Re: OT: What? the clean-shaven outnumber the bearded? "Yer Ugly Mug," etc.

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à Andreas Johansson :
>
>
> >PS There are Darwinistic explanations of homosexuality. The latest I
> heard
> >invokes the "big brother effect", namely that gay men tend to have more
> elder
> >borthers than other men, and asserts that homosexuality is a
> side-effect of
> >actions by the foetus to defend itself from the mother's immune system,
> which
> >is assumed to be on its guard against male signatures since the earlier
> male
> >foetuses.
>
> I am first child, and my younger sibling is a sister (my mother didn't
> get
> any abortion or dead-born child before me). My partner is the second
> of
> three siblings, and the two others are girls. My former boyfriend was
> an
> only child. My first boyfriend was the younger one, but he only had an
> older sister. So I don't know about this alleged Darwinistic effect,
> but
> it's pretty suspicious to me. Also, I know that the mother's immune
> system
> reacts to the rhesus of the child (and then, only with mothers of
> negative
> rhesus with a foetus of positive rhesus it happens), but I've never
> heard
> that it reacted also to the sex of a foetus. I'd like to know what
> evidence
> they have on that (for instance, a study showing that a majority of
> dead-born children are males, or that just born males are usually less
> healthy than just born females).
I'm told that most most spontaneous abortions involve male foetueses. But I
don't know where I should go looking for a study confirming it.

> Like Stone, I think it's really more grasping for an answer, just like
> this
> survey that tried to compare the brains of homosexuals with the brains
> of
> women...
I can't resist asking what sex were the homosexuals?

I don't think the people behind this hypothesis would deny their work is pretty
speculative (hey, they're positing a cause-effect relationship without offering
anything concrete as to the exact mechanism!), but if the "big brother effect"
is true it presumably has a cause. Individual gays lacking elder brothers isn't
really an argument against it - the data presentated in the New Scientist
article I read about this in  already included plenty of such people.

                                                      Andreas

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