| Cub said: Bolded: It shouldn't have made you believe that really. The studies you are talking about measure hormones effects after birth, not during fetal development in which major brain (and other organs) differentiation (shaping) occurs under the effect of the mother's + fetus' own hormones. Also, Hormones on their own are useless, so measuring their levels sometimes don't reflect the real picture. Hormones in general get secreted and circulate the body looking for their receptors to attach to and exert their actions. So you need "Hormones+Receptors" for any effect to occur. I'll try to explain further: For example, the pancreas secretes insulin which then attach to receptros that are present on muscles' cells facilitating glucose entry in order to keep your blood glucose levels within normal levels. There are 2 ways by which you can get diabetes (unhealthy high blood glucose levels): 1) Low insulin levels. 2)Insulin receptor defects. (that's why some diabetic patients have high insulin levels, to try to compensate for the defective receptors) You can apply the same exact principles to all hormones, for example, imgaine gay people having diminished testosterone receptors in their brain cells, what could be the outcome? This is all just oversimplified and I am not even suggesting that my brain cells lack testosterone receptors But yeah, bottom line is the matter isn't so clear-cut. People shouldn't stress anyway unless it's for purely scientific reasons and curiosity. |
, I am just trying to explain why you shouldn't rule out hormonal effects because of the studies you have mentioned.Good points.
I actually didn't rule out the possibility of genes being involved because I know there is more to them. The genes topic is very big and there are many things in the argument that need to be cleared, for example, if the fetal development was the determent factor, wouldn't the effects of that period still be measurable in our bodies today?, so examining our bodies would give us all the info that we need if something went "wrong" during the fetal development.
In general, I think we all agree that what makes who we are is more about what we choose to learn from the experiences of life, either through our conscious or unconscious mind; which I think is the key factor here.
