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iammyownrushmore  ·  3755 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Religion's use.

You're a little all over the place, homeslice, and while you're butting up next to some good ideas, you need to do a bit more digging around.

Your analogy is pretty wonky, but it's because you have a misunderstanding of the underlying concepts.

This is a bit personal, being as I am someone who works as a biologist and is queer, but homosexuality and heterosexuality are not exactly a binary, nor have they EVER been, and this doesn't exactly lend itself well to tersely-linked allele studies, which is why many of them have had some many problems with reproducibility. Sexual and romantic desire are the result of complex interactions between social and innate factors. Trying to directly tie this to a freakin gene, which may provide some preference via developmental avenues (which hasn't exactly been, you know, proven) has no deterministic tie to a complex behavior such as homosexuality, much less it's current iteration, it just provides a nice avenue for some researchers bear upon it with their field of interest and should be taken with a spoonful of salt.

While some researchers do model the spread of ideas/concepts as memes in the same fashion as others study population genetics, the biggest problem is it is highly questionable how empirical you can really get. What it means to have religious belief varies wildly throughout history, and tying any moral center (including altruism) is really misstating what the nature of religion is, namely, metaphysical arguments for the intent and purpose of humanity's existence and explanations of the natural world. Or at least, that's my conception of it.