My friend Virginia Hughes is asking this question on her blog pursuant to a conference she is going to. She has a survey she’d like people to take. The survey takes about 15 seconds so please go and help her out.
For background: Virginia was the blog herder for Scienceblogs.com for a while. She’s quite a good science writer and has a blog you should put on your RSS thingie.
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Done.
If this covered homsexuality I’d be all about it.
Because then, Mike, you could take a little test that would tell you that all those thoughts, all those fantasies…those aren’t really homosexuality. You could get a certificate and everything and show it to all the guys you get caught cruising.
Because then, Mike, you could take a little test that would tell you that all those thoughts, all those fantasies…those aren’t really homosexuality. You could get a certificate and everything and show it to all the guys you get caught cruising.
Actually, I was thinking we could just abort them … and honestly whatparent wouldnt. No (wo)man, no problem.
No, Mike. As usual, you’ve got it backward. What parent would do something like that?
What parent would do something like that?
Parents abort children for cleft pallets, they sure as shit would send them to the hoover-matic for being gay.
Any genes for homosexuality in men are (probably) on the X chromosome, and (my hypothesis) are there to give a womanâ??s daughters a potential foster parent (her gay son) for her grandchildren if her daughters die in childbirth. A gay man is not a competitive threat to an alpha male for females, so there is no reason to fight him to the death. Since he is gay, he won’t fight other men to the death for females. As a non-female he wonâ??t die in childbirth.
I suspect that is why gay men have (anecdotally) such good home-making skills and straight men do not. Gay men only achieve reproductive success through successfully raising their sistersâ?? children, so good home-making skills have become linked to being gay.
Homophobia is probably a variant of being gay. Straight men have no need or desire to be homophobic. A male with a gay X chromosome probably doesnâ??t want to mate with a woman who has a gay sibling because then their daughters may have two gay X chromosomes and have only gay grandsons. So men with a gay X chromosome are either gay or homophobic (or both).
This is just idle speculation. There probably isnâ??t a single â??gay geneâ?, it is likely polygenetic. But I suspect contributory genes would be on the X chromosome and mostly silent in females.
daedalus2u said:
That is so completely wrong. That would be Lemarkian at best. There is no inheritance there at all.
Your discussion about homophobia is not even coherent.
Well, I assume daedalus2u means indirect fitness.
This is the helpers at the nest model and has been proposed in several forms over time. I’m not buying it myself partly because I have yet to see a culture in which this happens as it would have to happen, as well as for a number of other reasons.
My wife and I wouldn’t. Now, if being a stupid, bigoted ratfucker were genetic, on the other hand…
Somehow I find that less plausible than the hypothesis that “home-making skills” are useful for everyone but excluded from the conventional masculine social role…which being an out gay male tends to involve having already rejected.
At least this time it’s not about nitrous oxide.
As for the original post topic, I think genetic screening might be justified for untreatable conditions that make a person a danger to others, like psychopathy (see Mike H for details) and the (closely related) FMPS (Fucking Morning Person Syndrome). Psychiatric disorders in general, though…I don’t see this being a net good, given that most people who have them are perfectly capable of leading happy, productive lives with appropriate treatments, and their different brain wiring can often prove to be an advantage in certain situations (autistic savants are one of the more dramatic examples). This seems like a stupid and dangerous red herring; effort and funding should be focused on providing treatment.
Gone there, but I find the questions to be confusing. For example munging unrelated items together:
“Which is most important?” and the options are something like:
* reliability
* privacy
etc, as if you cannot have any privacy if the test is reliable. It’s not even a false dichotomy, it’s a false pentachotomy/multichotomy.
I didn’t take those options to be mutually exclusive: all are important but maybe some are more important than others. (Although personally I think that some of them are too closely linked to be split.)
From what very little I know, although there may well be a genetic component for a lot of mental illness the environment is much more important in most cases so I’m not too sure what benefit testing would provide. I suppose one could simply be a bit more aware of the risk of a particular potential problem, but that assumes being able to do something about it and that the added pressure on a child and its parents wouldn’t introduce its own problems.
A lot of mental problems also seem to be similar to normal behaviour. The comparison of psychopaths and sucessful businessmen is well known; likewise ASD, merging into normal behaviour. If one could issolate and eliminate all of the genes involved in these disorders one might also eliminate a whole host of valuable traits.
I have a family history of many mental illnesses (and physical ones too, lucky me!). It’s very obvious in my family that it is mostly hereditary. If genetic testing for these diseases were available, I would strongly consider getting IVF and having the blastocysts tested. I would hate to watch a child suffer through schizophrenia like my uncle did. If the tests became available after I already had children, I would certainly get them tested so I could find the best treatment for them. I wouldn’t want them to end up getting an exorcism like my uncle did. Even though schizophrenia is my biggest fear, there are at least 4 other mental diseases and 4 serious physical diseases in my close family tree (parents, siblings, grandparents, and aunts/uncles). A genetic test would be a huge relief for someone like me, even if the test were positive. It’s a shame that a homophobic troll has to overshadow the seriousness of this issue just to get a little attention.
daedalus2u, that sounds like evolutionary psychology. Any idea on how to test it? It doesn’t seem necessary for your hypotheses for the gene to be on the X chromosome; pretty much anywhere except the y chromosome would work.
I am not sure how to test it. It is a complex behavior with considerable dispersion so it likely isn’t mediated by a single or even by a few genes. Because there is such stigma to it in some circles, it is difficult to get precise data on individuals as to their sexual orientation.
It is probably more common in places with polygamy and especially where women have low status and so have more need of a non-reproducing male sibling as a helpmate.
I suspect that there is considerable epigenetic programming in utero that affects the degree. I would predict that the incidence of gay sons would be higher in first born teen pregnancies because of the social stress that such women are under. A son born to a teen mother would have more difficulty attaining enough status to become an alpha male, so rather than be an alpha-male-want-to-be (i.e. a male who is killed fighting an alpha male and so never reproduces), being gay might be a better reproductive strategy.
Looking at the birth patterns of people who enter the clergy where they are expected to be non-reproducing might shed some light on it. I would expect a higher fraction of first born sons becoming Catholic priests for example, especially when conceived out of wedlock. Being unable to inherit property because of being illegitimate would shift things too. But being first born later, to a woman under stable and low stress conditions might completely reverse it, even with an identical genotype.
I think there are very big problems with the ideas behind genetic testing for psychiatric conditions. None of them have simple Mendelian transmission patterns (except maybe Huntingtonâ??s). The differences between a male brain and a female brain are not really â??geneticâ?, people who are XY but have androgen insensitivity develop and identify as female. It isnâ??t the genetics that determines the gender of the brain, but the epigenetic programming mediated by (primarily) androgens.
I think that most psychiatric conditions are mostly also due to epigenetic stuff. In schizophrenia, being exposed to flu in utero is a gigantic risk factor. I have heard that if all flu during pregnancy were eliminated that the incidence of schizophrenia would go down by ~1/4.
The most serious problem with prenatal testing for psychiatric disorders is how many false positives are there. If the liability to the test provider is gigantic (i.e. lifetime of care for an autistic individual), then the cost to the provider of the false negative must be allocated to all of the non-false negatives, the true positives, true negatives and false positives. Only the false positives can be increased arbitrarily.
When identical twins are discordant for autism, no prenatal test can do better than the differences between identical twins. The concordance of autism between monozygous twins is reported to be 60-90%. If the cost of a false negative is $1 million to the test provider, what do they call a test that shows a 1% chance of autism? Unless they charge $10,000 per test just for false negative liability they have to call it positive.
I donâ??t think genetic testing for psychiatric conditions is going to be useful in the near term. The understanding of how genetics results in the neurodevelopment that leads to those conditions is simply not there. I donâ??t think the people doing the genetic research appreciate how complicated development is. I think the people who say it is simple and a test is 10 years away are deluding themselves and the funding agencies.
The whole concept of psychiatric “diseases” being diagnosed is a put-up job by the psychiatric industry.
There is no such thing as a genuine medical diagnosis when it comes to psychiatry – psychiatry arbitrarily groups a few characteristics together and assign an arbitrary (and ever-changing according to current fashion) label to that group of what they decide are “symptoms”.
Ultimately, psychiatry provides zero insight into the biology of their subjects’ complaints and is extraordinarily unsuccessful when it comes to treatment – treatment has moved on from electroshocking (only just) and other barbaric practices which are the equivalent of the blood-letting of centuries gone by, but harm is still caused to sufferers by the casual and careless application of damaging and non-useful labels to their symptoms coupled with the psychiatric industry’s heavy reliance on incredibly dangerous and debilitating drugs.
As for Homosexuality, the current fashion in the pseudo-discipline that is psychiatry is to not consider it a disorder. This is not a scientific fact, as basic biology appears to contradict the current fashionable position of the psychiatric industry on this issue.
Mind you, they *do* recognise “denial” as a basic building-block of almost any psychiatric disorder…
I agree with Vince wholeheartedly.
It would all be so much simpler if everyone never went to a psychiatrist, but instead relied on something rooted in the real world, like having their engrams accessed by a reputable auditor.
[Citation needed]
Some specialists say that business loans help a lot of people to live their own way, just because they are able to feel free to buy necessary stuff. Moreover, various banks offer small business loan for all people.