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Dead guild? *cries* I'll see if anyone replies to this in a few...weeks...

Note: I'm not trying to convince anyone that being gay is right/wrong. This is purely in the realm of science.

So we've all (hopefully) heard the "Population Control" theory behind homosexuality, right? Meaning that in times like now, with the global population rapidly reaching threshhold level, nature has 'flipped a switch' if you will, to take people out of the breeding pool. This also occurs in animals, e.g. rats kept in a crowded cage show high instances of homosexuality.

So that kinda argues for an environmental cause, although 'nature vs nurture' doesn't really apply.

But studies have been done to show a genetic cause too! In animals, primarily the ones that are sexually dimorphic, there are male traits and female traits. I'll go with fruitflies because everything in genetics comes back to them.

The female fruit flies are larger, eat more and have male and female phermones, but primarily female. The males are smaller, barely eat and have only male phermones. Obviously, the individuals with the highest fitness have the most exaggerated traits (unless it gets really extreme).

The thing is, these traits are x-linked. Males get traits from the mother, females get them from both. And a high fitness male (small, barely eats etc.) passes that on to his daughters at the same rate they get equivalent traits from the mother.

What this means is that high fitness males pass on high fitness male traits to their daughters. But HFM (high fitness) male traits are low fitness in females, making them genetically undesirable. And the sons only get traits from the mother (x-linked, remember) so if their mother was high fitness, they become low fitness males. And low fitness males look like females and don't really try to breed.

LF females give off higher amounts of male phermones than HF females, and are smaller, so they don't really get to mate.

On the other hand, LF males tend to have very fertile sisters (because both got HF female genes). Isn't that wild?

Studies have been done in humans suggesting that gay males tend to have fertile sisters too.

This blew my mind, so I thought I'd share it with the (probably dead) guild. R.I.P. science crying

Dead guild? Damn.

My genetics class delved into this briefly. Finals were a month ago, and I haven't quite wound down from the 18 unit course load, but I thought it was a fascinating hypothesis. I tossed it out to a friend of mine, which probably wasn't the best thing to do considering he's a bit of a militant homosexual, and it really didn't sit well with him.

It'd make for an interesting case study, but I have no idea how you'd assay or control.