Dear Geoff,
That was very informative, and I thank you. I am a Biology major at ASU
and am currently writing a paper which deals with the eugenics movement and
it's impact on modern genetics, I was looking for a study that was of
questionable scientific value and I think I will use the Lemay one you
referred to. I know of several other studies where the actual study was
retracted. Did the newspapers print these retractions? Of course not, scary
eh? Ok to my point, I have a question concerning your information, how
might you explain that many admitted homosexuals say "I have always known
since I was a child that I was homosexual", how can this be something other
than a biological explanation for this, perhaps infant/embryo trauma? Just
curious if you know of any hypotheses put foward to explain this.
As for Focault's quote about homosexuals being a species...I find this
very troubling, most of the scientific community is slowly spreading the
message that there is exists no biological basis for race within humans, and
for him to have a chutzpah to call homosexuals another species...very
troubling indeed, understandable only in the light of the eugenics movement.
Who knows, maybe the next thing they'll be saying is that homosexuality is a
disease.
Jeffrey
Biology Undergraduate Arizona State University
Casey <casem at pangea.ca> wrote in message
news:01be89dc$c1917b60$28f8a1cf at g.casey...
> Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald in their book Exploding the Gene
Myth:
> How Genetic Information is
> Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians,Employers, Insurance
> Companies, Educators, and
> Law Enforcers, give a four or five page review of the studies that have
> been used to form the conclusion that homosexuality and lesbianism have an
> undoubted biological basis. They form much the same conclusions on this
> subject both in their 1993 and 1997 editions. Ruth Hubbard is a biologist
> at Harvard University.
> These are not the only authors that give an unfavorable review of
> these studies. The reader will likely
> find as I have done that he/she can pull any biology book off the shelf in
> any bookstore and find critiques
> of the advocacy science that homosexuals and others have used and find
that
> those studies have
> very doubtful conclusions.
> Some of these criticisms are as follows:
> 1. The identity of a number of the subjects (sometimes this number is
> quite significant) was not known
> but only assumed.
> 2. The control group was not adequate or did not exist.
> 3. In one major survey study the sample was not a random sample and so
the
> composition
> of the resulting study group was in all likelihood very skewed in
> favour of experimenter bias.
> 4. The data were strongly suggestive of a different conclusion other than
> the experimenter put
> on it. In LeVay's experiment regarding the hypothalmus, for
> example, a comparison of
> homosexual cadavars with heterosexual cadavars, all of whom belonged
> to AIDS victims, is
> somewhat suggestive that the small size of the nucleus of the
> hypothalmus is due to the degenerative
> effects of AIDS rather than any real difference between homosexuals
and
> heterosexuals.
> 5. Very strong experimenter bias as indicated by, for example, a statement
> made by LaVay to the effect
> that if he didn't find the result he was looking for he would
> altogether give up science. Most of the
> research done in this area has been done by gays and lesbians.
> 6. Aspects of the hypothesis remained untested
>> A very interesting observation made by Hubbard and Wald is that
> researchers LeVay and Bailey and
> Pillard though they say in their scientific papers that they are not
making
> any claims for a biological or
> genetic basis for homosexuality, when interviewed they draw very strong
> conclusions from their studies.
> Bailey and Pillard, for example, are quoted in Science News as saying,"Our
> research shows that male
> sexual orientation is substantially genetic". There is quite a contrast
> between what is concluded in the
> studies and what is said on talk show circuits.
>> It was either in Hubbard or Wald or in another book dealing with the
> LeVay study that it was
> noted that when LeVay and another homosexual appeared on the same
> television program, the other
> man tore a strip off LeVay for daring to suggest that homosexuality was
not
> a choice. For this
> other homosexual it was indeed a choice!!
>> For homosexuals, having a biological basis, which they insist on,
is
> very important to their
> getting homosexuality accepted as normal in schools and in other public
> institutions, and in society
> in general. Randy Shiltz, who wrote, And the Band Played On said the
> following: that a biological
> explanation, "would reduce being gay to something like being left-handed,
> which is in fact all that it is."
>> Hubbard and Wald point out that the notion that homosexuality is not
> just a behaviour but rather
> something biological began in the nineteenth century and the idea was
> promoted early in this
> century by sex reformers Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter. In the
> centuries preceding, homosexuality was merely a chosen act of sodomites.
> On this point they quote Michael Foucault
> who wrote this in History of Sexuality, until that time [the nineteenth
> century]:
>> "the sodomite had been a temporary aberration;
> the homosexual was now a species."
>> I hope that this little bit of truth will be helpful to homosexuals, their
> supporters, and all others who
> are interest in this subject.
>> Geoff
>>
