Originally Posted by SteppenWolf

Almost a certain fact inside the scientific community is that homosexual
behavior start to build up after an abuse as a child.

Originally Posted by SteppenWolf

Im going to bother to reply you first... i dont know what you mean by wannabes. I already am... oh, I see your point now, im sorry, i have less than 1000 posts, i must be broke then.

And regarding scientific evidence, let me start by building the nurture case with this:

Studies performed over the last several decades have found that gay men tend to have a greater number of older male siblings than do straight men. In a recent analysis of data from 14 studies involving 10,000 individuals, a group led by Ray Blanchard, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, determined that a large number of older brothers is a significant predictor of male homosexuality [24][25].

Originally Posted by Splum

Originally Posted by Splum

Actually fucking men in the ass WAS illegal in most of the USA until 2003 so your counter-argument is weak. Technically most homosexuals in the United States should be convicted of that crime.

Originally Posted by Splum

Same sex marriage and sodomy is outlawed mostly everywhere.

Originally Posted by BoyAlley

Originally Posted by LadyMischief

It's the society we live in today that makes it an issue for debate and harassment and discrimination.

Originally Posted by Centurion

The louder one "yells" the less they really have to say, and in your case, this really reverberates with your conclusion that people choose to be gay.
Amazing..so many people posing as experts on the human psyche when they can't even keep their own life straight (no pun intended).

Originally Posted by LadyMischief

ancient cultures embraced homosexuality and it lived harmoniously alongside heterosexuality without much issue. It's the society we live in today that makes it an issue for debate and harassment and discrimination.

Originally Posted by Splum

There is no definitive scientific proof that homosexuality is caused by "hormones" or "genes". None of you have any proof, until then homosexuality will always be regarded as a choice. You can "personally" believe in various theories all day long but in the end thats what they are just theories. I have facts on my side.

Again I am not trying to attack homosexuals and I dont hate homosexuals, they are amusing like retarded children.

Originally Posted by Pleasurepays

In August of 1991, while I was on the faculty of the Salk Institute in San Diego, I published a short paper in Science in which I reported on a difference in brain structure between straight and gay men. The difference was in a group of nerve cells called "INAH3." This cell group is located in a brain region known as the hypothalamus, which among other tasks helps generate our sexual behavior. Other researchers had previously reported that INAH3 was larger (on average) in men than in women. What I reported, based on a study of about forty brains obtained at autopsy, was that INAH3 was also larger in straight men than in gay men.

Being a science nerd whose previous papers had been ignored by everyone except my mother, I didn't expect anyone to pay attention to this one either. So I was quite taken aback when the "Gay Brain," as it was quickly dubbed, provoked a tremendous media splash. On the front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune it even took precedence over the collapse of Communism, which happened on the same day. People's reactions to my report were very mixed: there were people who loved it and there were people who loathed it, but almost everyone had some opinion about it. One widely expressed opinion (with which I agreed) was that the study needed to be replicated before its findings could be considered part of accepted scientific knowledge.

One of the most outspoken critics of my paper was William Byne, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who is now on the faculty at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. Initially, Byne suggested that INAH3 might not even exist. If it did exist, he said, it was probably the same size in men and women. And any difference that I had found between gay and straight men was most likely due to differences in the men's cause of death, rather than their sexual orientation. (All the gay men in my study had died of complications of AIDS.)

Unlike most of my critics, who tended to be humanities professors or right-wing clerics, Byne had the appropriate training to do a replication study, and he quickly embarked on one. With the help of several colleagues, he set about collecting and analyzing a new set of brain samples. Before too long, Byne had verified that INAH3 does exist, that it is generally larger in men than women and that the cause of death (AIDS versus other diseases) does not affect its size. However, years went by without any announcement concerning the key question ? is there a size difference related to sexual orientation?

Finally, on August 6 of this year, Byne presented his data at an international conference in Madrid. According to an account of the meeting in the Spanish newspaper La Raz?n, Byne reported that INAH3 was indeed larger in the straight men than in the gay men in his sample, in line with my 1991 Science report. Byne tells me that the difference was not as large as I had found, however. He declined to discuss the details of his statistical analysis prior to publication in a scientific journal.

La Raz?n did mention an interesting new detail. In spite of the size difference, Byne found that INAH3 contained the same number of nerve cells in the gay and straight men. If confirmed, this finding would suggest that there is no difference between gay and straight men in the earliest phase of brain development, when nerve cells are being generated and assemble into functional groups. Rather, the difference may arise at some later time, when the nerve cells in INAH3 are growing and forming connections.

What could cause such a difference in growth? There is a wide range of possibilities, ranging from genetic differences between individuals, differences in the levels of hormones (especially testosterone) that regulate cell growth in the hypothalamus and even differences in pre- or postnatal environment that could impact the growth of INAH3 through a variety of means.

Thus the findings on INAH3 to date do not prove a particular theory of sexual orientation as much as they point to ways in which such theories could be tested in the future. For example, if the technology becomes available to image INAH3 in living people, one could hope to establish the age at which the development of gay and straight men's brains diverges. Obviously, the factors causing the divergence must operate at or before that age. My prediction, based on animal experiments, is that the divergence happens before birth, but we don't yet know that for a fact.

Even without my research, we knew that there has to be some structural or chemical difference between the brains of gay and straight people. The alternative ? that the difference resides only in patterns of brain activity ? has been ruled out, because sexual orientation remains unchanged after all brain activity has been temporarily halted (by brain cooling or deep anesthesia, for example). What's surprising about the gay/straight difference in INAH3, then, is simply that it is so localized and obvious, rather than being diffusely spread through the synaptic architecture of the entire brain. This offers the hope that we will eventually be able to understand the origins of sexual orientation at a cellular level.

Originally Posted by Bossman

Womb environment 'makes men gay'

A man's sexual orientation may be determined by conditions in the womb, according to a study.
Previous research had revealed the more older brothers a boy has, the more likely he is to be gay, but the reason for this phenomenon was unknown.

But a Canadian study has shown that the effect is most likely due to biological rather than social factors.

The research is published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Anthony Bogaert from Brock University in Ontario, Canada, studied 944 heterosexual and homosexual men with either "biological" brothers, in this case those who share the same mother, or "non-biological" brothers, that is, adopted, step or half siblings.

He found the link between the number of older brothers and homosexuality only existed when the siblings shared the same mother.

The amount of time the individual spent being raised with older brothers did not affect their sexual orientation.

'Maternal memory'

Writing in the journal, Professor Bogaert said: "If rearing or social factors associated with older male siblings underlies the fraternal birth-order effect [the link between the number of older brothers and male homosexuality], then the number of non-biological older brothers should predict men's sexual orientation, but they do not.

"These results support a prenatal origin to sexual orientation development in men."

He suggests the effect is probably the result of a "maternal memory" in the womb for male births.

A woman's body may see a male foetus as "foreign", he says, prompting an immune reaction which may grow progressively stronger with each male child.

The antibodies created may affect the developing male brain.

In an accompanying article, scientists from Michigan State University said: "These data strengthen the notion that the common denominator between biological brothers, the mother, provides a prenatal environment that fosters homosexuality in her younger sons."

"But the question of mechanism remains."

Andy Forrest, a spokesman for gay rights group Stonewall, commenting on this and other studies, said: "Increasingly, credible evidence appears to indicate that being gay is genetically determined rather than being a so-called lifestyle choice.

"It adds further weight to the argument that lesbian and gay people should be treated equally in society and not discriminated against for something that's just as inherent as skin colour."

Originally Posted by LadyMischief

Primates are smart enough to choose gay too!!

Some of these examples of "homosexuality" in phylogenetically distant animals may be analogous rather than homologous to human homosexuality, but as we move closer to humans the likelihood of homologous behaviors increases. In mammals many different behaviors have been observed that might be associated with male homosexuality. Among primates homosexual behaviors are particularly diverse. These include such practices as the mounting of one male by another (e.g. Langurs, pig-tailed macaques, baboons, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos) (Sommer 1990; Oi 1991; Lorenz 1963; Yamagiwa 1992; Hayaki et al. 1989), including mounting with anal penetration (e.g. stumptailed macaques, squirrel monkeys) (Sommer 1990; Maple 1977), and mounting with anal penetration and ejaculation (Japanese macaques, rhesus macaques, gorillas) (Sommer 1990; Gadpaille 1980; Edwards and Todd 1991).

Many ancient cultures embraced homosexuality and it lived harmoniously alongside heterosexuality without much issue. It's the society we live in today that makes it an issue for debate and harassment and discrimination.