"Genes of homosexuality" – a secret weapon in the struggle of the sexes
Gays are women's secret weaponPyotr Smirnov, "Newspaper.
However, as it turns out, male homosexuality is a weapon of women in antagonistic sexual selection.
The struggle for resources between representatives of the same species is a phenomenon observed not only in the human environment, but also in the animal world. If people find lofty reasons for such a confrontation, then our younger brothers have everything explained by the desire to raise as many descendants as possible, that is, to spread their genetic material as much as possible.
Sometimes it goes so far that it degenerates into a confrontation of the sexes with the maximum exploitation of the partner. Females usually have the hardest time, who spend the best years (for some, months or even days) of their lives on bearing and raising children.
As psychologist Andrea Camperio Ciani and his fellow mathematicians found out, women have found a way to "take revenge" on male exploiters: they preserve and transmit the genes of homosexuality.
The authors of the work published in PLoS ONE combined two burning topics in it at once, adding a modern theory of evolution to same-sex love. Despite dozens of studies, scientists do not stop searching for the causes and origins of the development of homosexuality – both male and female. Perseverance, born of curiosity, has not yet brought really reliable results.
The fact is that homosexuality is not just a separate behavioral and physiological reaction. This is a whole complex of features that consist in the capture and interpretation of nonverbal signs and signaling molecules. Only if in the animal world behavioral disorders are limited to a short-term interest in one's gender, then in a highly developed society the story drags on for a long time.
So far, scientists, and together with them public and religious figures have agreed to the point that male and female homosexuality are different in their origin and in the mechanism of development. And the causes of such a phenomenon can be considered genetic factors, coupled with the action of the environment, both psychological – education and contacts with others, and material – experts do not exclude the action of chemically and biologically active substances, especially since recent experiments confirm this.
It turns out a classic scheme of the development of the trait, partially derived by Gregor Mendel – "the phenotype is the result of the interaction of the genotype with the environment."
If we do not take into account that scientists have managed to synthesize several drugs capable of such a "transformation", as well as to detect certain structural and functional changes in the brains of gays and lesbians, then science really knows very little about the causes.
The figure shows the differences in the activity of the amygdala of the right and left hemispheres for heterosexual men (HeM), heterosexual women (HeW), homosexual men (HoM) and homosexual women (HoW).
The high fertility of women in the gay family tree, established by Chiani in 2004, adds to the turmoil.
Genetics has also failed to make much progress on this issue – no specific genes have been found that are reliably "responsible" for homosexuality. Although the "innateness" of this trait is confirmed by specific differences in the brain in areas that do not change from birth, and in addition – a higher frequency of occurrence of the trait among identical twins compared with fraternal twins. It turns out that a trait that reduces, if not completely excludes, the emergence of offspring is transmitted genetically – a fact that would seem difficult to explain with the help of classical genetics and evolution with natural selection.
In fact, even an unchanged theory gives three possible explanations at once. The first is that the "multifunctionality" of the genes of homosexuality is not excluded, which ensures both the fertility of women and the femininity of men's tastes.
Secondly, it is possible that these genes are recessive and manifest themselves only in the state of homozygote, when both alleles (gene variants) in two chromosomes inherited from the father and mother are the same. In the event that one of them, or even more so both, are dominant, then a "standard taste" is manifested. This type of inheritance is typical, for example, for red hair color and for numerous congenital diseases. One recessive variant does not cause any "harm", but if a child is born from heterozygous parents who do not have the trait, then there is a 25% chance that he will be special, for example, red.
Of course, in this case, recessive genes, especially if they are harmful, will remain in the gene pool in constant "concentration". But when the selection conditions change, another thing is also possible – genes may disappear from the gene pool, or vice versa – their occurrence may increase. For example, sickle cell anemia develops when a child has two copies of a "bad" version of one of the genes, but children who are heterozygous for this gene not only do not suffer from anemia, but are also resistant to the development of malaria - unlike their brothers, who, it would seem, have a "bad" version completely absent.
The third explanation is antagonistic sexual selection, when genes propagating in a population give one sex an advantage in reproduction over the other. This variant is included in the modern theory of evolution and has already been observed in insects, birds and even some mammals.
As the simulation showed, it is the latter explanation that is the only true one.
Scientists have modeled the spread of potential homosexuality genes and compared the resulting picture with real family trees and data on the prevalence of homosexuality.
The conclusion of the psychologist and mathematicians is that only antagonistic sexual selection can explain the real data. At the same time, at least two genes should be involved in the selection, one of which is located on the sexual – female – X chromosome.
The authors believe that these same genes are associated with increased fertility of women and represent a way to control and maintain balance in the entire population. If we proceed from the classical model, then this is true for the entire population, regardless of nationalities and races.
Roughly speaking, the more gays there are on the planet, the more fertile women are, and vice versa.
Ciani and his colleagues did not look for a more detailed explanation of the mechanism of increasing fertility. Perhaps the simplest explanation would be that "gay genes" only increase the attraction of its carriers - whether they are gay themselves or their mothers – to men. However, such arguments are nothing more than fabrications, which have not been confirmed by any computer modeling. In addition, the model built by Chiani does not describe the phenomenon of female same-sex love in any way.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru20.06.2008