Sexuality Is Written in the Genes

[AngryAmish]

"When it comes to the matter of desire, evolution leaves little to chance. Human sexual behavior is not a free-form performance, biologists are finding, but is guided at every turn by genetic programs.

Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice. Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.

So much fuss, so intricate a dance, all to achieve success on the simple scale that is all evolution cares about, that of raisingthe greatest number of children to adulthood. Desire may seem the core of human sexual behavior, but it is just the central act in a long drama whose script is written quite substantially in the genes."
snip
"It is a misconception that the differences between men’s and women’s brains are small or erratic or found only in a few extreme cases, Dr. Larry Cahill of the University of California, Irvine, wrote last year in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Widespread regions of the cortex, the brain’s outer layer that performs much of its higher-level processing, are thicker in women. The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a larger fraction of the female brain.

Techniques for imaging the brain have begun to show that men and women use their brains in different ways even when doing the same thing. In the case of the amygdala, a pair of organs that helps prioritize memories according to their emotional strength, women use the left amygdala for this purpose but men tend to use the right."

See, Ron Burgundy was right: "You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It's science."

[Donald Ian Rankin]

1. I'm very sceptical about this.

My understanding is that there is some fairly conclusive evidence that genetic factors do play a part in determining sexual orientation, but I think that baldly declaring that environmental factors, personal choice etc don't is not a defensible position.

[unpossibles]

2. your last sentence (the joke) seems to contradict the rest

"Widespread regions of the cortex, the brain’s outer layer that performs much of its higher-level processing, are thicker in women. The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a larger fraction of the female brain. "

this doesn't surprise me. More than one woman I know is frankly shocked that so many men survive into adulthood with some of the crazy/"stupid" crap we tend to do, and I don't disagree.

[yardwork]

3. Could the article be any more sexist?

Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children.

Gee, don't women get to seek out men or other women for the same reasons that men seek out romantic partners, or are we programmed to only "select men who seem likely to provide for us and our children?"

What about lesbian women?

This is so one-sided and stereotypical it isn't funny.

[Der Blaue Engel]

4. "Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice."

And then later on in the article, we get this:

Presumably the masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men. In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men.

Such experiments do not show the same clear divide with women. Whether women describe themselves as straight or lesbian, “Their sexual arousal seems to be relatively indiscriminate — they get aroused by both male and female images,” Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men.”

Wow...so, from this logic, I guess women don't even have sexual desire, since we're simply CHOOSING (something just stated to be nonexistent with regard to desire) our sexual partners based on our own picky personal preferences.

That sound you just heard? That was my tiny little brain (with its thicker cortex and thus advanced higher-level processing, and its larger hippocampus with resultant superior memory function) exploding all over my monitor.

According to this article, maybe Descartes's maxim should be changed to "I think, therefore I am woman." :silly:

And don't even get me started on "If you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis, how strong could any psychosocial effect be?" :eyes: