Re: Disorders

Bradley Felton (zim@pobox.com)
Sun, 12 Jul 1998 11:57:32 -0500

At 10:25 PM 7/11/98 -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>Maybe not. It is well documented that rats in an overcrowded cage start
>producing more homosexual rats. This seems to be a normal (genetic?)
>reaction to over-population. In the modern, over-populated world, it
>would make sense that the same factors could kick in to slowdown human
>over-population. If this is the case, it may be the breeding population
>that keeps increasing the population beyond sustainable levels who are
>overriding the natural programming with memetic ideals.

I think there are a couple of errors here:

  1. An increase in gay rats does not slow down the population bloom, as non-gay rats are always happy to take up the slack.
  2. If these gay rats are not contributing to the gene pool, their trait can not be said to have evolved for this purpose (it may be a "glitch", which evolved for some other purpose but turns fatal in an over-populated environment).

In humans, the "gay gene" exists in an equilibrium with those of other sexual stratedgies, increasing its share in small societies where the increased disease risk that this strategy brings is not a large factor, decreasing when the opposite is true. Presumedly something similar is going on with the rats....

-Bradley Felton zim@pobox.com