Homophobia Explained 1/8
1,221 views · Published 4 July 2008 · 9:35 · Indexed 28 October 2026
Channel: Jackies1979 · 2008 · Education
Sorry for the bad video quality.... so I also show the text here; the bibliography will also be given at the end... Abstract. The article presents a mind-bending game-theoretic dilemma which arises from a sociobiological finding on male homosexuality. It follows the pattern of a paradox first evoked by Fisher's hypothesis that smoking does not cause lung cancer but that a common cause leads to both the phenomena. My dilemma is, however, not vulnerable to an important type of objection against Fisher's problem. The dilemma may occur in the actual world and may give further support to the validitiy of the hypothesis that male homosexuality is linked to an increase in maternal female fecundity because several of its possible solutions may, on the basis of this hypothesis, straightforwardly explain the selection of homophobic traits. Keywords. Homosexuality, Evolutionary Game Theory, Social Organization, Adaptation, Fisher's Problem, Causation Camperio Ciani et al.'s (2004) solution to the Darwinian paradox of the survival of male homosexuality poses a threat of yet another paradoxical constellation, this time in game theory. Camperio Ciani et al. (2004) showed that homosexuality may bear reproductive advantages beyond some of the merely somatic survival benefits described by Kirkpatrick (2000) because the same genetic factors that give rise to the trait in males might boost the fecundity in their maternal female relatives. Indeed, maternal female relatives of homosexual males turned out to be significantly more fecund and to be mothering homosexuals more frequently than those of heterosexual males. It is unclear, however, what exact causal relation obtains when a human male acts upon his sexual identity tendencies. In Fisher's words, "the fact is that if two factors, A and B, are associated [...,] it may be that A is an important cause of B, it may be that B is an important cause of A, it may be that something else, let us say X, is an important cause of both" (1958, p. 155). Therefore, this correlation leads to a type of game-theoretic dilemma first evoked by Fisher's (1958) hypothesis that smoking does not cause lung cancer but that smoking and lung cancer are caused by one and the same third entity, e.g., the person's genotype, provided that it is unchanging as of fertilization.
