Eureka!

I stumbled across some articles from the archives of Discover Magazine this weekend that I thought might be intriguing to all, that, and I thought you could use some more reading. :) So here are some highlights:

The Real Story on Gay Genes
Homing in on the science of homosexuality—and sexuality itself
by Michael Abrams
published online June 5, 2007

"William Reiner, a psychiatrist at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, explored the question of environmental influences on sexuality with a group that had been surgically shifted from boys to girls. These boys had been born with certain genital deformities; because it is easier to fashion a vagina than a penis, the boys were surgically made into girls at birth. In many cases they were raised as girls, kept in the dark about the surgery, and thought themselves female long into adulthood. Invariably, Reiner found that the faux females ended up being attracted to women. If societal nudging was what made men gay, at least one of these boys should have grown up to be attracted to men. There is no documented case of that happening."


Raw Data: Do Brothers Make You Gay?
Boys with older brothers are more likely to be gay. But is it nurture or nature?
by Stephen Ornes
published online September 1, 2006

"Moreover, the more brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay. According to Bogaert, every older brother increases the probability that a man is homosexual by 33 percent. The average estimate of the base rate of male homosexuality is around 4 percent of the general population. So a man with 1 older brother has around a 5.3 percent probability of being homosexual. For the youngest of 3 brothers, that figure rises to 7 percent. Hypothetically, a man with 9 older biological brothers, according to Bogaert's estimates, has about a 50 percent chance of being gay. Notably, Bogaert's estimate breaks down at 12 brothers, when the probability exceeds 100 percent.

Why Do We Know So Little About Human Sex?
by Anne Fausto-Sterling
published online June 1, 1992

"Kinsey and his co-workers discovered a continuum of sexuality. They developed a heterosexual-homosexual rating scale, which they divided into seven categories, from exclusively or predominantly heterosexual to exclusively or predominantly homosexual. Where sex is concerned, it turned out, you find all sorts of shades of gray. They found that 37 percent of the male population surveyed had some overt homosexual experience, that most of these experiences occurred during adolescence, and that at least 25 percent of adult males had more than incidental homosexual experiences for at least three years of their lives.
...
Helms concluded by gay-baiting both of Laumann’s coinvestigators- -distinguished social scientists and acknowledged homosexuals--repeating that the surveys are part and parcel of the homosexual movement’s agenda to legitimize their sexual behavior. "