Anthropologists and Paleoanthropologists rebuild the whole body of a Neanderthal from some bone remains (no they don't just guess and let their artistic talent prevail!). Look at this picture for example it's a picture of an Australopithecus:

Source: Dkimages


And compare it to this one:


Source: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Compare most of all the zygomatic bone (cheek bone). See how MASSIVE it was in the Australopithecus skull? This could be somehow facilitated or coded by the DNA but basically, it is a feature gained over the lifetime of the individual, as his diet (mainly roots and rough vegetal material) demands a powerful bite his muscles and concomitantly his bones (both the jaw and the zygomatic ones) grow, our diet (mainly cooked and soft food) doesn't require that much pressure, there fore the bones are smaller and the aspect is softer.

Now back to our groove, that groove is NOT like that, it is innate, Neanderthals have it, it does serve them a certain role, but it is not correlated to muscular activity. But this skull is not a Neanderthal's skull, it is in fact a Homo sapiens skull! But it has a Homo neanderthalensis' groove... And this is not the only metis ever found. There is a significant number of metis remains found throughout Europe in that period (20 000 - 40 000 years ago).

As I said before, these variations might not be innate but their presence can have an effect on the life of the individual bearing it, thus allowing the work of natural selection. The change of climate and the more effective life-style of modern man helped him, with his anatomical variations to dominate and out-compete Neanderthals.

For example, and to help illustrate that concept, consider the joint structure. Neanderthals had more massive bones in general, there fore their joints were less flexible. On the shoulder level, this means that Neanderthals (or Neanderthal/sapiens hybrids that had thick bones) were less agile and efficient in throwing spears for example, there fore less efficient in hunting from a distance (targeting much larger preys and allowing a better income). So maybe Neanderthals' bone structures were just not fit enough, and it is in the end the law of the survival of the fittest. Source: James Owen's Nat Geo article: Neandertals, Modern Humans Interbred, Bone Study Suggests

A little criticism to this theory:

1. It could be an accidental aberration, or variation:
   
   
   

   According to Eric Delson, this feature could have simply occurred naturally and not necessarily inherited from some Neanderthal parent. In fact, he believes it could be found in modern populations, who knows? This would need to be proven. This is also the same argument used by skeptics when the Homo florensiensis remains were found for the first time in that Indonesian Island of Flores. Skeptics back then said it could be a case of Microcephaly. However that argument didn't stand back then and it's unlikely to justify all the Neanderthal-like variations. You see, and as I always say, fossil remains are very very very rare to occur, very few individuals are fossilized. So an already very rare variant of skulls is unlikely to be fossilized (this is a simple statistical concept). Now of course, you could say: "well a 1/10000000000000 chance is still a possibility, who knows? Maybe this individual had that super rare morphological feature and that the super rare chance of getting fossilized, who knows?"

   
   
   

   That is true, but that doesn't explain the recurrence of a number of these Neanderthal-like aberrations, compare the number of remains with to the number of remains without them, how often did these aberrations occur? It is obviously higher... Why?





2. Earlier DNA studies revealed a rather early split between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens occurred as early as 400 000 years ago:
   
   
   

   Source: Elizabeth Svoboda's article in Nat Geo's online edition: Neandertal Gene Study Reveals Early Split With Humans.

   
   
   

   The study (done by James Noonan) even focused on Nuclear DNA (DNA contained inside the nucleus of the cell) and previous studies (source: Hillary Mayell's Nat Geo article: Neandertals Not Our Ancestors, DNA Study Suggests) focused on mitochondrial DNA and found similar resutls. Neanderthals don't seem to have contributed our DNA! It just doesn't seem to have happened.

So individually speaking, Neanderthals and modern humans seemed to be interbreeding but, on the long run they didn't contribute to the construction of our DNA... I vote for viable non-fertile individuals, what do you think?

P.S.: no don't get impressed with the large number of links, I just opened the links that were available in the initial page.

Skulls Add to "Out of Africa" Theory of Human Origins

It has been puzzling the international scientific community for quite a while now, did the early humanities interbreed or not? If you think of it, we do know that we share with chimpanzees more than 95% of our genome, right? And the two groups (humans and chimpanzees) were separated definitely some 4.5 million years ago (if I am not mistaking with the number), right? So maybe just MAYBE early Homo sapiens and early Homo neandertalensis interbreed, or maybe Homo sapiens and other human forms, who knows.

The question is not only a poetic one, thinking about early romances across the borders of tribal wars and what ever some poets might imagine. No the question is deeper, or at least more troubling for some, more interesting for others. It's orbits mainly 2 points:

• A strictly scientific question:
  
  Let's remember the definition of species:
  
  1. Wordnet: taxonomic group whose members can interbreed
  
  
  2. Wikipedia: In biology, a species is, loosely speaking, a group of related organisms that share a more or less distinctive form and are capable of interbreeding.
  
  
  You can search more definitions, you know the procedures type "define:species" and you'll get a myriad of definitions, however an important detail will certainly repeat itself in all definitions: Interbreed, Interbreeding. Fore this is an important detail about naming species, two ordinary individuals that are grouped in one species need to be able to interbreed in order to belong to the same species. However, some scientists tend to put the modern human and the Neandertal human in one species: Homo sapiens. In that perspective, the modern human would be Homo sapiens sapiens and the Neandertal human would be Homo sapiens neandertalensis. Could that be true?
  
  We certainly have no way to reach a sexually functional Neandertal in order to try and make it fuck a human and then see if they give a healthy, fertile offspring (keep in mind that many animals belonging to two different species may breed but their offspring is sterile there fore the process is scientifically a failure). But modern day scientists don't always refer to actual interbreeding to define species, they use molecular biology and genetic studies of the genome and so on. But even that is useless as the sample of Neandertals are rare (same as any ancient human remains) and when we do find some remains, it's usually bones, and even when we do find remains of soft tissues it's usually mineralized tissues and not mummified tissues... In other words we have no material to extract DNA from, some studies did find a few fragments of DNA but that hasn't been able to clear the question of whether neandertals and modern humans belong to the same species or not.
  
  But many scientists already speak of Homo sapiens neanderalensis... Which brings us to another point that is less scientific, but more philosophical and existential...
  




• What is a Human?
  
  Of course, if you do sink deep into Paleoanthropology and evolution in general, humanity will lose its spark and it will make Man the special creature of God... it will make him just another animal. I don't know whether it's insulting or relieving to acknowledge that but for most people it's simply disturbing! But so far we did preserve a small shred of superiority: We, the Homo sapiens, have ruled the world with our wit and intelligence.
  
  But what if We didn't rule it? What if other humans have ruled it with us? What if we were not pure Homo sapiens what if we were a mix of humans and that other humans rule the earth together with the combination of all our genes. Of course some might argue that we don't look like neandertals or like Homo ergaster or any other humans. But the truth is that Phenotypes (looks) are deceiving we can hold more DNA from Neandertals than we do from Homo sapiens and still look like the latter. Because different pieces of DNA fulfill different roles. If that is true then we would have nothing, and I mean, NOTHING, that sets us apart from other animals.
  
  I know many of those who follow my blog may not find this so shocking or so disturbing. But come on people we might not be the world's number 1 believers, but many people around the earth are strong believers and many of them believe that God created all animals in one day and MAN on a totally other day. Many people justify their right to kill animals because they are...animals... not Humans...not special enough.
  

I have been trying to follow the news of this subject for nearly 2 years now, reading every article about it. And finally I have found a study that claims to have some rational answer to that question. You can read it in the Scientific American Online edition.

The article focuses on the fact that humans did in fact expand to the world starting from Ethiopia (Africa), which is no longer seriously questioned by scientists. In proving their point they rely on the decline of variability in skull structure from the cradle of modern humanity (Ethiopia) to the farthest regions (Asia for example). However here's the piece that interests us:

As smaller bands broke off from larger settlements, they would have carried with them a less diverse subset of the bigger group's genes, which partly translate into anatomical features such as skull shape. So the farther early Homo sapiens trod from their homeland, the less variable their skulls should become. Unless, that is, they bred with previously established populations of Neandertal or other early humans, which would have injected new genes and boosted variability.

The researchers found no signs of interbreeding, they report online today in Nature. "What you find is a very nice linear decline of variability as you move farther away from Africa," Amos says. Prior studies had identified an identical trend in the diversity of simple genetic sequences or markers.

So maybe religious lunatics can sleep well tonight... We didn't interbreed with Neadertals. But that leaves an important question yet unanswered:

Was it biologically impossible for us to interbreed?

Just because we didn't interbreed with them doesn't mean it would have been impossible. One thing is certain, we had all the chances to do so. The variation of weather over the last 100 000 years (modern Man's appearance is estimated to around 120 000 years) have defined many regions of crossing at least between modern man and Neadertals. The most important region being the Middle East in which I live. Unfortunately, studies in here are rare, the only place where serious scientific research takes place is Israel (the only place where an abundance of remains was found, though Lebanon for example contains many caves, thus must've had many remains).

On the other hand, knowing of how humans are xenophobic by nature (check out this article in National geographic news). You can't help but to think to yourself: Both groups must've forbidden such contact between different members, probably declaring it a sin or something and promoting the others' mass murder.

I strongly believe that