Genetics And Sexual Preference Essay

Many people will say there is no way genetics can influence sexuality. If this was the case wouldn’t there be a stronger correlation between the sexual preference of parents and children? The answer is no – since social influences also play a role in sexual determination, the sexual preferences of people who are related will likely differ because they will have different individual experiences which ultimately lend to the determination of their sexual preference. With that being said, a series of experiments conducted by Bailey, Bobrow, Wolfe, and Mikach (1995) studied the sexual orientations of adult sons with homosexual fathers. Both experiments focused only on the causes of homosexuality in males, and neither accounted for the degree to which environmental influences had on sexual orientation. Researchers ultimately found a small correlation between the sexual orientation of fathers and their sons. Their study consisted of about 55 homosexual fathers who reported on the sexuality of their sons. Results concluded that less than 10% of sons were homosexual; the overwhelming majority of sons were either heterosexual, or their sexual orientation couldn’t be determined. However, researchers conducted another study to test their theory of genetic influence on homosexuality and found significantly different results: “In that study, we recruited gay men with a twin or adoptive brother. The rate of homosexuality among sons (9%) was comparable with the rate we obtained for adoptive brothers (11 %) and was significantly lower than what we obtained for dizygotic (DZ) twins (22%), x² (1, N = 129) = 4.2, p < .05. Thus, the rate of homosexuality in sons of gay fathers in the present study was lower than that obtained for another kind of first-degree relatives (DZ twins) of comparably recruited participants in a prior study” (p.7-8). One plausible explanation for the higher rates of homosexuality among twins than the rates between father and son is that dizygotic twins may have shared environmental factors which ultimately influenced sexual orientated, while fathers and sons did not. Another likely reason could be that since siblings share a significant amount of genes, while parents do not, these genes could directly affect sexual orientation and therefore creating more of a consensus of sexual orientation in siblings than between parents and children. Since researchers did not …show more content…
Persons with this syndrome develop testes that produce normal or above normal male quantities of testosterone, but they lack androgen receptor sites to bind to the hormone in a normal way. The degree to which the syndrome is manifested depends on the quality and quantity of the available receptor sites. In the most extreme cases (called complete androgen insensitivity), affected children appear to be females, and are reared as such. At puberty, all of the usual secondary feminine sex characteristics appear except for menstruation. The determination that they are genetic males often is made for the first time when menarche fails to appear even quite late in adolescence. Longitudinal studies of affected individuals have noted a striking absence of most male-typical behavior and interests (Ehrhardt, 1975; Ehrhardt, Epstein, & Money, 1968; Money, 1969; Money, Ehrhardt, & Masica, 1968). The androgen insensitivity syndrome also illustrates how the concept of heterosexuality-homosexuality occasionally is difficult to apply, as persons with this syndrome are genetic males with all F/dM phenotypic traits. By most conventional criteria, they would be considered heterosexual females”