mistermack

An ISRAELI CORPORATION You have two cows. They come with guns. Move you to a dusty cowshed and take your cows. Then they bulldoze your cowshed and when you protest, they shoot you for being a terrorist. Then American taxpayers pay to replace the bullets. Then end times.

Not at all. If you don't fear something, it's obvious you won't want to admit to fearing it, if you are labelled as having a fear of it. Homophobia for the most part, is a false label. It was originally more of a taunt, than an accurate depiction. Now it's just the usual word for anyone who isn't woke enough to continually sing the praises of gayness. In a way yes, no human is immune from societal norms, and nobody gets brought up in a vacuum. I would just say that homo-tolerance is exactly the same, it's a learned behaviour, needs brainpower and indoctrination just the same. Fear and misunderstanding ARE natural. But there's nothing wrong with tolerance. I would teach kids the same. And please don't quote other animals as being naturally tolerant. If you don't know something exists, that's oblivion, not tolerance.

The important thing about memory. . . . Is, . . . ummm. . No,, it's gone 😶

As usual, when you wonder if something is genetic or nurture, a check on identical twins will tell you a lot. Homosexuality in one twin does not automatically match homosexuality in the other. So it's not 100% caused by genetic makeup. There is a possibility that identical twins can experience different levels of hormones in the womb, but that's not been proved either way. I don't think anyone's done a study on homophobia in identical twins. I wouldn't expect any proven link if they did. Well firstly, most people who are homophobic wouldn't admit to fearing gays. And most probably don't fear gays. The phobia label is just a trendy depiction of what most homophobics would describe as dislike or repulsion. Also, it's just as likely that tolerance is something that is learned. I don't see parents openly teaching kids to be homophobic, but I do see parents teaching tolerance to their children all the time. If tolerance is so natural, why does it have to be repeated over and over to children? Now that is downright silly. There isn't another species with anywhere near the brainpower to understand the concept of homosexuality. Most species can't even comprehend that other animals are even conscious. Very few can even recognise themselves in a mirror.

From a legal point of view, I don't think that would get you off a charge of touching something you shouldn't have. You would stand more chance if you claimed it was accidental !! 😉

As far as I know the answer is yes to all. It's known as the relativistic Doppler effect to give it it's full title. And light IS electromagnetic radiation, and you do get a red/blue shift effect because of Doppler, which is useful in cosmology telling us the relative motion of certain stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Doppler_effect

You can learn or reason that it is desirable to overcome an innate instinct. It's possible to reason your way to overcoming other kinds of phobias. That doesn't change the fact that it was originally innate so it doesn't answer the question of "nature or nurture".

At population level, it's pretty obvious that a lot of variation is good for the survival prospects of the overall population, but bad for some individuals who's characteristics are badly matched to the environment. If you have variation, it's obvious that there will be winners and losers at an individual level. But the variation is an insurance policy for the group when conditions take a turn for the worse. If you had a population of clones, ideally suited to the current conditions, then they might be highly vulnerable to a climate shift, or an influx of competitors or new diseases. Whereas if you have a great deal of variety, the population might ride out the bad times, with the most suitable individuals surviving. So it's not likely to be pure chance that populations are varied. It's a tried and tested feature of evolution that's been happening for millions of years. When you lose variety artificially, like in potatoes in Ireland in the 1800s, you set yourself up for disaster.

"theoretically possible" is a very speculative phrase. There is unlikely to be theory related to such a process, it's far too complicated to predict. To be precise, "early in the pregnancy" would mean after an egg has implanted itself, and commenced hooking up it's plumbing to the mother. In that case, it's highly unlikely to the point of impossible, that doctors would embark on removing that, and trying to reconnect it to a different mother. There would be dual problems of morality, and of doing it without fatally damaging the embryo and placenta. In vitro fertilisation, as posted above, is already happening. Another possibility for the future is the development of an artificial womb, capable of carrying an in-vitro fertilised egg all the way to a viable baby without ever being placed in a woman. There is work being done on that, but it's dragging because of religious and moral objections, as well as practicalities. But I have a feeling that it will be possible in the future, and might even become the normal way of making babies. It might start out as a way of breeding valuable livestock, and progress to human reproduction.

It doesn't have to be such a direct process. The homophobic tendency might arise as a side effect of other traits, which ARE favoured. For instance, my suggestion that it arises from our ability to mentally imagine what others are feeling. That can be a huge advantage to the individual, in building alliances, in attracting mates, and even in hunting. But it also might have the side effect of making us recoil from homosexual behaviour. The plusses might just outweigh any disadvantage. I'm not championing that scene, just bringing up complicating possibilities. In my case, mentally putting myself in the shoes of someone just like me, but who discovered that they are attracted to men, has eventually had the contrary effect to phobia, by making me imagine what I would feel like, in their place.

Age distribution problems arise as a one-off after a population bulge. If you didn't have the the bulge, you wouldn't have the old people problem. I covered that with " The main thing for the welfare of the people is to have stability, with slow population movements." Yes, people are living longer. But you CAN raise the retirement age, and if they have to, then eventually they will. But you ignore the fact that machinery has taken the place of human labour on a huge scale, and will continue to do so at an accelerating rate. You might have fewer workers supporting more old people, but the real picture is fewer people, and more and better machines. And why is that absurd? I said they like more money to spend, and you just volunteered a reason why. That doesn't contradict my statement, it reinforces it.

I think the there is a selective advantage. Not directly but indirectly. Variation is hugely important in most characteristics, and the price of variation is to have some individuals where the variation has gone too far. I think that's what produces gays, and many other traits that don't seem to have any genetic advantage. The variation is so important for the population, that it outweighs any disadvantages. I'm speculating, it's not something I've read.

There is, 100 years is only about three generations. If you care about your own descendants, I guess even great great grandchildren are relevant. Even though they only have one-sixteenth of your genetic material. In other words, they are fifteen sixteenths descended from unrelated humans. From a purely academic point of view of course, we nearly all hope things go well in the future. But personally, I'm not that fixated on human life, at the expense of other species. Once you get to one 32nd fraction of my genes, then I'm just as concerned for the wellfare of snow leopards, as I am about humans. Moreso, as we number billions, and they are just hundreds or a few thousand.

I don't. I tried to be clear that I was unaware of homosexuality, and had very little knowledge or interest in sex of any kind. I wasn't claiming that I had lived in a vacuum for nine years. I would stand by my opinion that revulsion or repulsion of homosexuality stems from the human ability to mentally put yourself in someone else's shoes. I very much doubt if I would have reacted the same, if my brother had described lesbianism to me. Firstly, because my imagination wouldn't put me in their position, and secondly, because he wouldn't be talking about bumhole action, which was the grossest part for me at the time. Mind you, the very idea of kissing or being kissed by a man was also pretty gross to me. But then, our family wouldn't even hug back in those days. It just wasn't part of normal behaviour. We do more now, but it still feels unnatural to me. Babies wives and girlfriends excepted. At the time, I was in junior school, and the kid who sat next to me in class, I found out years later, turned out homosexual. He was ok, there was no hint of it at the time, and he probably didn't know, if he was as ignorant as me. It's ironic that his reaction would probably have been just the same as mine, at the time.

Why "should" ? It depends on your own personal preferences and goals, that's all. Adolf Hitler didn't care much about anybody or anything. Ghandi did a lot of caring. They are now both just as dead as each other, and will be for the next infinity of years. All that's left is data. They had an effect on peoples' lives, but those people too will soon be nothing but a teeny bit of data. In the long run, caring about the long-term future gets you nowhere, unless you are fanatical about genes and their survival. Will someone be carrying a few of my genes, in the year 3,000? I don't really give a toss.

Why does a country need a certain population level? It's governments that like a rising population, they like to have more money to spend. But the people are generally better off with a smaller population. A plot of land doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and you're not breathing in everyone else's farts. Defence and international influence are the main things that benefit from higher populations, that's why politicians like more people. The main thing for the welfare of the people is to have stability, with slow population movements. And as the world is massively overpopulated by humans, I would aim at a slow decline, as a population policy.

That's ludicrous. As if there is a book somewhere listing what feelings people should or shouldn't have. So now you're blaming closet gays for homophobic feelings. And the only people who are not homophobic are genuine straights. Is this a new kind of logic? My own experience of homophobic feelings is that it's a fairly natural inherited trait, brought about by our ability to imagine scenarios, and put yourself in another's shoes. My brother is three years older than me, and when I was a kid, (a long time ago), I knew nothing of sex, other than there were two kinds, and they were quite different. That was as far as I had ever contemplated the matter. Then one day, my brother mentioned homosexuals, ( I was probably about 8 to 10 at the time ) and I asked him what that was. He started to tell me, and I flatly refused to believe him. That spurred him on, and he commenced to go into great detail about their activities, with me shouting at him to shut up, that he was a liar, and eventually I was standing with my fingers in my ears shouting 'la la la la la' at the top of my voice, to drown him out. He thought it was great fun. To me, it was so horrible, what he was saying, that I had to try to shout him down. Of course, I quickly found out that he wasn't inventing it. But that was my own natural, unprimed reaction to my first ever information about homosexuality. I don't think it was nurture. I'd never heard of it before, and my parents never ever spoke about sex of any sort. I'm not sure I even knew, or cared, about where babies came from, at the time. That's a Catholic upbringing for you.

This brain argument is pretty much the weakest of the lot of the AAH, and that's really saying something. It should be obvious to anyone who looks at it seriously that it just doesn't stand inspection. The human brain stops growing at age 11 in girls and about 14 in boys. Does their diet suddenly get cut off at that age? Of course not. There's no dietary reason why the brain shouldn't keep growing. It stops because it's reached an optimum compromise, arrived at by the deaths and survival of varied humans over millions of years. The iodine question has been answered perfectly well, with the farming reference. Wild human ancestors would have had a much more varied diet, and would probably regularly attend salt licks, like many other animals do. Farming, with its tendency to cut the variety of food, is modern, and so the problems it brings are modern too, and can't be applied to what was happening millions of years ago.

That is absolute rubbish. Humans living thousands of miles from the ocean, hundreds of miles from running water, still develop normally, and their childrens brains grow properly, even in times of famine. They could easily grow bigger brains, if evolution favoured it, but childbirth and general robustness are limiting factors, not biochemical building blocks.

If you don't want to see them, then 'terrestrial scenarios' cease to exist. When you get fixated on one thing, that's all you will ever see. What about tool use? We became bipedal to free the hands, and then later, tool use and it's benefits drove an increase in brain size. I'm not saying that's right, but it's an obvious possibility that you seem blissfully unaware of, with your single-track thinking. At least there is solid evidence out there for tool use. It's not just in our imaginations.

I clicked the link, and what did I find ? "Belgraver, for example, found that members of a swimming club had an incidence of 42.8% while patients in his general clinic had an incidence recorded as low as 2.02%.32" Which indicates that the condition is NOT limited to regular swimmers, but it is just more common amongst them. HOWEVER, he didn't examine a sample of human patients from 40,000 years ago living a rough life outdoors in all weathers. I think he would have found much more than 2.02% incidence. Your link is to an article by a committed AAH supporter who draws wildly unwarranted conclusions from the evidence produced. It's not at all balanced work. Very much along the lines of Elaine Morgan.

Why don't you back up your claims with evidence? In any case, as I pointed out, modern life is totally unlike the life of people living over 40,000 years ago.

That's us, isn't it? 😉

Why do you post such rubbish? Are facts not good enough for you? Science isn't about emotion, which you seem to be full of. This sort of slogan-argument is ridiculous, on a science forum. On the subject of 'surfer's ear' you would think that five million years of evolution would have found a way to prevent it, if our ancestors were aquatic for that length of time. It's really evidence AGAINST your AAH. It's caused by cold air or cold water. Our ancestors lived outdoor lives, totally unlike how we live now. It's not surprising if some of them encountered some cold winds and rain. Surfer's ear in a few old bones is telling us nothing new.

I said no such thing. You're inventing your own facts. Which doesn't argue well for the general quality of your arguments. So it's not surprising that the AAH is for you. Jim Moore's writing generally makes sense. Elaine Morgan's writing is pretty worthless, full of special pleading.