Gay flies turned on by heat

A mere change in temperature is all it takes for the males of a new line of genetically engineered flies to switch from being heterosexual to suddenly courting other males.

The switch occurs within minutes and is fully reversible, meaning scientists have for the first time a system they can manipulate to study how some brain regions may be involved in determining sexual orientation.

Whether the secrets unveiled by these peculiar flies will shed any light on human sexual preference is still unclear. Some of the neurons affected by the genetic changes are involved in sensing pheromones. These play an important role in fly courtship behaviour, but their influence in human sexual behaviour is unknown.

Toshihiro Kitamoto of the Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope in California created the flies, but is reluctant to extrapolate the findings: "It's a very sensitive issue."

Others are more willing to express enthusiasm. Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health says the research should inspire other scientists hunting for genes involved in sexual orientation in humans.

There is no reason to think similar features will not be present in mammals, he says, noting that homosexual behavior is widespread among many animal species and suggests a strong genetic influence.

Hamer's team has published two highly publicised studies suggesting there is a "gay gene" on human chromosome X, though a different group failed to reproduce their results.

But many disagree. Sexual orientation in humans is mostly a social behaviour, contends Ruth Hubbard from the Council for Responsible Genetics. "To try to find analogies in flies, who have their own agendas, is just plain silly," she says.

Nonetheless, in flies there is no doubt that genetics plays a major determining role. A handful of genes have been identified that, when mutated, lead male flies to lose their preference for females and instead go after other males.

It has been previously suggested that some regions of the nervous system are connected to sexual orientation, but there was no way to focus on them. Now Kitamoto has genetically engineered flies so that only a subset of their neurons stopped working.

The mutation is temperature sensitive, meaning neurons carrying the mutation suddenly become inactive above 30°C. At the normal 19°C, males are heterosexual. But ramp up the heat above the critical temperature and in about two minutes their behaviour changes.

When put in a chamber with virgin females, the males become largely disinterested. Add them instead to a vial with other males and they pursue them vigorously. Flip the temperature back to normal and the flies become heterosexual again.

Kitamoto does not yet know why the flies change their preference so quickly, but says the system should become a valuable tool to define further which regions of the brain, and which genes, interact in determining sexual orientation.

Obviously, homosexuality is unnatural. But in order to justify themselves, homosexuals have for a long time promoted any deviant sexual behavior in animals as justification for their lifestyle. After all if animals do it, it must be "natural." I think that is what Houmatt is alluding to.

I actually understand Houmatt's basic premise. That is not the problem. My problem is when he accuses me of spreading homosexual propaganda and the like just because i reported on what Bonobos do! And then he goes further and says that i should watch what i say because this is a conservative forum!

I am conservative, however that does not mean i should shut out stuff that is true just because it does not sit well with other conservatives. If i was alive in the middle-ages i would not have said the Universe revolved around the Earth if i knew otherwise! Nor would i have said the Earth was a flat plane and mosnters lived at its edges!

However according to Houmatt my post on the Bonobo was conservative anathema ....and hence it was enough incentive for him to attack me. He would prefer for me to keep quiet about the Bonobos and not disrupt his lil' coccoon.

However although FR is a conservative forum it is also a free forum for the exchange of ideas. And hence i am free to post whatever i desire, and if it disturbs people like Houmatt then there is really nothing i can do about that. After all there is no panacea for unabated ignorance and atrophied intellectual acumen! And if i will be made a matyr for my posts on the Bonobo so be it .....i would rather be flamed than to be a sheep denying facts like the Bonobo shares 98% of its DNA with humans or that the world is by far older that 6,000 years old (the reason i bring this up is there was another thread where this group of 'Christians' ganged up on me and some others for saying the world is older than 6,000 years old. And these 'Christians' were actually using insults, which is very un-christian).

And those guys also referred to DU just like Houmatt did (and they added that if i did not 'watch out' they would reveal my 'secret identity' before they started calling me a 'masonic warlock').

There is no way people like Houmatt can make me switch off my mind and follow folk lore and conjecture, and him saying i am pro-homosexual does not affect me since i clearly know i am not. And i also know that most Freepers are not like him and do their research before they spout forth vitriol!

And if you notice Houmatt's posts not once does he give real evidence to prove me wrong, not once. All he does is say i am posting propaganda and so on. And no matter what his rationale is i do not think he should blatantly attack people for posting stuff he is either ignorant of or disbelieves.

DU is a land of appalling ignorance and I'd show you the way except I wouldn't want to be complicit in totally wasting five good minutes of your life. ;-) In any case, you reminded be of this passage that I copied a long while ago - I don't remember from where anymore - which I figured I'd share with all y'all:

The universe looks old. Exactly as it would look if it's really old. As if it has one, specific, consistent history. As if it has been expanding for fifteen billion years from a single point. As if light has been traveling through it, lensing through gravitational fields, and as if events hundreds of thousands of light-years away have sent light at right angles to us, hundreds of thousands of years ago, which reflected off other objects and then came toward us. We can use Euclid's geometry to show how far away these objects are and how old their light is.

The Earth looks old. Exactly the way it would look if it's really old. As if it's been around for four-and-a-half billion years, and was hot and molten for the first half-billion of it, as if the continents have been gradually moving for the entire time, and as if the oceans and rivers and streams and tectonic flows have been shaping it, slowly, for all that time. As if Africa and South America have been receding from each other for millions of years, as the deposits have built up on the continents and the sea floor has spread, with the magnetic iron and nickel in the volcanic deposits recording the Earth's changing magnetic field, exactly in time with the changes we have been measuring.

It looks just as if radioactive isotopes have been here, changing into their stable daughter elements in accord with the laws of physics, changing the ratios of those daughter isotopes in exact proportion to the elements (not the isotopes) found in the rock, just exactly as if they've been doing so for hundreds of millions, or billions, of years.

Life on Earth looks old, exactly like it would be if it's really old, as if it's been here for almost the entire history of the Earth, as if it's been changing all that time, with new species appearing, each similar to something that was here before. As if coral, dated to three hundred million years ago by the radioactive material in the rocks it was growing on, was showing four hundred days in a year, exactly matching the predicted slowing effect of lunar tides on the Earth's rotation over three hundred million years.

Life on Earth looks as if it's descended from a common ancestor. Exactly like it, in fact. Just as if it's arranged in a nested hierarchy of similarity, instead of all the infinite other ways it could have been arranged, and as if the junk, noncoding DNA in each animal has exactly the same similarity relationship as the morphological hierarchy, like the errors in DNA, shared in the nested hierarchy, such as why humans and chimps and gorillas can get scurvy but all the other mammals can produce their own vitamin C.

Certainly God could have created the Earth six thousand years ago. Or last week, for that matter. But regardless of when it was created, it was created to look exactly as if it had all this history?

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