Talk:Causes of sexual orientation

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[edit] Total re-write

Much of the material on this page needed to be merged into the full discussion on the genetics and environment/choice pages. I'm in the process of moving material into those articles from several places, so if you're looking for material deleted from this article to appear in one of those two, you might want to wait a few hours for me to finish.

This article was also getting rather clunky from repeated patching by different people, and some of the statements weren't really saying much, or were making controversial conclusions best handled by letting other articles discuss the situation in detail (like the stuff about religion). So, instead of just cutting and moving, I re-wrote this article to be what I hope is a proper introduction to the topic. -- Beland 03:00, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Rename this article?

So in these nature vs. nurture arguments, there are some finer points of terminology. To my understanding, the causes of sexual orientation include lots of far-ranging things like "what makes people sexually attracted to anyone?"; "cause" refers to the mechanisms that make something go. Determinants are the factors that determine whether an organism will express phenotype A vs. phenotype B. It's the difference between "what makes some people have blue eyes and others brown" (a single gene, in many cases, I guess; anyway, this would be a determinants question) and "what makes people have eyes (blue, brown, or otherwise)?" - that would be a causes question, I think. Anyway, this is a long-winded way of asking whether this article wouldn't be more properly named "Determinants of sexual orientation", because I think that's what was originally meant. (Certainly, that's what it's about right now.) "Etiology of sexual orientation" might also be a candidate, though I am less familiar with that term, so I'm not sure it's exactly appropiate. -- Beland 03:07, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I think some people would object to "etiology" because it suggests/implies a diseased state. Technically, the word refers to the logos or description of an aitia or cause. So it should work except for the connotation that most people would attach to it.
The idea of "cause" is murky in common language. We ask, "What caused the water to boil?" Somebody says, "It boiled because I lit the gas flame under it." But the second speaker has mentioned only one of several factors involved, the factor that s/he changed. To know whether water will boil you have to know the air pressure, whether it's pure water or has some percentage of salt in it, and the temperature to which the water is to be raised. Temperature, pressure, and the nature of the liquid are all causal factors that determine whether it boils or not. (Actually there is at least one more factor that can determine the exact time when the water starts boiling, but let's keep it simple.)
"Cause" can be defined as "anything that is a factor in producing an effect or result." By that definition, which allele or alleles one has of the two copies of the gene that determines eye color is a "cause." You could call it a determinant too, but the dictionary says that "determinant" is a synonym for "cause". If there is a distinction to be made between "cause" and "determinant," it probably ties in with our human idea of actors and our human idea of relatively immutable things in the environment that the actors have to deal with, move around, etc. A gene is a kind of template or jig according to which other components in the cell of some organism fabricates amino acids. It doesn't do anything itself. It is like a pile of plastic fruit on a tray that sits there while art student after art student comes in and draws it. But the gene determines the structure of the amino acid that is associated with it. If the gene gets mutated by a cosmic ray or something, it may become the template for an amino acid that doesn't do its job well or even doesn't do its job well enough to allow the organism to live. So by your use of language, the genes might be determinants and the ribosomes and other cell components might be causes.
What happens to make a human being a 0 or a 10 on the homosexual -- heterosexual continuum is not at all clear. It is possible that there may be a single gene that has more than one allele, and one or more of these allels may determine whether the human is homosexual or heterosexual. If there is such a gene, then one could speak of its being a "determinant" in the way you seem to want to use that word. But all of the other explanations with which I am familiar seem to me to be more of the "actor" sort. The mother is suffering from a cancer and has lots of tissue that produces male hormones, so the baby she is carrying, although female, is pushed in the direction of masculinity. If that push happens, it "causes" the baby's brain to be masculinized. Actually, once you get beyond the proposed "gay gene" (which should be a "gay/straight gene"), I can't think of anything that serves as an immutable factor that the body just has to deal with in the way that the growing body just has to deal with the eye color gene. I also can't think of any way in which homosexuality/heterosexuality can be reduced to the kind of "on-off" choice found in the "blue-eyed or not-blue-eyed" choice. Homosexuality/heterosexuality more nearly parallels the shades of brown that turn as black as the pupil at one extreme. 金 (Kim) 04:22, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I don't see any problem with both articles, if there is enough information regarding the supposed determinants of gayness that would not need to be repeated on the causes page. Hyacinth 04:35, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia, etiology "is the study of ccausation." Causation, along with cause (which may be called reason), redirects to causality. Also according to Wikipedia a determinant "is a function that associates a scalar det(A) to every square matrix A."
Ignoring the mathematical definition, it does seem that determinates are not (only) about causes, but (also) about effects, and thus do not belong in a article about "causes" per se.
Any wikipedia article is required to be about "the study of X", rather than "X", which is to say the article is not about the causes of sexuality, but the study of the causes of sexuality.
Hyacinth 04:48, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

After some more hemming and hawing, and looking again at how short this article is, I'm thinking maybe the best thing to do is just to make it a section of Sexual orientation. Or is it needed as a handy destination for these and other fine articles?

[edit] Reorganize sub-articles?

As I was adding to the Environment and Genetics articles, I found myself thinking that if the Causes article needs to be split into subarticles, maybe this isn't the best breakdown. The passages that discuss anatomical and psychological differences of indeterminate origin really don't belong entirely in either Environment or Genetics. Perhaps it would be better to have a subarticle focusing on scientific research, broken into multiple articles based on the type of research, if necessary; and another subarticle on the choice debate (which is related to the nature/nurture controversy, but it's a particular angle that has more to do with morality and politics than any of the scientific stuff). -- Beland 06:35, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)


[edit] What to do with this page?

Examining this article, I can't help but feel that most of the material is repeated in other articles. This page exists only as a link page to other articles on causes of sexual orientation and seeks to summarise these but does so poorly and incoherently. Either arguments and content common to both articles (environment and genetics) need to be merged here and this section cleared up, or this article should just become a link page, perhaps even a category? For example, the political controversy sections from both could be moved here. Alternatively, is there an argument for deleting this page altogether? Thoughts? --Axon 12:05, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I think my earlier suggestion to merge this page with Sexual orientation was a good idea. This page could be converted into a coherent section there, more or less. -- Beland 14:18, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)