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Slimebeast on 18 July 2010
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zexen_lowe said:
Slimebeast said:
zexen_lowe said:
Slimebeast said:

You are ridiculos. If homophobia only had cultural reasons males would have started to fcuk each other ages ago, as horny as most men are.

Besides, it doesn't matter what you personally feel, we're talking populations here. For every man who is neutral towards male on male sex there's at least five who are repulsed by it.

And don't blame it on religion. All through history, in nearly all cultures everywhere on earth homosexuality has been a huge taboo. Which again proves that it has biological roots.

I refuse to discuss this. That repulsion towards homosexual acts is genetic is a fact.

Sigh....the things you gotta read here...

They have...some men have been fucking each other since we evolved from monkeys...after all, animals also have homosexual intercourse, it's only natural that we by instinct did the same. Then civilization came, they had various degrees of tolerance towards homosexual acts, the most well known is Greece, which as everybody knows considered sex between men as the only true act of love and only encouraged sex with women so they could procreate. I don't support that way of thinking either, but it's what they thought.

In the end, homosexuality (or rather, intercourse between humans of the same gender, as ancient civilizations didn't feel the need to give it a name, there wasn't any "sexual orientation") has always existed with various degrees of tolerance. Saying that homophobia is genetic is simply ridiculous. You're not "programmed" to feel repulsion for anything, of course there are things that you'll like more and things you'll like less, and you can't change that, but it hardly has anything to do with homophobia, that is caused by how you're brought up. If you're as a kid are told constantly that homosexuality is repulsive, it's likely you'll end up thinking that, if I tell you that it's the only way to go, you'll think that, and if I tell you it's no difference and that every human does whatever he likes, then you'll grow up a tolerant non-homophobic person.

But whatever, since you say it's a fact, let's see your proof. Good luck finding it, because there's none

We're just repeating the same arguments over and over. But yes we're programmed to repulsion towards lots and lots of things. Fear of height, fear of snakes, fear of dark etc.

I'll just clarify one thing. Obviously homosexual men have had sex all through history, I'm in no way denying that, but I wasn't refering to them in that first sentence, I was refering to the majority of males. 

We're programmed to fear snakes??? Of course we're not! I'm not a fan of psychology and even less of classical conditioning, but the Little Albert experiment shows how we can be conditioned. If you fear snakes, it's because you were told they can kill you, if you didn't know that, you wouldn't fear them.

Yeah, many people cringe even from just watching a snake on TV.

Monkeys are programmed to fear snakes, so why wouldn't we be?

"The classic and best experiment in this is Susan Mineka's work with a group of monkeys in Madison in the '80s, where she set out to examine the ontogeny of an instinct—in this care fear of snakes. Wild-born monkeys are afraid of snakes. They're so scared of snakes that they will cower in the back of the cage screaming rather than reach across a plastic model snake to get at a peanut when they're very hungry. Captive-born monkeys are not afraid of snakes; they happily reach across the model snake to get at a peanut. So what's going on here? That means that fear of snakes must be learned. But how on earth do you learn fear of snakes? The conventional classical conditioning wouldn't work very well, would it, because either you have a bad experience with a snake to learn from, in which case you're dead, or you don't have a bad experience, in which case you don't learn that snakes are frightening. So how are you going to end up acquiring a fear of snakes? It seems an absurd thing to acquire. She argues that what's happening is that there is a program for fear of snakes, an instinct if you like, but that that instinct needs to be socially triggered—in some sense triggered by a vicarious experience, by observing another monkey having a fear of snakes. So she set up an experiment in which she videotaped the wild-born monkey reacting with fear to a snake, and she then showed this video to a captive-born monkey, which immediately acquired a fear of snakes and was not then prepared to reach across even a model snake to get a peanut. She now doctors the video, so that it has the same monkey reacting in the same way in the background, but the bottom half of the screen now instead of having a snake has a flower. Again, the captive-born monkey has never seen a flower, so after it sees a monkey reacting with extreme fear to this new thing called a flower it should just as easily learn a fear of flowers. But it doesn't. It just learns that some monkeys are crazy. So what's going on here is that there is clearly an instinct for fear of snakes, and that's not surprising. Human beings have snake phobia. It's the commonest of all the phobias, even though most of us hardly even ever see a snake in our lives, but it requires an input from the environment. It requires a nurture input to be triggered. We know this is happening in the amygdala, and we're getting a bit of a handle on which cells are involved. We're not yet down to the gene level, but I'd bet my bottom dollar there's going to be a little pathway of genes in here that's mediating this process."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ridley03/ridley_index.html