psycpc at rosie.uh.edu (Rexer, Jennie L.) writes:
>controversy revolved around the fact that the researcher himself (s. Levay)
>is a homosexual male, and due to the subjective nature of the methodology
>of neuronal counting, alot of experimenter-bias type speculation arose.
LeVay was blind to which brains were homosexuals and which were controls. A
more troubling contaminant is the fact that LeVay obtained the homosexual
brains from people who had died of complications of AIDS. But many people are
so eager for the "legitimacy" of a biological reduction that they ignore the
uncertainties. It should also be pointed out that LeVay's result was a
statistical one; that is, one can't look at the size of this nucleus in an
individual brain and say "this person was oriented toward men" or "this
person was oriented toward women".
--
Matthew Belmonte mbelmonte at ucsd.edu
`The Bohemian Kingdom' - Risley Residential College for the Creative and
Performing Arts, Ithaca, New York
