Also, on the topic of gayness, I remember there being some reported correlation between the a person's self-identified "gayness" and their ratio of maternal aunts to maternal uncles. Back to google scholar.
Ooh, I've never heard that before. My dad's an only child and my mum's one of four sisters (no brothers). Does that help?!
A supportive anecdote it is, but still an anecdote. Hmm...I have... one maternal aunt and two maternal uncles. I keep on thinking that I'm missing someone, but I don't think I am. Funny that, eh?
Hmm. Okay, so the paper I'm reading (might as well get all this out of the way now, right?), "Maternal Inheritance and Familial Fecundity Factors in Male Homosexuality" (subscription only), seems to think it reasonable to view some classes of homosexuality as heritable, their theory being that there are some genes that, in females, increase their "fecundity" that, when present in males rather decrease it (resulting, in extreme cases, in homosexuality). This does not explain the ratios however, which needs some other characterization, as, they say, possibly an "arms race" between the sexes.
Other stats mentioned in this being that homosexual men tend to have significantly more older siblings than heterosexual ones, while their parents tend to have fewer siblings compared to the parents of exclusively heterosexual children. Also homosexual men tend to have more homosexual cousins on their mother's side than their father's. That's the review part of the paper over.
For their own data-gathering (they questioned 150 people; a very small number, to be sure), they report that the trend of increased female fecundity and having more maternal aunts than uncles holds true for only three of the eight ethnic groups that were covered in the test, where the others showed precisely the opposite results. However, the number of people in these other groups was really far too small to say anything at all, except that it might be interesting to do some new studies.
RICHARD DAWKINS, in contrast to this view, has the hypothesis that us homosexuals fulfil the role of the "sneaky male". To paraphrase his reasoning: the difference in size between the sexes is indicative of "alpha male" type communities; in such environments, it's common for other males to feign effeminacy or in general be quite sneaky (in some fish, you get almost a third "gender" where the non-alpha males are significantly smaller than either the females or the alpha-males, and they spend their time tiptoeing about in groups squirting all the ladyfish they come across with their semen). He says something like "just because they say they're not interested in it, and act that way, that doesn't mean they they won't end up knocking up the occasional lady". One could note the desire of many gay couples to adopt as being slightly supportive of this view. This is only a hypothesis of his, of course, but it seems not to be doing the rounds that one would expect, given his general popularity, so I thought I'd share it here as an on-topic aside. I haven't come across much about it in academica, but I am almost totally ignorant of research into genetics and/or sexuality other than the odd anecdote, so.
Don't know what research has been done about lesbians though (I doubt there has been as much, to be honest, owing to the way things are), but much of the above data about maternal fecundity and the ratios has, I think, been found to be true of male-to-female transsexuals also.
I was wondering if there are any stats on the number of gay men who also have brothers that are gay, without the AIDS question being considered? Surely this would be the logical "control question"?
Yes; that was the thing: I don't know the numbers off-hand and have had my fill of sexual-theorizing for today, but it should be enough to say that in their data there were gay men with gay brothers, but NOBODY who had a brother with AIDS identified as being gay, and women who had relatives who had AIDS were much more likely to identify as being homosexual also.
