Biology is not fully reducible to genetics, and behavior is not fully reducible to biology. I’ve found myself using that adage more often in conversation, so I thought perhaps it would be helpful to mention and unpack here. As far as I know, that particular phrasing is mine, but the sentiment I believe is fairly […]
homosexuality
Science in Review — September 2013
This is the fifth and final post in a series on the topic of biology and sexual orientation. I set out to write this series primarily as a forcing function to update my own understanding of the evidence for biological mediation of sexual orientation. After reviewing studies on heritability and the biological pathways, I have satisfied […]
Science in Review — August 2013
This is the fourth post in an ongoing series on the topic of biology and sexual orientation. Last month we talked about the evidence for the heritability of sexual orientation. The upshot of that seems to be that it is partially correlated with certain genes, or with inheritance in general (as estimated by twin studies), […]
Science in Review — July 2013
This is the third post in an ongoing series on the topic of biology and sexual orientation. Having dealt with what I felt were some necessary preliminaries, we now turn our attentions to the main questions about the biological mediation of sexual orientation, starting with issues of genetics and heritability. To what extent is sexual […]
Science in Review — June 2013
This is the second post in an ongoing series on the topic of biology and sexual orientation. Last month, I talked about how the longstanding philosophical questions of the mind-body problem might inform or bias our understanding of how biology mediates sexuality. There was some question as to whether having a monist or dualist perspective […]