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Twins aren't genetically identical, even at birth. They begin separating from each other genetically when the zygote splits. Environmental factors determine how genes are expressed, and those factors are not identical. That makes twin studies a piss poor method of gene study. All it can tell you is how much the environment might effect their expression over time, and they aren't very good at even that.
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigenetics/twins/

Now that genetic testing is cheap, we're finding out most identical twins aren't identical at all. Proper gene testing doesn't assume twins are identical clones for life, it actually disproved that hypothesis. The space study with twins showed that in under a year their genes permanently diverged a full 7% (with a larger temporary change initially that lowered as they returned to similar environments).
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-twins-study-confirms-preliminary-findings


I feel that people often misuse mistaken assumptions to validate their prejudices. If the science isn't clear and validated, using it against others is improper in the extreme.

Discriminating against people for their legal, culturally accepted, natural behavior makes the person doing the discriminating an asshole. Homosexuality is quite present in nature, is now culturally accepted in western cultures, and is legal. Tolerance is a learned behavior I wish was taught better, especially by churches.

"A twin study of self-reported psychopathic personality traits"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886902001848

Perhaps the above is more to the point. Similar twin study showing identical twins having similarly significant genetic component to psychopathy as the prior studies show for sexual orientation.

Should we be similarly upset at people assigning morality to psychopathic behaviours?

"Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religious Interests, Attitudes, and Values: A Study of Twins Reared Apart and Together"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062599?seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents

Religiosity shows the same thing, strong correlations for identical twins, raised apart from one another, and much weaker correlations for non-identical twins also raised apart.

If Tom Cruise claims his belief in Scientology is a birth right and how dare we judge him, is he really backed by the science?

Where I am coming from, is insisting that for all the factors involved in human decision and behaviours, I still want to conduct ourselves as though free will exists.

More importantly, the freedom to discriminate against people based upon their behaviours must be defended as strongly as the right to discriminate based upon purely in born, unchangeable attributes like race, gender and ethnicity must be opposed.

As promised, the most promising results when polling google scholar:

"Genetic and Environmental Influences on Sexual Orientation and Its Correlates in an Australian Twin Sample"

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/J_Bailey2/publication/12572213_Genetics_and_Environmental_Influences_on_Sexual_Orientation_and_Its_Correlates_in_
an_Australian_Twin_Sample/links/0deec518bc0435c0cd000000.pdf

Probably one of the better studies, it breaks down orientation to a scale versus straight binary, though the results are then statistical correlations and my stats classes are too long ago for me to work that back into something resembling my claims above.

"Sexual Orientation in a U.S. National Sample
of Twin and Nontwin Sibling Pairs"
http://ioa126.medsch.wisc.edu/findings/pdfs/47.pdf

19 identical twins in the study with at least one twin with non-hetro orientation, within those 19 pairs, 6 showed concordance. So 6 of 19 identical twins sharing orientation, 13 of 19 not. This supports my statement above that in studies identical twins more often than not don't share homosexual orientation. This study also lists the statistical correlation of this result as 0.68, the previous studies statistical correlation was lower at 0.51(1.0 would be perfect correlation). If I'm reading the statistics remotely right, the above study then is similarly in keeping with my statement.

"Homosexual Orientation in Twins: A Report on 61 Pairs and Three Triplet Sets"
http://hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/1961to1999/1993-homosexual-orientation-in-twins.html

Smaller sample size and different polling methodology, specifically sought out respondents of non hetro orientation. Shows a higher correlation, 25 of 38 identical twins being concordant. That's 66% concordance so opposite of my claim that more often than not they are discordant.


Running out of time here to post results. If you keep digging though it's more of the same, identical twins don't come close to showing 100% correlation, highest study of the samples I've pulled is 66%, and it's by far the highest. This is in contrast to race and gender, where you fully expect 100/100 identical twins to match.

, I said it was more controversial.

I dare say even agreeing that we don't solely choose our sexual interests, when it comes to our actions I insist we treat those as the result of free will, aka choice.

When I'm not typing from a 4in screen I can pull up the references, but the peer reviewed studies on genetics hardly illustrate that sexual orientation and identity are dominated by it. Twins studies do show that identical twins more often share orientation than non-identical, which gives a correlation to genetics. However, I'll pull up the studies but last I reviewed them, more than half the identical twins in the studies did NOT share the same orientation. That is an arguably compelling indicator that genetics does not solely determine orientation.

Other twin studies comparing other behaviours like religion show a similar pattern. Studies with twins on violent and aggressive behaviour show an even stronger "genetic" component than the orientation studies, and nobody has any qualms about being politically incorrect declaring that violence is a choice and not a birth attribute...

If you watch carefully, his identical twin takes his place everytime he says the word rope.

So many identical twins!!

Alright,

this Wikipedia entry is a good start on the neuroscience and chemistry that goes on inside our brains when love happens:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_basis_of_love

As for the chemistry of conciousness, I'd recommend the book Neurochemistry of Consciousness: Neurotransmitters in Mind. I believe it's a free download on most readers. It's also a neat read.

It is exciting that we are those things. Because we all have roughly the same physical materials in our head, and we are all different people. The majority of us have the ability to record, interpret and recall information and stimulation, and it's all those chemicals and receptors in our heads.

We fall in love, or hate, or feel "meh" about something because of the stuff in our brain that makes our personalities. Even identical twins are still different people. That's amazing to me. The fact that we even reproduce at all, it takes a lot of work on a cellular level to even have a kid. That is amazing to me.

I have yet to see any proof that this is a god or a soul. What we can do is, look inside someone's brain and measure what's happening and what reactions we have. We can see it, we can observe and form conclusions from it.

We know that if you give a type I diabetic insulin, that insulin will act as a replacement inside their body. We also know, from the news, that if you try and think positive about getting that pancreas to work again, it fails to do so.

So, when someone says, that spirituality can cure disease, all I ask for his some hard proof. Not a bunch of hokem.

Using your example, how can you have a father and a son be the same human? They can both be human, but they can not be the same human. The only way that could be possible, if is the two humans were identical twins. Your example seems flawed, you should come up with a better one to explain it.

How do you know they are both equally god? How do you measure a god? How do three individuals make up a god? How does that work? What are the odds that this has happened elsewhere in the world? If it only takes a father, son and holy spirit to make god, how many gods are out there?

>> ^shinyblurry:

As you can see, Christianity has its own definition. It is referring to, essentially, that everyone in the Godhead shares the same nature or essence, but that they have their own individual personalities. The Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father but they are both equally God in nature. Not separate Gods, but one God made of three persons. Just like a human father and son are both equally human because they both share that human nature.

>> ^conan:

incredibly stupid tabloid science. i'm amazed that there're still people who can differentiate between cause and correlation. fat parents are having fat kids, is it genetics? no, it's because whatever the reason for your bad eating habits, you pass them down to your kids. what to you expect from your kids when you only eat junk? they'll eat it too. either because they mimic you or because you're the one who feeds them! congratulations, now you have perfect excuses: what once were "heavy bones" now are "hunger hormones" and genetics. this "documentation" didn't provide any hard facts, just hormones with names in quotation marks and similar snake oil stuff.
Step 1: stop doing sports, eat more junk and surprise! you'll become overweight. Step 2: catch up on exercising and change your diet and surprise again! your weight will drop. it's common sense. and this comes from someone who's still perfecting step 1... ;-)


I think you're misunderstanding the point of it. Everything you say is correct to a degree. I didn't hear them say that the sole cause of obesity is hormonal, not once. I'd be surprised if you watched it all the way through. The way you feed your children and the habits you give them is absolutely the root cause, at least I would say so. Then society/culture, marketing, advertising fast food. The cheapest foods are junk, that also plays a part.

But what they're saying here, is that the reason some people end up getting wildy overweight and not just a bit chunky is because there isn't the same hormone to tell them they're full. The amount some fat people eat would make a regular sized person sick, in just one meal.

I don't believe obesity is genetic either, I am one of those people who inherited my mothers shitty eating habits, was overweight as a child and now have to suffer the consequences of that. However my sister was fed the same way, offered the same things, but was always skinny because she ate like a bird (one years she would only eat bread rolls, haha). My children are two very different types, too. My daughter can eat more than the average adult, you know that old saying, hollow legs? But she puts weight on if I let her eat the wrong things or every time she feels hungry, so over the years I've had to very much restrict her. Now she tends to make the right choices so hopefully that will go through to adult life with her and I've not passed down the same bad habits, however she would eat every half hour if she listened to her belly. My son is just the opposite. If he's not hungry I could offer him his favourite anything and he'd turn it down. Lucky bugger!

Then there's the thing where my sister all of a sudden in her late teens became overweight. That didn't make much sense. But her eating habits had very much changed. The bit in this doc where they were testing identical twins where one was overweight and one wasn't was fascinating and tied things up much neater.


>> ^snoozedoctor:

Getting fat is like filling a bathtub with water. If you run the spigot faster than the drain, it fills up. Now THAT is heavy science. Burn more calories than you eat = weight loss.


You're talking about how to lose weight, a science we all understand This is talking about the reasons some of us gain. It's always pissed me off when bigger people rather than just admit they stuff their faces, try and pass it off as big bones (eh?) or genetics. I'm even rather cynical of people who say they love their weight and being big is beautiful and they want to be like that. I think rather they know how bloody difficult dieting is, not just the losing weight but keeping it off, also I think those people, and bless them for it, accept that they don't want to go through the endless bullshit of dieting and gaining and embrace it. Or they've got some chubby chasers paying them top dollar to watch them eat and balloon to 400 lbs. Food is very very addictive once you've learnt the pleasures of it, just like a drug. It's very hard for anyone who doesn't have a weight issue to understand it, especially since you've been listening to people make endless excuses for it over the years. I think that's what is putting the blinkers on you now when you watch anything with alternative reasons for obesity, you just see it as an excuse.

This is exciting, because what they're saying is if they can recreate these hormones they will be able to find a way of replacing them, which will make the whole dieting process much much easier.

The guy at the front of the marathon has the pace car watching him non-stop, along with at least 1 of the mobile tv cameras.

The cheater probably had to wait for the gap between the pace car with the 1st and 2nd place runners and the rest of the group.

I was accused to cheating in a race once when I was a kid. A parent saw me behind her son near the end of the race, only to see me ahead of her kid by 50 feet at the finish line. The only possible explanation is that I had taken a shortcut to pass her son. When my dad brought me and my identical twin to the judges booth, she walked away without apologizing.

It would have to work pretty well to be worth all the anti-rejection meds you'd have to take forever, and that seems unlikely. However, big picture, you have to start somewhere and this is a pretty good start. Doesn't seem all that unlikely that fifty years from now or so they'd be able to give you one that worked good as new. Maybe even one grown from your own DNA or harvested from the identical twin lobotomized in utero and placed into storage that all the rich people will have.

It might be helpful to distinguish attraction from behavior, there seems to be some overlap going on there in the discussion.

Indeed, but studies have had a hard time drawing that line. Your sexual orientation also is only one of thousands of places where there is a distinction between attraction and behavior. People with addictive personalities are attracted to certain behaviors. People with poor impulse control are attracted to certain behaviors. People with poor control of their temper are attracted to certain behaviors. There is still a distinction between having an addictive personality and being an addict. There is a distinction between having poor impulse control and a bad temper, and criminal behavior.

There are plenty of studies out there on twins and various behaviors, eg. smoking, that show very strong correlations between the behavior and identical twins as compared to non-identical twins. As I said, smoking studies on twins have shown that smoking is as strongly mirrored in identical twins as is sexual orientation. My point is to say you shouldn't attack people who say homosexuality is a choice with any more vehemence than those calling other behaviors like smoking a choice, as that is the conclusion supported by the existing scientific evidence.

>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^AnimalsForCrackers:
>> ^bcglorf:
Furthermore, stop misrepresenting the science on sexuality. As a behavioural scientist, your nonsense is not only tedious, it is offensive.
Please do point out any factual errors I made. Not only do I doubt that you are a behavioral scientist, but even if you were, your simple say so doesn't close a matter. The actual studies and results speak for themselves and I believe I cited them quite accurately, even if many may not like the conclusions.

Citations? Where? I've re-read all your responses multiple times and I haven't found any.
In response to your response to me, "Please explain then, what rights are being denied to "gay folks"?" sorta has a way of making people think you really don't know of what, if any, fundamental rights that might be denied to "gay folks" and that their grievances are superficial, hence the implied minimization of real issues, hence my response.

From the handbook of behavior genetics, the chapter on Genetic and Environmental Influences on Sexual Orientation. They summarize quite nicely the history of scientific studies on twins, and the results absolutely demolish the idea that identical twins raised in the same home will share a homosexual orientation. At best 50% of the time if one is homosexual, the other will be too. The majority of studies find a much lower likelihood still, and incidentally those studies are generally of more sound methods as well, again as noted by the authors and not myself. To be sure, the text asserts a link between genetics and orientation, but nothing near the definitive levels people seem to be advocating as self evident. It is, in fact, in the same realm as studies on other behaviors.


Fair enough. I'm no expert but after second-guessing myself and researching this further, I've read that the current consensus seems to be leaning towards there being a complex mix of biological and environmental factors at work here in varying proportions for varying individuals, and more research to be done to be able to attribute and quantify just how much of either influences sexual attraction as our understanding of it is far from complete.

So I say to you, in the same vein, you may be appear to be attributing far too much to "choice" as you think others do to purely biological factors. Most homosexuals report their same-sex attraction to be something they've never had a say or a choice in. It might be helpful to distinguish attraction from behavior, there seems to be some overlap going on there in the discussion.

I don't see how something not being solely determined by their genes or biology would automatically suggest "choice" to be its antonym and the answer. There are many unchosen attractions and desires and preferences that people have that can't be attributed to biology alone, yet they're also not consciously made choices. There's a bit of a false dichotomy going on here. The truth seems to be somewhere in the middle.

If I've erred in my ramblings, hopefully someone better trained/more learned in this area will tear it to shreds and set me straight (no pun intended ).

>> ^AnimalsForCrackers:

>> ^bcglorf:
Furthermore, stop misrepresenting the science on sexuality. As a behavioural scientist, your nonsense is not only tedious, it is offensive.
Please do point out any factual errors I made. Not only do I doubt that you are a behavioral scientist, but even if you were, your simple say so doesn't close a matter. The actual studies and results speak for themselves and I believe I cited them quite accurately, even if many may not like the conclusions.

Citations? Where? I've re-read all your responses multiple times and I haven't found any.
In response to your response to me, "Please explain then, what rights are being denied to "gay folks"?" sorta has a way of making people think you really don't know of what, if any, fundamental rights that might be denied to "gay folks" and that their grievances are superficial, hence the implied minimization of real issues, hence my response.


From the handbook of behavior genetics, the chapter on Genetic and Environmental Influences on Sexual Orientation. They summarize quite nicely the history of scientific studies on twins, and the results absolutely demolish the idea that identical twins raised in the same home will share a homosexual orientation. At best 50% of the time if one is homosexual, the other will be too. The majority of studies find a much lower likelihood still, and incidentally those studies are generally of more sound methods as well, again as noted by the authors and not myself. To be sure, the text asserts a link between genetics and orientation, but nothing near the definitive levels people seem to be advocating as self evident. It is, in fact, in the same realm as studies on other behaviors.