From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Dec 02 1999 - 02:41:31 MST
On Wed, 1 Dec 1999 hal@finney.org wrote:
>
> So we went from 100% carrying the gay gene to 75% in the next generation.
> Or if you count percentage of breeders, it is 67%. This will continue
> to drop each generation, eventually eliminating the gene from the pool.
>
As I tried to point out, a gene might be preserved if it happens to be useful
in specfic environments. It is also true that a gene might be preserved if
it happens to physically sit next to a gene that is valuable. You will
get preservation of adjacent genes that where one of them happens to be
valuable, because crossovers in DNA occur over regions of megabases to
tens of megabases while genes are mostly only kilobases in size.
Getting rid of garbage DNA is difficult when there is little selection
pressure to do so. Only in birds (or perhaps bats) does there seem to
be selection pressure to delete "junk/underutilized" DNA (for reasons
of weight reduction). In mammals, there is likely to be an accumulation of
genes which prompt "atypical" behaviors when they are not suppressed or
counteracted by other genes.
So, the real problem is not with the term "natural" or "atypical" but
with the term "homosexual" -- it decribes a gross behavioral characteristic
that might have multiple underlying, but distinctly different, physical
(or environmental) causes.
Robert
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