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The currency of evolution is the Gene. As Genes are inherited, homosexuality is a genetic dead end. Most homosexual people are born of heterosexual parents. Their parents would have to have been homosexual or carrying a recessive gene that alternates by generation to dominant and back again, that causes homosexuality.
Homosexuality is not a genetic mutation either, it would not survive as a gene, as it would be weeded out by Natural selection seeing as two partners of the same sex can't reproduce.
Evolution by Natural selection favors those most adaptable to change and this change can't come about if there is no environmental pressure on it and no offspring to pass on the genes.
Natural sexual behavior documented in those of the opposite sex are observed in those that are homosexual because they have to varying degrees brain function like that of the opposite sex.
This is because of hormone supply to the fetus during development, after (for example) a boys sex has been determined in utero, the brain is not yet fully developed, it does not get its quota of male hormones and stays predominantly female, this can be caused by a lot of factors as hormones are susceptible to being denatured by a number of factors, during pregnancy stress levels if high can and do cause the under production of hormones, or the over production or failure to remove things that affect acidity levels which are detrimental to the proper function of proteins.
A lot of proteins require other proteins to function or to regulate levels so you can see that affecting even one hormone can have a cascading effect.
How could it be considered evolution seeing as how it has been documented since the beginning of recorded history? Furthermore evolution by nature implies changing to improve oneself and/or their environment. Since homosexuality impacts no one other than the individual, I fail to see how it could be even remotely considered evolutionary. Personally I believe those who would attempt to claim otherwise are simply looking for an explanation where none is needed. Homosexuality is not a choice, not an evolved characteristic, simple as that.
Evolution is a process which has been occurring for longer then recorded history.
Evolution is in simplified terms the recognition that animals of one type must of came from animals of another type in order to survive the range of environmental conditions found one earth, the process which changes animals so that they may survival may also result in unnecessary changes, resulting in a sub-type. However Homosexuality has it's evolutionary benefits, it lowers competition among males for females; well still providing hunters and warriors in a communal setting so that community life and its advantages can flourish; Thus having a certain percentage of homosexuals may improve a species chances of survival. It can do such among other numerous ways.
Homosexuality originated in some way, knowing the mechanism which causes it may have practical applications. For example, cellar automation games and evolutionary algorithms may find it useful to have members of a species arise who will only seek out, co-habituate an environment and mate with those they can't reproduce with or medication targeted towards homosexuals who wish to have stronger sex drive may take advantage of facts derived from knowledge of such a mechanism and so on. An explanation may be useful.
First of all, nowhere did I state that recorded history predates evolution.
Secondly, homosexual relationships have been documented in all species, in all times through archeological research. Homosexuals did not evolve from heterosexuals no matter how you slice it. They have always existed in some manifestation. To claim otherwise is false. No more, no less.
You stated that homosexuality has been know about since the beginning of known history, this has no bearing on if homosexuality is a evolved trait unless you believe evolution has only been working since known history, some creationalists believe the world is only a few thousand years old. Saying that cats have been know about since the beginning of know history has no bearing of if cats were evolved, unless you are implying that cats were created at the beginning of known history.
Homosexuality hasn't been documented in ALL species(of mammals, the animal kingdom, of life?). Further more it is like blond hair or blue eyes, it may not of evolved from brown eyes, but it still evolved. To claim that homosexuality is not a sign of evolution is analogous to saying that any arbitrary trait of a animal is not a sign of evolution, fact is that its a animal and thus every one of its traits have been molded by the evolutionary process. You can view any of its traits, and through careful research find evidence of evolution.
And your posting has any bearing on what I have written how?
I understand the need to be contrary simply to be contrary, for I once was you. However I grew past that stage and realized that posting diatribes which have no association with the previously posted content do nothing to further actual debate. I can see you simply feel the need to contradict any and all, but by making assumptions as to the intent of anothers posting, and assigning meanings to statements which were never there to begin with only serves to reflect poorly on you.
Should you wish to debate what I actually wrote rather than what you assumed and misinterpreted to be my intent, by all means do so, I would love to hear it.
If they did not make sense TO YOU, it was because YOU chose not to take them at face value, simple as that. Do not attempt to claim my post forced you to make erroneous assumptions, it not only further weakens your argument, but again reflects poorly on you as well.
My opinion clearly stated that Homosexuality is NOT a sign of evolution. No more no less. You chose to take two words out of context and turn them into an opinion I never stated nor hold.
This isn't a 0pinion site, and your argument was flawed.
Homosexuals have not always existed in some manifestation, because life has not always existed.
Also, the assumptions are called charity. If an argument can be interpreted in multiple ways, then if an opponent interpreted it in the way which makes the strongest argument he is being charitable.
If you do believe that life has not always existed since creation, then you believe that homosexuals either evolved or came about by some form of abiogenesis. The latter option would mean your an idiot though, simple life like what is probable from abiogeneisis were asexual, and there is strong evidence that nearly all life, and especially homosexual and heterosexual members of the same species have the same ancestors.
Homosexuality could be generalized as a brain-state. Most brain-states arise from evolutionary characteristics that our ancestors had millions of years ago. One that would drive forward your self (perserverence) could be considered a Normal brain state. Those that go against it, could be considered an abNormal brain state. Homosexuality could simply be an abNormal brain-state.
I am not saying the homosexual people are abNormal, it is just the terminology so please don't put too much emphasis on the "ab-" here.
Also, there are 6 billion humans on this earth, I think we can afford to have a few that may not reproduce.
Its about what allows for a set of genes to continue on.
Sacrificial behavior may help, for example parenting behavior helps to insure the survival of young while taking away from the parents chance of survival.
Also homosexuality may improve your chances of survival in some situations, take for instance species where heterosexual sex is dangerous(praying mantas, cats, etc). Since sexuality is a spectrum a primarily homosexual animal may have heterosexual sex enough to reproduce and carry on its genes.
no, they are based on logic, preferably deductive logic, and preferably with empirically verifiable premises.
A premises may be an educated opinion, or it may not be.
You have yet to clearly illustrate an error in my reasoning, Your mainly ignoring my primary points and strawmaning.
There was no ad homiem, what you are likly refering to was within a if then structure which I'm sure you don't fulfill the conditional statement for. Even if you did it wasn't an attempt to discredit your argument(what ever it is) based on your qualities and thus wasn't an ad hominem. I was mainly being sarcastic about the abiogenesis thing. and setting the trap to see how far you would go with being defensive and emotional in your rebuttals, test your knowledge further, and give a final test of your analysis skills.
I like to make predictions based on minimal information, sometimes I can be surprisingly accurate.
Its doubtful you went to a typical public western high-school, but if you did your education in science and programming wasn't very in depth, likly just the required classes, correct?
If your argument is so sound my dear, why have you resorted to personal attacks yet again?
Interesting to say the least.
You have made no predictions, rather you have made several erroneous assumptions, simple as that.
I addressed your (lack of) argument early on in your repeated diatribes, you were simple unable to acknowledge that fact for then you would have been forced to admit your error which your ego(?) will not allow you to do.
By all means continue to make your ill-formed assumptions, for they only serve to expose you for what you are.
The only person who has not been dealing with this debate like an adult is you.
In your first post, you made the argument that since homosexuality has been around for all of recorded history, it is not an evolved trait. Someone argued that since evolution is older than recorded history, the fact that homosexuality has been around for all of recorded history does not entail that homosexuality was not evolved.
When you realised the mistake you had made in your original post, you started accusing your opponent of "posting diatribes".
(1) My post was not an ad hominem. An argumentum ad hominem is an argument that attacks the opponent's stance using the opponent's personal attributes, rather than attacking the logic or evidence in the opponent's argument as you are supposed to. If I had said: "You sound like a child, therefore your argument is unsound", that would be an ad hominem fallacy.
But the point of my previous post, as is clear from a reading of the first sentence, was not to attack your argument; it was to call you childish. I was retracing the steps of the debate between you and your opponent, and noting that the point at which you suddenly started making personal accusations of your opponent was also the point at which your opponent had very convincingly rebutted one of your arguments. I hinted that this was very unlikely to be a mere coincidence; more likely you were throwing a tantrum.
In other words, I have made a personal insult, because I was criticising your personal attributes (though not a blind insult, as I had given a fully reasoned explanation as to why I considered you childish), but I have not made an ad hominem, because I have not attempted to deduce the unsoundness of your argument from my criticism of your personal attributes.
(2) casper3912 is not my "friend". He is someone I respect as one of thinking debaters on this site (unfortunately this group is a minority), but I don't agree with many of his beliefs, nor do I know him outside of this site. And he didn't ask me to join this debate. For all I know, he could be annoyed that I butted in. All I care about is that I have someone to argue with - it's what I'm on this site for.
(3) You are, however, welcome to find as many friends as you wish to criticise me. I welcome criticism because I love to argue, and if someone is being ridiculous I can always ignore them.
(4) If you had checked my points page, you would have seen that I have not downvoted anyone in this debate.
(5) "Inference" is not an accurate word to use. An inference in logic, since you are so keen to use logical jargon as witnessed by your (albeit erroneous) use of the term "ad hominem", is a conclusion that necessarily follows from a statement or set of statements. Making inferences is a crucial aspect of debating: You can't debate if you don't infer conclusions from premises (logical term for "reasons").
But anyway, let's move beyond the wording and get to the crux of the matter. Your opponent did indeed attribute to you an opinion which you have never stated, but the way he did so was perfectly legitimate. You made an argument that, logically speaking, was invalid, because it was missing a crucial premise (I'll show you in a bit what you're missing and how it is crucial). A logical argument is a chain that runs smoothly from the premises to the conclusions. Your chain is missing a link in the middle, so it doesn't hold together.
In such a situation, there are only two options for your opponent to take: (A) point out that your argument is invalid, a workable but rather simplistic measure, or (B) point out exactly what the missing step is, and supply it for you, so the debate can continue.
Evidently your opponent chose (B): he explicitly stated the premise that you had left unstated, then argued that this missing premise is wrong. This is what he was doing when he went from your statement of "How could it [homosexuality] be considered evolution seeing as how it has been documented since the beginning of recorded history?" to his rebuttal of "Evolution is a process which has been occurring for longer then recorded history." But he didn't spell out all the steps involved in his reasoning to get from your statement to his rebuttal, possibly because he expected that you would be able to figure it out. So I will show you, step by step, what has happened, in case you didn't figure it out - this account may differ slightly from how casper had thought of it, since I can't read his mind, but the general layout is obvious to anyone used to analysing logical argumentation:
-----------------------------
You wrote: "How could it [homosexuality] be considered evolution seeing as how it has been documented since the beginning of recorded history?"
Written out more formally, your argument would run thus:
Premise 1: Homosexuality has been documented since the beginning of recorded history.
Conclusion: Therefore, homosexuality is not a sign of evolution.
This is in no way a logically valid argument. That homosexuality has been documented since the beginning of recorded history does not entail that homosexuality was not evolved. Note that I'm not saying your conclusion is wrong. What I'm saying is that there's an error of logic. The logical chain is broken: you've stated nothing that provides a logical link between "documented since the beginning of recorded history" and "is not a sign of evolution". To make one more illustration, see what happens when I substitute "homosexuality" for something else: Homo sapiens have been documented since the beginning of recorded history, but this doesn't mean that homo sapiens were not evolved.
An additional premise must be added to turn it into a valid argument, and your opponent supplied it for you:
Premise 1: Homosexuality has been documented since the beginning of recorded history.
Premise 2: If something has been documented since the beginning of recorded history, it is not a sign of evolution.
Conclusion: Therefore, homosexuality is not a sign of evolution.
This is now a valid argument - that is, its structure is logical. However, what remains to be shown is that each of these premises are true. Your opponent didn't dispute your first premise, but he did dispute the second premise, the one which was unstated but which had to be added to make your argument valid.
When can one say that if something that has been documented since the beginning of recorded history, it is not a sign of evolution? The only scenario in which this could be true is if the entire evolutionary process occurred during recorded history, of which documentations have been accurate in the relevant aspects. Otherwise, something could have evolved before the beginning of recorded history, then been around through all of recorded history, which would make the unstated premise false. In short, the only way that premise 2 can be true is if you say that all of evolution occurred during documented recorded history.
And now the rebuttal becomes obvious: Evolution has definitely been around for longer than recorded history.
-----------------------------
So either you had made an invalid argument, in which case you had made a mistake, or you had made a valid argument that has one obviously wrong unstated premise, in which case you had also made a mistake.
I also believe that you at least had some idea that you had made a mistake (even though you may not have been able to pinpoint exactly what it was, and definitely didn't admit that you had made one), or why else would you have suddenly shifted from somewhat reasoned argumentation to wildly lambasting your opponent?
No. Attacking the individual rather than the argument, then purporting to have defeated the argument, is an ad hominem fallacy. Attacking the individual without linking the attack to the argument is not a fallacy; it's simply attacking the individual. (Attacking the individual is poor debating etiquette and rather distasteful under normal circumstances, but considering your unreasoned slights towards your opponent, I find it justified for me to slight you in an entirely reasoned manner.)
In more detail: Ad hominem refers to a logical fallacy, and falls under the branch of fallacies of relevance. A logical fallacy is an error in the steps of reasoning, such that the conclusion does not derive from the premises. A fallacy of relevance, specifically, is a type of fallacy in which one or more premises are irrelevant to the conclusion. An ad hominem fallacy refers to an argument in which a premise is irrelevant to the conclusion because it criticises the opponent's personal attributes, rather than the issue at hand.
How could I possibly have made an error of relevance in concluding that your argument sucks if "your argument sucks" wasn't even part of my conclusion?
I do think that your argument sucks, but as you saw in my previous post, that formed part of a different argument, and I gave a fully reasoned explanation as to why I think that, an explanation which did not involve your childishness or otherwise.
I would suggest Googling obscure phrases in the future before using them in argumentation, to prevent embarrassment. You don't even need to get a proper education in informal logic to learn what an ad hominem is; Wikipedia alone would have given you an excellent overview. If you want a more in-depth and authoritative treatment of the topic, pretty much any book called "introduction to informal logic" or "logical fallacies" or such like would provide it.
(2) Dishonest debating tactics
"I stand by what I wrote" and "Have a great day" are simply euphemisms for: "I don't want to, or cannot, argue against you, so I will put an end to the debate rather than admit my faults." If you had an argument to make, what would be the chances that you choose to end the debate rather than present your argument?
I noticed that you have also entirely ignored some of the points I have made, most notably the evidence I gave that I have not downvoted you.
If you are unable to form a convincing rebuttal of my arguments, the honest and respectable thing to do would be to admit it. Short of that, at least you can keep silent. But continuing to make trivial sarcastic remarks at me, while offering no further argument, reflects the most poorly on you, rather like the stubborn child who clasps his hands over his ears and shouts "I CAN'T HEAR YOU".
You could be correct that for certain insects developping a homosexual nature would be advantageous, but not entirely. Because the gene doesn't just want to preserve itself and end right there, it wants to go forth and reproduce. If it wasn't able to do so, the line would stop at that insect.
I hate it when people use that particular analogy. No, The gene doesn't want anything, it isn't something which has desires. What your analogy means is that there needs to be a mechanism for the gene combination to continue and there is for homosexuals, multiple mechanisms actually.
Homosexuality also doesn't mean a homosexual never has heterosexual sex, its a strong preference not a rule and times of uncertainty and experimentation are common enough. Also, homosexual genealogy could lie dormant in heterosexuals, only to become active in the offspring. So heterosexuals could pass on homosexuality, in a similar way as lets say green eyes can be passed on from parents with brown eyes( both my parents have brown eyes, mine are hazel but mostly green). http://www.burpingbaby.net/baby_eye_color.htm
It is impossible, or at least highly improbable, for a trait which discourages the transmission of genetic material to be the result of evolution. Homosexuals typically do not procreate, so how on Earth does the opposition suppose that the trait was passed on?
The human spirit is individual, it knows itself as good and by comparison with itself names other things good or bad.
Homosexuality is found though out nature.
We are generally not overpopulated, and it is doubtful that homosexuals would represent a large enough group in a society to make the birth rate and death rate equal.
If we are not over populated then explain why they stopped making soda drink with real cane sugar.... they could not keep up with the market and it would drive prices higher is why. yes queers are in many animal kingdoms , but what percentage ?? it is very low and besides most animals dont have very much mental capacities...
Also the cause of the shift wasn't too much demand for the supply, but tariffs; as my two links both state.
Even if Demand was high and there wasn't prohibitive goverment regulation, then cuba and other areas would be suppliers, boasting supply. Also, there is a multitude of other beside demand which affects price, most of which can be summed up with "supply", but things like technology, economies of scale, etc.
What does it matter the percentage? Usually natural is taken to mean made by nature and not by humans while un-natural means not made by nature but by humans; do you really believe that all homosexual acts which occur through out numerous species was caused by humans?
So please explain to me, what is a "human spirit"? And if you say soul, explain to me what the soul is? And in that case, what does it mean to "go bad"? Because this all seems very much an opinion and not an actual scientific theory? As you can see, your argument has many holes in it. If you want to say that, you're going to have to explain yourself.
Perhaps according to main-stream Western society we find the thought of homosexuality "bad" but you must remember that not every human is born the same. As in if you were from Papau New Guinea, I guarantee your priorities in life would be very different, as well as your world view.
Human as any animal have Oddities, Homosexuality is an oddity , it is not normal in the sense that the homosexual population is low. In goes against the very nature of reproduction, the survival of the species. If Johnny down the street likes the boys , that is his problem and should not be a society problem.. Spirit i refer to as the very being of the human race..what makes you tick..
