Homophobia Explained 5/8
392 views · Published 4 July 2008 · 10:05 · Indexed 28 October 2026
Channel: Jackies1979 · 2008 · Education
If the world or at least the part of it concerning animals' sexual identity is strictly deterministic, it arguably makes little sense to recommend to an agent a strategy upon which he should act when faced with the dilemma. He will become homosexual or heterosexual depending on some psychobiological cause even if he be in the middle of Kinsey's scale in the first place and have some natural ascetic talent -- unless he will not skid at all as would then be dictated by some other cause. Nonetheless, evolutionary game theory may still want to find out who of those that did skid significantly up or down the scale are the winners and who are the losers. If Camperio Ciani's findings really reflect a common cause for fecundity and male homosexuality, then the homosexuals should turn out to win since it is rather they than the heterosexuals who have a larger-than-average family, which is worth X utility units, despite their lack of the additional Y units which they would get when living an undisturbed heterosexual life in the homophobic environment (see Tab.1). The heterosexuals will lose despite their gain of the latter Y units since, given the common genetic cause for the two states of affairs (female fecundity and male homosexuality), in the moment they turn heterosexual it is plain that their family will tend not to be larger-than-average, and thus they will rather not get the X units that this outcome would be worth. Should the heterosexuals turn out to win, then Camperio Ciani's correlation cannot possibly reflect a causal relation. In this sense, the dilemma may provide a test scenario for Camperio Ciani's account.
If, on the other hand, nature has made room for a kind of indeterminism to
be interpreted as free will, there are still at least two causal constellations in which the homosexuals would win and which are not ruled out by the evidence as published in Camperio Ciani (2004). Although I leave aside the dubious possibility of some kind of backwards causation ("an agent, by becoming homosexual, determines the genetic disposition that his female maternal relatives already had at earlier points in time"), the first of these causal constellations is still somewhat odd, and passionately Einsteinian scientists are advised to skip it. It is, however, mentioned because nothing may rule it out completely:
There may be a strong and mutual causal relation between fecundity and homosexuality, but the seemingly odd couple as a whole is indeterministic in its occurrence, and probably simultaneous, and so in some sense the result of the collective, entangled free will of a family. This constellation rejects the premise that the genetic code does not change as of fertilization and builds on hypotheses such as Löwdin's (1963) that it is quantum tunnelling that could lead to spontaneous genetic mutations responsible for aging or the development of cancer. Likewise, biochemists and quantum physicists should scrupulously check and see whether or not there might be non-local, simultaneous effects at work amongst the genes of different individuals of a certain family that are reflected at the psychobiological level by an increase in fecundity among females and homosexuality among their maternally related males.
The second causal constellation is much more straightforward. Moreover, it also applies to the following hypotheses concerning the evolution of homosexuality: (I) There is a homosexual genetic variation not necessarily or at least not so immediately related to a male's maternal female relatives, and (II) homosexuality is, to some degree and either in a chaotic and thus pseudoindeterministic or even well predictable way, sociodynamically determined.
Due to space problems, the rest of the text is in the matrix video here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Nbz5jBNa-w0
