Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

–“Curt, Aren’t you relying on Blanchard for the origins of homosexuality?”–
(regarding a recent study)

More correctly, I’ve stated repeatedly that we don’t know the answer but that it’s in utero, could be mother’s immune system reacting to testosterone, could be some other immune response, but that it does run in families, and it does occur more commonly in non-first children. This research report uses a novel interpretation of the statistics on a small sample set of 64 men, and is not statistically significant, yet the effect does persist, it’s just small and affects both sexes. So I remain of the opinion that among the available theories the most likely is some in utero immuno reaction that is severe enough to harm fetal development but oddly enough not enough to cause miscarriage (which is the body’s usual reaction). The fact that no miscarriage is produced only reinforces that the cause is an amplification of some regular process of sexual development (in the brain) such that doesn’t cause miscarriage.
So in other words, we would need a theory that was more causally parsimonious than the current state of the science suggests.
Every other theory has been less so.
As usual, my standard of confidence in any scientific theory is quite high compared to others. But my work has taught me that the combination causal parsimony and precision of description are almost never wrong.
Cheers
CD