Sexual orientation - chosen, learned, or predetermined

[Falcon Randwick]

Yes, I'm familiar with that site, it's pretty funny.
The correlation in question, however, is not across indices, but between...

[Felgerkarb]

Pubert has shown extreme hetero behavior since early on, and he isn't even two yet. A boob man like his old man...and he likes pretty women and ignores unattractive or old ones.

[vladimir]

Pubert has shown extreme hetero behavior since early on, and he isn't even two yet. A boob man like his old man...and he likes pretty women and ignores unattractive or old ones.

Son of Felger

[wackyjacky]

I knew some guys in San Francisco who didn't start out gay - they just kinda got sucked into it.

[LTO]

Of course, as every Australian knows about those Pommy pooftahs, the real determinate is if you prefer Marmite to Vegemite...

Your brother seems to agree with me that that there is no conclusive evidence, perhaps even less conclusive than I thought - "appears to support a weak correlation" is a pretty weak statement, especially for something they really want to be true. I must say that I am a bit surprised that he would claim that "most people who identify as gay do have the gene" since they have not identified the gene yet. And I wonder if there is a straight gene, and a bisexual gene, and a pedo gene...

A "weak" correlation is a correlation, nonetheless. My brother has no vested interest either way, he's just a scientist who does the science. His conclusion as published in that particular paper reflects only the evidence he and his colleagues gathered during that research, privately he has told me that a "gay" gene has almost certainly been identified.

"What keeps driving the research is that many homosexual people feel they were “born gay”, says Dr Michael Dunne, an epidemiologist at Queensland University of Technology.

“This hints at a biological cause.”

Dunne is co-author of a major study just published on the sexual orientation of 5,000 Australian twins, which found that the genetic influences on homosexuality are weak. It is important that humanity understands itself, he says: “And homosexuality is an important part of human sexuality.”
https://pluralsg.wordpress.com/2007/03/ ... being-gay/

There is an even stronger correlation between skirt length and stock prices, but that doesn't make it causal.

In 2015, 13-15 years after the studies you cited (and studies cited in the article), this is where we are:

Researchers thought they were hot on the trail of “gay genes” in 1993, when a team led by geneticist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute reported in Science that one or more genes for homosexuality had to reside on Xq28, a large region on the X chromosome. The discovery generated worldwide headlines, but some teams were unable to replicate the findings and the actual genes have not been found—not even by a team that vindicated Hamer's identification of Xq28 in a sample size 10 times larger than his last year. Twin studies suggested, moreover, that gene sequences can't be the full explanation. For example, the identical twin of a gay man, despite having the same genome, only has a 20% to 50% chance of being gay himself.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/ ... ations-dna

No, Scientists Have Not Found the ‘Gay Gene’
So, ultimately, what we have is an underpowered fishing expedition that used inappropriate statistics and that snagged results which may be false positives. Epigenetics marks may well be involved in sexual orientation. But this study, despite its claims, does not prove that and, as designed, could not have.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch ... ne/410059/

After all, it’s not 1996 anymore. In 2014, the “gay gene” simply doesn’t matter. The science behind it is narrow and inconclusive. Its rhetorical potential—if it ever had any—has been thoroughly exhausted. And, at this point, continuing to pursue a genetic explanation for homosexuality could more harm than it does good. It doesn’t matter whether or not you were “born this way,” what matters is being accepted the way you are, however you got there.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... -gene.html

And, the actual science aside, IMHO this is a horribly misguided project from the start - treating straight as innate and gay as an aberration that must be caused by something (a gene or whatever) - the assumption that there exists the clearly defined category 'gay' in some objective sense - the reduction of human behavior to genetic determinism (one need only have a look at 20th century history to see how badly that can go)...

[Loogan]

I would say it's a combination of choice, learned and predetermined.