Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site bbncca.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!bbncca!rrizzo From: rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) Newsgroups: net.motss,net.bio Subject: Recent articles; homosex & science Message-ID: <1612@bbncca.ARPA> Date: Mon, 18-Nov-85 18:22:42 EST Article-I.D.: bbncca.1612 Posted: Mon Nov 18 18:22:42 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 20-Nov-85 00:43:00 EST Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Ma. Lines: 98 Xref: watmath net.motss:2259 net.bio:309 RECENT ARTICLES The December 1985 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN has an article by Jeffrey Laurence on "The Immune System in AIDS", pages 84-93, the magazine's first real coverage of the subject of AIDS. Up to now, it's neglected AIDS, or carried short infrequent news items about it. The article's bibliography cites papers dating from May-December 1984. The current ADVOCATE (#433, 11/12/85) has a "travel piece" by Michael Chaffee on Soviet Gays, in the USSR and US. (It contained an item I found interesting: the Soviet movie director Paradjanov (sp?) was imprisoned because he is gay. Years ago on PBS I'd seen his most famous film, "Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors," a dreamlike tale about the Gusuls (sp?), a Lapp-like hill tribe dwelling in the eastern Carpathian mountains near Poland, the most beautiful Russian film I've ever seen, but I knew nothing about the director.) SEX & SCIENCE The current GCN (11/23/85) has a good centerfold article by Scott Tucker, "Sex & Science: Who Decides What's Good For Us?" which critically reviews research on possible biological bases of sexual orientation and the often homophobic presuppositions of researchers. Much of such "science" begins with an assumption that homosexuality must be the result of a deviation in a biological process (prenatal stress, hormone balance, etc.). So what else is new? What's new is that biotechnologies capable of altering the gender and sexual orientation of fetuses are now foreseeable in the not-too-distant-future. The social implications of this were briefly but sharply debated in net.motss months ago. To me it's the most intriguing issue yet raised in this newsgroup, because it's so thorny. Recently AIDS hysteria has revived not only old prejudices but their accompanying superstitions about homosexuality. Even some scientists have succumbed. Given the current vogue in social biology and evolutionary styles of explanation, I'm appending the following annotated bibliography of biology essays that aim to demonstrate the naturalness of homosexuality. Like Marxism and psychoanalysis, darwinism has often been used merely to justify the status quo and is so broad an idea that it can be used to support almost any hypothesis and prove incapable of refutation. Never- theless, a number of scientists have made cogent use of it to examine possible biological roles of "nonreproductive sexuality." (Andre Gide's turn-of-the-century apologia for homosexuality, CORYDON, is scientifically outdated, but it's devoted almost entirely to biological considerations, and is well-written and thought-provoking.) Below is a footnote (#9, page 9) from John Boswell's CHRISTIANITY, SOCIAL TOLERANCE & HOMOSEXUALITY (1980, U. Chicago Press, $9.95 pb): [ Quoted without permission. ] In the late nineteenth century, when the issue of homosexuality first began to exercise the minds of scientists, most authorities assumed that homosexual inclinations were congenital, and differed only on whether they were a defect (Kraft-Ebbing) or a part of the normal range of human variation (Hirschfeld). The triumph of psychoanalytical approaches to human sexual phenomena resulted in general abandonment of this approach in favor of psychological explanations, but in 1959 G. E. Hutchinson published a paper specualting on the possible genetic significance of "nonreproductive" sexuality (which he labeled "para- philia"), including homosexuality ("A Speculative Consideration of Certain Possible Forms of Sexual Selection in Man," AMERICAN NATURALIST 93 [1959]: 81-91). In the 1970s a great deal of speculation has followed on the evolutionary significance of homosexuality, much of it agreeing on the essential likelihood of genetic viability for homo- sexual feelings through one selection mechanism or another. A theory based on parent-offspring conflict as a mechanism for producing homo- sexuality was published in 1974 by R. L. Trivers ("Parent-Offspring Conflict," AMERICAN ZOOLOGIST 14 [1974]: 249-64). In 1975 E. O. Wilson (SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW SYNTHESIS [Cambridge, Mass., 1975]) suggested that homosexuality might involve a form of genetic altruism, through which gay people benefit those closely related to them and offset their lowered reproductivity (see pp. 22, 229-31, 281, 311, 343-44, and esp. 555). This argument was expanded and simplified in "Human Decency Is Animal," New York Times Magazine (October 12, 1975), pp. 38ff. and in ON HUMAN NATURE (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 142-47. The most detailed and comprehensive study of this subject to date, examining nearly all modern theories for the etiology of homosexual- ity, is that of James D. Weinrich, "Human Reproductive Strategy: The Importance of Income Unpredictability and the Evolution of Non- Reproduction," pt. 2 "Homosexuality and Non-Reproduction: Some Evolutionary Models" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1976). An extraordinarily lucid and readable summary of previous biological approaches, with provocative original speculations, appeared in John Kirsch and James Rodman, "The Natural History of Homosexuality," Yale Scientific Magazine 51, no. 3 (1977): 7-13. Cheers, Ron Rizzo "Humans are anmimals, but we are not rats." -- Scott Tucker