Mort-Hog
If moral relativism is wrong, I don't wanna be right.
Posts: 4,192
As for whether homosexuality is genetic..
There have been some pretty awful case studies trying to prove this. Obviously a positive result would mean a lot for homosexuals, but there are a lot of people who are a little too eager to prove the point and this results in some awful science and ends up damaging the case for genetic homosexuality more than anything. So yes, if you're looking for research that's been debunked, you'll find a lot of it.
The whole thing tends to be based in psychology, a questionable 'science' at best, so I tend to avoid it wherever possible.
One thing that has been observed is that homosexuality occurs in many animals. Beetles, sheep, bats, lions, dolphins, monkeys, they've all displayed homosexual or bisexual behavior, both males and females. Bonobos are African apes closely related to humans, and about 75% of all bonobo sex is homosexual.
Why exactly this occurs baffles zoologists, it obviously doesn't have any reproductive value. But it seems that bisexuality has some sort of social benefit.
Certainly in predators, homosexual tendancies act as a social 'cement' making competing males less aggressive to eachother and more likely to hunt in packs (and thus survive better). But why it occurs in apes, or sheep, or in females of the species generally, I don't know. It could just be down to sexual gratification. But from monkeys to mosquitos, homosexuality occurs throughout the animal kingdom, so there's no real reason to think that homo sapiens should be any different.
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. " - Bertrand Russell
The Triumph of Stupidity in Mortals and Others 1931-1935