Tobester - 05 May 2008 03:16 PM

Perception Manager - 05 May 2008 02:36 PM

Put into plain English what you want to say.

Says the man who puts a spin on everything to get his sordid point across.

What, are those words a bit to big for your “hungry brain”?
You might find that coming here is quite different from “preaching to the choir”.

Jeeze, Tob, put a NSFW or ‘Warning, Crack-Smoking Aryans Ahead’ before posting links like that.

But yes.. it’s always amusing to see how many people are surprised that we don’t accept what they say purely on their word.

Perception Manager - 05 May 2008 03:19 PM

t’s interesting to note that Amish communities have zero homosexuals, yet come from from Swiss genetic stock.  I don’t know the prevalence of homosexuality in Switzerland but it is surely non-zero.  So, my point is:  Same genetic stock can have two different outcomes.  Which would support your view on this.

As someone who currently lives in an Amish/Mennonite community, and also as someone who worked with a rather large number of Swiss back in the mid-90s, I can tell you that you are VERY wrong on both counts.

Perception Manager - 05 May 2008 02:36 PM

No, autism isn’t only behavioral.  I can agree with that.

Put into plain English what you want to say.

Then why do you insist that homosexuality must be behavioral?

MadCarlotta - 06 May 2008 04:57 AM

Perception Manager - 05 May 2008 03:19 PM

t’s interesting to note that Amish communities have zero homosexuals, yet come from from Swiss genetic stock.  I don’t know the prevalence of homosexuality in Switzerland but it is surely non-zero.  So, my point is:  Same genetic stock can have two different outcomes.  Which would support your view on this.

As someone who currently lives in an Amish/Mennonite community, and also as someone who worked with a rather large number of Swiss back in the mid-90s, I can tell you that you are VERY wrong on both counts.

I’ve been to Switzerland a few times. And I saw a fair few gays.

And there are indeed gay Amish people. Just as there are gay Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Scientologists, Buddhists, Shintoists, Vikings, Mormons and Suffists. It’s just whether they accept that fact that matters.

Even if it were true that there were no gay Amish, it wouldn’t make the argument correct; there’s no history of cystic fibrosis in my family, yet I come from the same ‘English stock’ as many a sufferer. But that’s not because behavioural or developmental factors inhibit CF in my family, but because the smaller sample is not perfectly representative of the larger population.

So, for those keeping score, we can add ‘racist’ and ‘homophobic’.

Interestingly, being XX or XY doesn’t even guarantee you’ll turn out as a girl or boy (respectively):

[quote author=“Scientific American”]How Boys Become Boys (and Sometimes Girls)
New research explains how three proteins conspire to determine an embryo’s sex

In research that could give doctors a way to reassign sex in cases of unclear gender, scientists report this week that they have figured out why some children with genes that should make them boys are instead born as girls. The study, published in Nature, explains why some embryos with X and Y chromosomes—which should be born as male—develop ovaries and eventually become girls.

The key is whether a gene called Sox9, involved in formation of the testes, is active. “There are a surprisingly large number of cases where this process goes wrong,“ says Robin Lovell-Badge, a biologist at London’s MRC National Institute for Medical Research, who estimates that this phenomenon could effect up to 1 in every 20,000 genetic males. “Maybe one could treat some of these sex reversal or intersex cases after birth by manipulating whether Sox9 is active or not. This is all speculation but it’s possible.“

If Sox9 is somehow switched on in a genetic female—an embryo with two X chromosomes—it causes male gonads to form; if it fails to turn on in males, the cells it controls will become follicle cells, which mature into ovaries.

[More here…]