According to Sagan, rates of homosexuality and social dysfunction increase noticeably with overpopulation. Nature's way of culling the herd?
You know I wouldn't be surprised if there is something to that. It's been a long time and I don't know if I can find it but I remember reading one time about an experiment in which they inferred that subjecting female rats to stress during pregnancy led to a situation in which male offspring tended to have "female-like" brains. This was like back in the 1980s and the elapsed time makes the details fuzzy in my mind but I remember it.
But wait...I just did a Google and I think I found a reference to it:
http://www.viewzone.com/homosexual.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
In a paper published almost a quarter of a century ago, a research psychologist at Villanova University was also puzzled about gender. Dr. Ingebog Ward was studying the sexual behavior of rats, years before the role of the hypothalamus was even suspected of gendering human brains. [6]
Dr. Ward divided some pregnant rats into three groups. Suspecting that something special might be happening in the early stages of pregnancy, she subjected the first group to stress during the first ten days of gestation by irritating the mother rats to bright lights, noise and annoying vibrations. Ten days in a rat's pregnancy corresponds to the first trimester (3 months) of a human pregnancy. The second group was subjected to stress towards the end of their pregnancy, just before birth. The third group was comprised of male offspring from both prenatal stressed mothers and unstressed mothers. These babies were subjected to the same stress producing stimuli.
Dr. Ward then allowed all the males to grow to adulthood without further interference. She then placed each group of males in cages with healthy females to observe their ability and desire to mate with normal adult females. Here is what happened:
"Abstract: Male rats were exposed to prenatal (i.e. before they were born) or postnatal (after they were born) stress, or both. The prenatally stressed males showed low levels of male copulatory behavior and high rates of female lordotic responding (i.e. "lordotic" refers to mounting behavior which usually occurs during mating). Postnatal stress had no effect. The modifications are attributed to stress-mediated alterations in the ratio of adrenal to gonadal androgens during critical stages of sexual differentiation. Specifically, it appears that stress causes an increase in the weak adrenal androgen, androstendione, from the maternal fetal adrenal cortices, or both, and a concurrent decrease in the potent gonadal androgen, testosterone." [6]
That's flat out amazing that I was able to find a reference to something I dimly remembered reading long ago. The internet is an amazing, powerful tool.
Thanks for the recap. I was forgetting WTAGs arguement.
