Posted on 03/24/2013 1:04:54 PM PDT by newheart
The list of amici contains several names that will be familiar to anyone whose has had the bad habit of following American politics. Beyond their political coloration, which in many instances seems quite changeable, they do present a typical Washington motley: underemployed lobbyists, society hostesses, TV gasbags, defenestrated politicians, and political hangers-on, most of them draping themselves in the phony-baloney job titles that only our preposterous political culture can pretend to endow with authority (“adviser,” “consultant,” “commentator,” “advocate”). In other cases there are references to real jobs—former special assistants, speechwriters, undersecretaries—that the amici once held and abandoned several administrations ago, when the world was young—and before their moral and constitutional views had progressed to the state of exquisite sensitivity that now drives them to lay their opinions before the High Court. Nobody will be surprised to learn that these opinions are not terribly well informed.
(Excerpt) Read more at m.weeklystandard.com ...
As the excerpt shows, they also demonstrate the facile nature of the so called 100 Repbulicans amicus brief.
Science of Same Sex Relationships.....
Same sex attraction is based upon what is intellectually acceptable... period.
Attraction is based upon personality aspect attracting its compliment. Masculine is attracted toward feminine and vice versa no matter the gender.
Thus if a masculine female is not gay, she will just be attracted toward a feminine guy. The reverse is also true.
I’m not sure what your point is. The article is about the lack of genuine science in what passes for same-sex marriage research.
The science is bunk, just like global warming. This was all planned, and the plan was laid out. The very first objective was to remove homosexuality from the list of psychological disorders. There has been a smear campaign within the psychiatric community against anyone who questioned fake studies and results put forward by pedophiles like Kinsey.
I agree. I’ve read much of the research and most of it is not good research. They are searching for a genetic basis to prove a biological basis for being gay. They can search forever and will not find it.
There is some very interesting research relating to genetic engineering of the vomeronasal organ and pheromones with mice that results in a reversal of gender behavior.
Sensory organ differentiates male/female behavior in some mammals
Vomeronasal organ, not brain, determines sex-specific behavior
For years, scientists have searched in vain for slivers of the brain that might drive the dramatic differences between male and female behavior. Now biologists at Harvard University say these efforts may have fallen flat because such differences may not arise in the brain at all.
Rather, they say, the epicenter of sex-specific behavior in many species may be a small sensory organ found in the noses of all terrestrial vertebrates except higher primates. Their work, appearing this week in the journal Nature, indicates that defects in this organ, known as the vomeronasal organ, lead female mice to adopt male behaviors such as mounting and pelvic thrusting while abandoning female behaviors such as nesting and nursing.
“These results are flabbergasting,” says Catherine Dulac, Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “Nobody had imagined that a simple mutation like this could induce females to behave so thoroughly like males.”
The results do not apply directly to humans, which lack a vomeronasal organ, but may open new avenues of investigation for research into sex-specific human behavior.
Dulac and co-authors Tali Kimchi and Jennings Xu studied female mice mutant in TRPC2, an ion channel whose absence disables the vomeronasal organ, which works along with the nose to detect pheromones.
They found that these females, when placed in a cage with a sexually experienced male, would engage in typically male courtship activity: chasing their cage mates, lifting the males’ hindquarters with their snouts, and emitting complex ultrasonic vocalizations that are part of the male mouse’s mating ritual. Eventually, the female mutants would replicate male sexual behavior by mounting the hapless males and thrusting.
The male mice responded with increasing aggression toward the mutant females, eventually impregnating all of them. Once these females had given birth, Dulac and her colleagues observed a striking lack of maternal behavior. After giving birth, wild-type female mice spend about 80 percent of their time in their nest nursing their newborns, but the mutant females would readily wander away after about two days of motherhood, eventually abandoning the nest altogether. While lactating mice will ordinarily attack male intruders and reject their courtship behaviors, the mutant females were docile toward males and appeared highly receptive to their overtures.
“There are two possible interpretations,” Dulac says. “Either the vomeronasal organ may be needed to grow a female-specific neural circuit during development, or the mature female mouse brain may require vomeronasal activity to repress male behavior.”
To test these two alternatives, Dulac and her colleagues excised vomeronasal organs from the nasal septa of normal adult females. These mice began behaving like males, despite the fact that they – like mutant females in the study – showed testosterone levels, estrogen levels, and estrus cycles indistinguishable from those found in normal females.
“It had previously been thought that entirely different neural circuits, modulated by these hormones, controlled sex-specific behavior,” Dulac says. “Remarkably, our work suggests that neuronal circuits underlying male-specific behaviors develop and persist in the female mouse brain, but are repressed by the normal activity of the vomeronasal organ.”
“In fact, our research suggests a new model where exactly the same neural circuitry exists in males and females,” Dulac says. “In this model, only the vomeronasal pathway itself – which serves as a switch that represses male behavior while promoting female behavior – is dimorphic.
While male and female bodies are strikingly different physiologically, it appears the same cannot be said for the brain.”
Dulac and colleagues are now studying the behavior of male mice mutant for TRPC2 to determine whether they display femalelike traits.
Dulac, Kimchi, and Xu’s work was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and the Human Frontier Science Program. Kimchi and Xu are both with Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.
That is fascinating. Obviously, since humans don’t have the vomeronasal organ it doesn’t directly apply, but it does suggest that sex-specific behavior may not be as tied to the brain as previously thought. So does that open the door for a more environmentally based view of the cause of sexual preference in the old nature vs. nurture debate?
I can demonstrate how consciousness changes are the primary stimulation for sexual preference. Usually, I can identify the exact point in an individual’s life where they develop masculine or feminine consciousness attributes and if they changed, that can be identified as well. I’m not supporting either side in the debate. Just searching for scientific facts to assist in understanding of the process.
most of them draping themselves in the phony-baloney job titles that only our preposterous political culture can pretend to endow with authority (“adviser,” “consultant,” “commentator,” “advocate”) …IOW, the left still tries to get away with using the logical fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam. If that fails, then it will be back to the Alinskyite argumentum ad hominem.
The Dulac, Kimchi, Xu study sounds fascinating, but I wonder if when it was sent out for peer review did anyone say “I smell a rat”?
These same research studies were replicated at other universities. The Harvard article I posted is about six years old. Last year UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine Neuroscience Department had a Grand Rounds on this area of research. I find the topic absolutely fascinating.
Two of my children have been doing genetic engineering and cloning research in two different medical schools. Topics like this give me a common discussion topic with them!!!
I wonder if there are potential implications in this research for people with homosexual inclinations who want to be freed from them...but maybe political pressure would prevent such research from being carried out.
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