Mike Airhart was the founding editor of Ex-Gay Watch, until he left in 2007. He has returned as a contributing writer. He is a project manager and data scientist for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and an interfaith advocate, living near Phoenix, Arizona.
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That’s truly interesting. I come from a family of five brothers, with me and my closest brother being idnetical twins; of the five of us, only my twin and I are left-handed. He’s straight and I’m gay. So I can kind of see how we fall into the pattern Joe talks about.
The theory appeals to me because it would demonstrate that homosexuality was the inadvertant byproduct of another natural process, which makes the most sense from an evolutionary perspective. It is also intriguing in that Scientific American just this month published some work on handedness in humans that linked it to one-side dominance in other species. For example, fish that swim in schools tend to move in one direction (which direction is specific to the species of fish) at once when attacked by a predator, which maintains the school and the protection it provides. This paper posits a mechanism for how that trait is passed down from species to species.
This theory also explains a lot of other seeming anomalies about gay men, at least (as usual, no work on lesbians) – for example, the concordance rate for sexual orientation among identical twins (which is between 1/3 and 1/2 IIRC). Also, intriguingly, there has long been a correlation between left-handedness and homosexuality, which makes total sense.
Joe when I clicked on your link for the paper I got a blank screen. Is there an HTML copy of this paper? PDFs don’t work when you try to disconnect from the internet to read them and they take forever to traverse over dialup.
Randi, you may want to post your comment on Joe’s own blog as well to make sure he sees it.
for some reason I couldn’t open the pdf.
I searched for a non-PDF version of the article, but had no luck. I’m not sure what to tell you guys…the link worked for me on both my home and work computers 🙁