Gay biasanya dipengaruhi oleh keluarga dan lingkungan
emang lo bisa milih lahir dimana dan siapa orang tuanya?
dan tambahan sedikit:
Being gay 'is genetic'
2005-09-16 09:08
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Why is science being ignored in the raging debate about the position gays should or could occupy in practising religion?
I ask this because many religious people condemn the gay minister of St Stephen's Dutch Reformed Church in Cape Town, Laurie Gaum, for being openly gay and agree with their church commission's decision to defrock him because of it.
And listening to hundreds of self-righteous callers on radio talk-shows who use only their Holy Books to condemn homosexuality as sinful while ignoring science, I once again want to emphasise the call for a return to rational thinking that I argued in this column last week ("Switch on the baloney detectors").
Moreleta Park's Dutch Reformed Church in Pretoria wages an astonishingly naive and hypocritical campaign against gays, with its ministers and anti-gay church members openly proclaiming gays can be "cured" from their "sickness" - by converting to Christianity, or praying long and hard enough.
Even worse: many people sitting in judgment make no distinction between gays and common criminals and other sinners, again trusting only the archaic views of their Holy Scriptures.
Biological traits cannot be overruled!
As if biological traits can be overruled and ignored that easily! Where is science in all of this? And what do scientists say about the phenomenon of homosexuality? Why do theologians and many religious people continue to ignore the findings of science about homosexuality?
It's a disgrace that the whole debate in the NGK, and other churches, as well among Muslim communities, continues to apply the norms of dated Holy Books written in the Dark Ages between 2 000 and 1 500 years ago.
And in a scientific age when modern science has found ample evidence that being gay has a biological foundation. That gay people are not abnormal, but a biological variation that cannot be prayed and forced into a heterosexual state of mind.
A young man, Matthew Shepard, is tied to a fence and beaten to death in Wyoming because he is gay; more than 50 gays, some of them young boys in their puberty, are "legally" executed on the orders of Iranian mullahs because of their genetic sexual orientation.
Laurie Gaum is evicted as minister because his genes do not conform to the mental framework of genes prescribed by the NGK. Just three scandalous examples.
The evidence
Let me give attention to only two scientific studies. There are hundreds of others readers can easily find on the internet.
It is outrageous that the results of two laboratory studies, published as far back as 1991 and 1993 in Science, are still ignored by religious fanatics. Simon LeVay, "A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure Between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men," Science, Vol 253, No 5023 (August 30, 1991), pp 1034-1037, and Dean Hamer et al, Science, Vol 261 (1993), pp 321-327 have come to conclusions that clearly show a biological link in the sexual orientation of people.
LeVay, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego, California, conducted autopsies on 19 gay men, 16 straight men, and 6 heterosexual women at 7 hospitals in New York and California.
He dissected the forebrain of the deceased and found the hypothalamus gland in both the women and the gay men were less than half the size of those in the straight men.
LeVay concluded that his study "suggests that sexual orientation has a biological substrate" - which refutes the so-called reparative therapy - "God can heal you" - so many anti-gay, pro-the-Holy-Books-at-all-costs-religious people propose to gay people.
The National Cancer Institute study lead by Hamer, a Harvard trained geneticist, looked at 40 families with two gay brothers. Hamer and his team found evidence in 33 of the pairs for a genetically maternal influence in the determination of male homosexuality.
According to Hamer there was a clear "correlation between homosexual orientation and the inheritance of polymorphic markers on the X chromosome," which gay men receive from their mothers.
Readers can also do a survey of other similar studies by scientists such as LeVay, J Michael Bailey, Richard C Pillard, Dennis McFadden and Edward Pasanen, to mention just a few of the surveys refuting the absurd and unscientific arguments of religious fundamentalists.
A good overview of the debate can also be found in the article Gays and Genes by Andrew Hacker in The New York Review of Books, March 27 2003.
May I repeat my plea: give science its rightful place and allow the voice of scientific reason to be heard.
Source:
http://www.news24.com/News24/Columni...767311,00.html
dan tambahan lagi:
http://www.livescience.com/health/060224_gay_genes.html
Health
Mom's Genetics Could Produce Gay Sons
By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 24 February 2006 09:22 am ET
Buzz up!
Comments (3) | Recommend (0)
The arrangement of a mother's genes could affect the sexual orientation of her son, according to a new study.
The finding, detailed in the February issue of the journal Human Genetics, adds fuel to the decade-long debate about whether so-called "gay genes" might exist.
The researchers examined a phenomenon called "X chromosome inactivation" in 97 mothers of gay sons and 103 mothers whose sons were not gay.
X and Y
Chromosomes are large thread-like molecules that contain an organism's genetic instructions. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs. The X chromosome is one of two sex chromosomes in mammals; the other is the Y chromosome. Females have two X chromosomes and no Y's, while males have one X and one Y.
Even though women have two X chromosomes, only one is functional because the other is inactivated through a process called "methylation."
"It gets wrapped up in a ball and is not used with the exception of a few genes," explained study leader Sven Bocklandt of the University of California, Los Angeles.
If one of the females' X chromosomes is not turned off, then there is too much genetic material, which can lead to a harmful overabundance of proteins. Down syndrome, for example, results from the presence of an extra copy of chromosome 21.
Big difference
Normally, X chromosome inactivation occurs at random: half of the cells in a woman's body will have one X chromosome inactivated, while the other half inactivates the other chromosome.
However, when the researchers in the current study examined cells from the 42 mothers who had at least two gay sons, they found that about a quarter of the women in this group showed something different.
"Every single cell that we looked at in these women inactivated the same X chromosome," Bocklandt told LiveScience. "That's highly unusual."
In contrast, only 4 percent of mothers with no gay sons and 13 percent of those with just one gay son showed this type of extreme skewing.
Bocklandt thinks this suggest that a mother's X chromosomes partly influences whether her son is gay or not.
"We think that there are one or more genes on the X chromosome that have an effect on the sexual orientation of the sons of these mothers, as well as an effect on the cells we were looking at," Bocklandt said.
Other chromosomes implicated
Bocklandt was also involved in an earlier study that looked at the entire human genome of men who had two or more gay brothers. The researchers found identical stretches of DNA on three chromosomes—7, 8 and 10—that were shared by about 60 percent of the gay brothers in the study.
That study also found mothers to have an unusually large role in their son's sexual orientation: the region on chromosome 10 correlated with homosexuality only if it was inherited from the mother.
The results from these two studies suggest that there are multiple genetic factors involved in determining a person's sexual orientation and that it might vary depending on the person.
"We think that there are going to be some gay men who are X chromosome gay men and some who are chromosome 7 gay men or chromosome 10 gay men or some combination," Bocklandt said in a telephone interview.
Most researchers now think that there is no single gay gene that controls whether a person is homosexual or not. Rather, it's the influence of multiple genes, combined with environmental influences, which ultimately determine whether a person is gay.
A touchy subject
Research into the genetics of sexual orientation is controversial. Religious leaders who believe that sexual orientation is a choice argue that such research is an attempt to legitimize homosexuality; others worry that a detailed knowledge of the genetics underlying homosexuality will open the door to genetic engineering that prevents it.
But Bocklandt doesn't think these concerns should prevent scientists from asking the basic question of whether homosexuality has an underlying genetic component to it or not.
"I have no doubt that at some point we'll be able to manipulate all sorts of aspects of our personality and physical appearance," Bocklandt said. "I think if there's ever a time when we can make these changes for sexual orientation, then we will also be able to do it for intelligence or musical skills or certain physical characteristics—but whether or not these things are allowed to happen is something that society as a whole has to decide. It's not a scientific question.
Originally Posted by Andy-K
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