From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Dec 01 1999 - 08:26:09 MST
On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, Rob Harris wrote:
>
> Nice one! I'd never thought of that possibility. Of course, the first thing
> that came to me was "How can Homos pass on their genes for any amplification
> of effect to be made? But then I thought "Perhaps the presence of the
> recessive gene in the pool as a whole is preferable, and so is indirectly
> propagated by the reproducing carriers"....
>
This is a heterozygosity effect (with perhaps moderation or promotion
by other genes). The best example is sickle cell anemia. Homozygous
for non-sickle cell gives you malaria, Homozygous for sickle cell
gives you a bad case of the disease (with malaria resistance), but
hetrozygous gives you some resistance to malaria without giving you
the disease.
Other traits that I'm fairly sure have this type of characteristic
include storing/burning execess energy supplies and conservative vs.
adventursome personality traits (i.e. do you "stay" or "go" in
the face of an erupting volcano).
In these cases, a minority in a population will carry the trait,
in times of "stress" the fraction of the population with that
trait will increase (because they survive the hardships), but
when the environment returns to normal it will decrease to a
lower level because it confers a survival disadvantage in those
times.
I think homosexuality might to some degree simply a strong dose
of human "hypersexuality" combined with a loss of discrimination for
the a biologically "productive" mate (or a mixup in the "type"
of mate one is attracted to). Humans have been selected for
hypersexuality, but I suspect there are pressures against that
since if you are really indiscriminant, you leave yourself open
to attack by individuals with whose partners you have enjoyed yourself.
Robert
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