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Eugine_Nier comments on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 - Less Wrong
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When did this actually happen? All the arguments I've boil down to either the "it shows up on brain scans and is thus innate" fallacy, or if you don't agree it's innate you must be an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!!!11!!
What? I can't see why knowing that genetics (assuming that's what's meant by “innate”) affects how likely people are to commit violent crimes would make me dislike violent criminal any less, nor why knowing that (say) the concentration of lead in the air also affects that would make me dislike them any more.
Well, there are a lot of people arguing that we should go easy on violent criminals since "it's not their fault". I don't agree with this argument, but a lot of people seem to be convinced by it.
Twin studies. (Though by that standard lots of things are relatively innate.)
Relative to what? If "lots of things" are "relatively" something, your standards are probably too low.
Yes, twin studies give a simple upper bound to the genetic component of male homosexuality, but it is very low. As an exercise, you might try to name 10 things with a lower genetic contribution. But I think defining "innate" as "genetic" is a serious error, endemic in all discussions of human variety.
Added, months later: Cochran and Ewald suggest as a benchmark leprosy, generally considered an infection, not at all innate. Yet it has (MZ/DZ) twin concordance of 70/20. For something less exotic, TB is 50/20. That's higher than any reputable measure of the concordance of homosexuality. The best studies I know are surveys of twin registries: in Australia, there is a concordance of 40/10 for Kinsey 1+ and 20/0 for Kinsey 2+; in Sweden, 20/10 and 5/0.
Since everybody in this subthread is talking about the numbers without mentioning them, from Wikipedia:
Numbers like ".34–.39" imply great precision. In fact, that is not a confidence interval, but two point estimates based on different definitions. The 95% confidence interval does not exclude 0 genetic contribution. I'm getting this from the paper, table 1, on page 3 (77), but I find implausible the transformation of that raw data into those conclusions.
Ok, taboo "relatively innate". The common analogy used in the 'civil rights' arguments is to things like skin color. By that standard homosexuality is not innate.
I can't speak for Bayeslisk, but I'd say it means that things other than what happens to you after your birth have a non-negligible effect (by which standard your accent is hardly innate). But I agree it's not a terribly important distinction.
I probably agree. (But of course it's a continuum, not two separate classes. Skin colour also depends by how long you sunbathe and how much carotene you eat, yadda yadda yadda.)