Skip to navigation | Skip to content

Genes, family, society make a gay world

Gay men

How do genetic and environmental factors influence someone's sexual orientation? (Image: iStockphoto)

Genes handed down by one's mother and having a large number of older brothers may determine whether a man is gay, according to a new study.

Put together, these two factors may account for perhaps 20% of the prevalence of homosexuality, although social and cultural influences probably make up most of the rest, it suggests.

The study, by Italian psychologists from the University of Padova, appears in the Proceedings of The Royal Society B, a journal published by the U.K.'s Royal Society.

The researchers asked 98 homosexual men and 100 heterosexual men in northern Italy to fill out a confidential questionnaire detailing their sexual orientation and that of their siblings, first cousins, parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents.

Among the homosexual men, 22 out of the 396 male relatives on the maternal line of their family were gay, as were 12 out of 593 on the paternal side.

Among the heterosexual men, none of the 370 male relatives on the maternal line was gay; on the paternal line, the number was eight out of 604.

Just as striking was the relationship between birth order and sexual orientation.

In large families, homosexual men were likelier to have been born second, third, fourth or later, and were far likelier to have older male siblings rather than older sisters.

The study, led by Francesca Corna, says this added statistical support to hypotheses about possible genetic causes for homosexuality, although it did not investigate homosexuality in women.

Previous research found a genetic link

Previous research, carried out among gay brothers, suggested a link between homosexuality and a genetic sequence called Xq28 on one of the arms of the X chromosome, one of the chromosomes that determines sex.

Men have an X chromosome, which comes from their mother, and a Y chromosome, from their father. Women have two X chromosomes, one from each parent.

Research published in the mid-1990s bred the theory, strongly contested by some, that the male foetus presents an antigen, a molecule that triggers a response from the woman's immune system.

With each successive male birth, the mother is successively immunised against this antigen and the subsequence chemical change in the uterus has an effect on the sexual differentiation of the foetus, according to this idea.

An architect of this hypothesis, Canadian scientist Ray Blanchard, has calculated that each additional older brother increases the odds of homosexuality in the next male by some 33%.

Cultural and social factors

Corna's team stressed that cultural and social factors, in addition to genes, also powerfully shape sexual orientation.

"Over 79% of the variance in male sexual orientation, in our sample, remains unaccounted for by the factors of excess of maternal homosexual kin and number of older brothers," they noted.

They wonder if child-raising traditions in northern Italy could help mould sexual orientation and behaviour. Aunts, mothers and grandparents spend lots of time with the child in his young formative years.

"Our findings, if confirmed by further research, are only one piece in a much larger puzzle on the nature of human sexuality."

While acknowledging that the nature versus nurture debate about homosexuality will continue to rage, the authors believe they may have resolved one of the enigmas about homosexuality.

This is the so-called Darwinian paradox. If homosexuality is conferred in part by genes, why haven't these genes been progressively eliminated over the millennia by natural selection: the process that prefers genes that are useful for reproduction and survival?

The answer could lie in Xq28, for the mothers of homosexual men could be exceptionally fertile.

In other words, this particular genetic variation is a Darwinian trade-off; there is low or zero fecundity among men because they are homosexuals, but high fecundity among women.
