back to earth

Sunday, July 02, 2006

My month-long in-house reporting course is finally over - and life, one hopes, will resume normality (i.e. 8 hours a night). This last week has been the craziest since the summer of my Penn graduation, for many of the same reasons: not enough sleep and way too many vices.

But it's been worth it all, I think, to end up with a bunch of friends with a bottomless capacity for bizarre conversations ("Humans are actually mutants and the reason we exist is that aliens from another planet needed to create a race to mine gold, so they mutated their genes with those of monkeys and formed us"), an openness to the occult ("pen spirit, pen spirit, please come out"), and a readiness to trade relationship histories in the same way one displays battle scars ("I can't believe you pretended to like a band just because the guy you were dating was in it - that is sinking really low!").

I'm a bit relieved that it's over, though. It's a charming distraction but ultimately unsustainable. If it had gone on much longer it would have been that much harder to persuade myself of its aberrational quality.

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Watched Neil Gaiman's Mirrormask last night. Okay fine, I use "watched" loosely, seeing that I slept through at least half of it. But the half I saw was gorgeous, in a sublimely surreal kind of way; the perfect movie to watch when you're high. Although I think it was let down by the acting, so I'm going to buy the comic to make up for it. I've bought five books in the last week and there are another two I'm dying to get my hands on - Curtis Sittenfeld's new novel and The Sandman Papers. I don't know where I'm going to find the time to read all this but I shall start by devoting this afternoon to curling up in bed with Ishiguro and tea.

Speaking of sleeping through movies, I also failed in my attempt to watch Superman Returns last week, although I think that was because the movie was actually bad. I don't know what happened in it, but I really needed that two-hour nap in the cinema. Good thing it was free.

I want to watch: Pirates, Guantanamo, and most of all Thank You For Smoking. And there's going to be Clerks II!

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Fascinating article in this week's Economist on homosexuality - about how the more biological elder brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay.

Brothers in arms
Jun 29th 2006 | TORONTO
From The Economist print edition

Some men are gay because their mothers have already had many sons


RAY BLANCHARD, a researcher at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, was reviewing some data a few years ago when he noticed something odd: gay men seemed to have more older brothers than straight men.

Intrigued - and sceptical - he decided to investigate. He recruited 302 gay men and the same number of heterosexual controls and inquired about their families. How many siblings did they have, of what sex, and how had the births been spaced? How old had their parents been when they had had them? Dr Blanchard found that only one detail seemed to predict sexual orientation: the more elder brothers a man had, the more likely he was to be gay. Neither elder sisters nor younger siblings of either sex had any effect, but each additional elder brother increased his chance of being gay by about 33% from the population average of one man in 50.

It was a rather perplexing discovery. It implied either that being brought up with a lot of elder brothers affects a boy's sexual orientation, or that a mother's body is somehow able to keep count of how many sons she has conceived, and that this count affects the orientation of future children. Hard as it was to explain, though, the finding was replicated again and again, across different cultures, eras and even psychiatric groups.

Those who argued for a social explanation suggested that having lots of elder brothers makes a boy more likely to engage in same-sex play, and might also increase the chance he is a victim of sexual abuse. But, regardless of whether either of these conjectures is true, neither playing with other boys nor sexual abuse has been scientifically linked to homosexuality.

Anthony Bogaert of Brock University in St Catharines, Ontario, therefore decided to examine the other hypothesis—that the phenomenon is caused by something that happens in the womb. He has just published his results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr Bogaert reasoned that if the effect were social, elder brothers would wield the same power even if they had not been born to the same mother. Lots of half- or step-siblings, or adopted brothers, for instance, would also cause their younger brothers to be gay. On the other hand, if the effect were really due to birth order, biological brothers would make their younger brothers more likely to be gay even if they did not grow up together; indeed, even if the younger boy grew up without any older boys around at all.

Dr Bogaert collected a new sample of several hundred men, this time specifically recruiting those who had grown up with "brothers" to whom they were not biologically related. He collected information on how long they had been reared with each sibling, as well as about biological siblings from whom they had been separated.

He found that only the number of biological elder brothers had an impact on a later-born boy's sexual orientation; non-biological siblings had no effect. This was true even when a boy had grown up surrounded by an enormous gaggle of non-biological elder brothers. By contrast, elder brothers raised in a separate household "influenced" their younger brothers' sexual orientation in exactly the same way as they would have done had they been living with them.

Like many of the best pieces of research, this one raises questions, as well as answering them. One is, how does the mother's body keep count of how many sons she has conceived? A second is, how does that change the environment in the womb? A third is, how does that change affect sexual orientation? And a fourth is, is this an accidental effect, or has it evolved for some reason?

To these questions, Dr Bogaert has no answers, though in some cases he has his suspicions. He speculates that, for reasons as yet unknown, a mother's immune system takes note of the number of male offspring and that each succeeding male fetus is subjected to increased levels of antibodies. These somehow affect its development. Clearly, something strange is going on, because things other than sexual orientation are also affected by birth order. Boys with elder brothers are also likely to have larger-than-normal placentas while in the womb. And despite that apparent nutritional advantage (for a larger placenta should be able to draw more food from the mother's bloodstream), they are also likely to have lower birth-weights than would otherwise be expected.

Dr Blanchard, meanwhile, calculates that about one gay man in seven can chalk his orientation up to having elder brothers. But to the question of whether there is some evolutionary advantage for a mother who has many sons to include a gay one among them, neither he nor Dr Bogaert has an answer.

 posted by zyn :: 2:43 PM :: 3 Comments :: permalink


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