The Elephant in the (Catholic) Room - David Torkington

David Torkington has a piece in "The Catholic Universe" entitled, "The elephant in the room that threatens to bring our Church to its knees".

I found it shocking:

"It is perhaps understandable that in the past gay men were attracted to communities of men as the safest and most desirable place to seek God. When I tried my vocation even before the Second Vatican Council, of 45 others, at least six were gay, although I only realise this with hindsight. At the time gay seminarians kept their heads down; they were there but they were latent. I know several who went on to become excellent priests.

A massive disillusionment after the Vatican Council led many tens of thousands of young priests and religious to leave the priesthood and religious life. The usual figure quoted is 50,000 but I think that is an underestimation. For obvious reasons the vast majority of gay seminarians and priests remained behind. When, in the sixties and seventies, celibacy in general became a taboo subject for the majority of the younger generation, vocations to the priesthood suffered. However, many gay Catholics continued to be attracted to the priesthood and the religious life.

When, in 1979, I was giving a lecture tour in South Africa I came across a seminary entirely populated by gay seminarians. I found the whole atmosphere sick and depressing. They openly admitted that for them, the vow of celibacy meant that this obliged them to refrain from sex with women — but it did not prevent them from having sex with other men. "

The Second Vatican Council affirmed: "The synod does not wish to leave any doubts in the mind of anyone regarding the Church's firm will to maintain the law that demands perpetual and freely chosen celibacy for present and future candidates for priestly ordination in the Latin rite."

"Just as later Rome forbade all talk about women priests, in the 1990s Rome forbade all talk about homosexuality. It was strictly forbidden. It was and has been the green light for homosexual males to flood into and take over many, if not most, seminaries. Later this happened to whole dioceses, with more and more homosexual bishops, archbishops and cardinals, many encouraging and promoting people similar to themselves with what now appears to be disastrous consequences.

One of the most conservative but highly respected Catholic moral theologians in the USA, Professor Janet Smith, has said that many dioceses in the USA are full of homosexual priests and many are run by them. In fact, she claims that well over 70 per cent of clergy in the US are gay.

I don't just mean 'gay' as friends of mine were gay and as many good priests have been and still are gay, but rather militantly gay: not celibate but pushy, pugnacious partisans with agendas hardly distinguishable from secular LGBT communities, which they wish to impose on the Church. This can be seen in parishes they have taken over in the USA. ...

The impression from 'on high' at present is that the sexual horrors which have depraved the Church for all too long are all but over, but that is far from the truth. If paedophilia is finally under control and dealt with, which I very much doubt then pederasty is all but out of control, especially in countries like the USA. "

I had not appreciated that level of homosexual dominance at all levels of the Catholic hierarchy. This is beginning to look unreformable.

I note that David Torkington is a conservative, 'mystical' theologian. His religious position would be considered out-and-out reactionary by most liberals (and by me). He expresses his own views thus:

"Let me be quite clear, sodomy was not only considered an abomination in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament, too. If it was committed in the early Church it had to be admitted publicly and the offenders had to undergo the sacrament of reconciliation throughout Lent with all the appropriate penances. If they continued to offend after that they were permanently excluded from the Christian community.

Nothing has changed nor can it change - sodomy is a very serious sin and permanent offenders who are priests. bishops or cardinals are commiting a mortal sin and cannot administer the sacraments lawfully whether there has been an official condemnation from Rome or not. It would be the same if your parish priest installed a mistress in the presbytery.

Their seriously sinful actions ipso facto (by the very act of performing them) instantly separate them from the mystical body of Christ. They cannot therefore perform any of the sacraments lawfully, nor is it lawful for any of the faithful to approach them to do so. Parishes run by such priests are in effect under an interdict whether such an edict has been issued from Rome or not. They simply do not belong to us nor we to them despite all the external similarities. "

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My thoughts on reading this article were these.

1. David Torkington is surely not long for this world. No doubt the phones on the desk of The Catholic Universe's editor are ringing off the hook with calls from senior functionaries demanding his instant exclusion: 'incendiary charges offered anecdotally, without proof, leading to the Church being brought into disrepute'.

2. Torkington's 'Quietist' philosophy leads him to prayer and meditation as the solution. That's not going to cut much ice with the regional Churches and in Rome itself.

David Torkington's latest book (Amazon, Jan 2018)

3. Any student of public choice theory could tell the Vatican that its predicament flows entirely from the perverse incentives it set up. The Church will always have a disproportionate number of gay clergy - numerous psychological studies show that the traits align. The problem is one of balance .. and not placing theological barriers to powerful human drives. Saintliness is rare while hypocrisy is regrettably common.

The Catholic Church will not make the necessary reforms. Even the Church of England, as theologically light as it is possible to be, is rent asunder on these issues by the global schism between American and European liberals and African/Asian traditionalists.

We live in such interesting times.

Homosexuality as a side-effect of civilization

Discordant twins

We seem to be closing in on the underlying etiology of homsexuality (excerpt below via Marginal Revolution) as a consequence of polygenic kin-selection.

"Why are there homosexuals? According to Darwinian thinking, a genetic trait that reduces the reproductive success cannot endure in the long run.

"The answer sounds crazy: blood relatives of gays and lesbians have more offspring. ...

"That homosexuality has a genetic basis is evidenced by comparative studies. A study by US-researchers J. Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard reached a clear conclusion: With identical twin brothers of homosexuals, the probability that they are gay too amounts to 52 percent, with fraternal twins it is 22, with adopted siblings 11 percent.

"So can we estimate the proportion of genetic influence on homosexuality? Only to a degree. The estimates range from 31-74 percent heritability in men and 27-76 percent heritability in women. The interpretation of these statistics is made difficult by the fact that no precise figures on the incidence of homosexuality exist, because it is difficult to define who actually is homosexual.  ...

"Miller has proposed an alternative explanation quite a few years ago. Genes always exists as doubles on chromosomes, in the form of two alleles. Genetic factors that promote homosexuality can survive in the gene pool if they mostly occur in a heterozygous (coupled with other alleles) form and increase the reproductive success of their carriers in this combination. Only in the rare cases where the inheritance is  homozygous –  both alleles are identical - homosexuality emerges and reduces fitness.

"A man who carries a small dose of gay genes in his genome would, according to the theory, improve his success  in the heterosexual mating game. That “certain something” that heightens sex appeal probably consist exactly of those essentials which make homosexuals different from heterosexuals in the first place.

"According to his theory, the alleged "gay genes" equip men who carry  the heterozygous disposition with an above-average degree of feminine traits such as sensitivity, gentleness and friendliness. Gay genes therefore form a natural antidote against "hypermasculine" genes that turn men into rough machos. They would promote properties that appeal to women and indicate a good suitability as a father and significant other.

"A lesbian disposition lends women reversed traits that helps their reproductive success. Surveys have already shown that psychologically "masculine" women have more sex contacts.

"Imagine, for example, there were five genes, each of which occurs in duplicate and increases the probability of homosexuality, Miller speculates. Only if a man had all five alleles in duplicate, he would be gay. "That would be an event that occurs with a probability of 1 to 32, meaning in 3 percent of all men." Such a system would already be evolutionary stable if a hint of homosexual disposition would increase the genetic fitness of heterosexuals by only 2 percent.

"What hitherto was pure academic speculation, a team led by epidemiologists Brendan Zietsch from Brisbane in Australia has empirically underpinned with a study of 5000 twin siblings. Metrosexuals,  who in their appearance and lifestyle mix male and female characteristics, are the genetic proxies of homosexuals.

"The male and female subjects provided information about their personality traits, their sexual orientation and their total number of sexual partners. 2.2 percent of men and 0.6 percent of women admitted to having a purely gay or lesbian gender identity. There were also 13 percent male and 11 percent female "nonheterosexuals” who reported dating with both sexes.

"Crucial point: Both the siblings of homosexuals and those of nonheterosexuals possessed remarkably many personality traits of the opposite sex. And they also had a greater number of sexual partners than the siblings of heterosexuals. In the evolutionary past, before the invention of the pill and family planning, they should have had a particularly big reproductive success.

"The androgynous personality traits and above-average rates of sexual contacts which characterized these men and women were, according to the researchers' calculations, primarily due to genetic factors and not to environmental influences.

"The genetic vacancy which is caused by the reduced reproductive success of homosexuals is probably offset by the increased rate of reproduction achieved by their blood relatives. This, incidentally, also explains a puzzling fact which scientists previously could not figure out: Homosexuals have a larger than average number of relatives. This was first demonstrated for the maternal side, but is also true, according to the latest data, for the paternal side, perhaps even stronger.

"According to the results of psychologist Andrea Camperio Ciani from the University of Padua, not only the siblings, but also the mothers and aunts of homosexuals are offsetting their "reproductive shortcomings". They not only had a larger than average number of births, but had also been affected particularly rarely by miscarriages and infections. Maybe they are blessed with genes that produce a particularly strong "love of men".

"This would be conducive to their genetic fitness, as it would encourage them to have more children. With their sons, this aptitude could trigger an outright homosexual orientation. But even if those were to become reproductive “underachievers”, that could still be evolutionarily adaptive for mothers: If the same genes would procure them - and their daughters - a larger swarm of children.

"The fact that there are gene variants that provide a fitness benefit if they are "heterozygous" and therefore occur only in one edition of the genetic double set has long since been known in biology. Homozygous carriers on the other hand, who inherit the gene from both parents, are exposed to the fitness reducing effect of this dual system. The best-known example of the so-called heterozygous advantage is the gene for sickle cell anemia. ... "

Interesting that the phenotype of an individual with a reasonable smattering of 'gay genes' seems a lot more prosocial than the highly hetero/macho type. Perhaps the process of 'self-domestication' hypothesised to have coevolved - ie to have been selected for - during the rise of civilization has inadvertently promoted homosexuality as a side-effect?

Greg Cochran has noted (in the context of his rival 'gay germ hypothesis') that "It doesn’t exist in most hunter-gatherers: you have to explain what it is you’re even talking about when you ask them."

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The 52% concordance on homosexuality for identical twins (rather than c. 100%) indicates that some kind of environmental effect is also present. A study reported in The Times today suggests this might be due to variant hormonal influences within the womb.

"It seemed like the sexuality differences were asserting themselves long before puberty. Dr Rieger said that this gave useful information about the development of sexual identity.

“What we can do is rule out a few things now. A lot of people jump to the conclusion it must be genetics.” Past research has indeed shown there is a genetic component to sexuality but also that that is not the whole story. Given these twins shared the same genetics, it can’t be that in this case. “This shows there is something early on, in the early environment, that has nothing to do with genes but can still have a tremendous effect on sexual orientation.”

Insofar as it is possible to rule out parenting, this research did so — all the twins shared the same home. Dr Rieger thinks the most likely explanation then is something happening before birth.

“Prenatal hormones are the number one candidate,” he said. “Our theory is that even though twins are identical, what happens in the womb can be quite different. They can have different nutrition, different levels of hormones.”

The study, Gender Nonconformity of Identical Twins With Discordant Sexual Orientations: Evidence From Childhood Photographs, is unfortunately gated. There's a summary (Daily Mail) here.

Only engineering convinces

Amazon link

I'm only in the earliest stages of Steve Keen's critique of neoclassical economics (above). He's very successful in exposing their logical inconsistencies and utterly implausible assumptions.

From my own amateur reading of the standard texts, I recall authors conceding these points on the excuse that (i) we can learn something from pure models, and (ii) that despite the flawed assumptions the results seem surprisingly accurate.

I know that Dr Keen is underwhelmed by such hand-waving and will address those points in later chapters.

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Keen is somewhat puzzled by the fact that leading economics journals won't see the force of his (undoubtedly correct) arguments or publish his erudite papers. He has some explanations in terms of cultural inertia, the apparent successes in the past of the neoclassical programme and even the usual lack of real-world consequences of getting the foundations so very wrong. He admits wryly that economics just isn't like physics or engineering.

This seems to me the crux of it:

• People will believe all kinds of things if doing so underpins their self-interest.


• If there are no practical consequences (ie nothing that can't be explained away), mere argument will never gain traction.


• If you believe humans will never fly (“if God wanted man to fly he would have given him wings”) then only an aeroplane will refute you.

I'm waiting for the final chapters where Keen unveils his alternative macroeconomic model which, I believe, successfully outperforms those of the neoliberals.

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Remember those stories of how racist AI systems were categorising criminals by their mug shots? Plainly, said liberals, crime was a matter of unfortunate circumstances. How could faces (which identical twins suggest are genetically shaped) have anything to do with it?

Yet it was engineering - hard to argue against.

The Economist (liberal susceptibilities very much on hold) reports today: "Advances in AI are used to spot signs of sexuality".

"When shown one photo each of a gay and straight man, both chosen at random, the model distinguished between them correctly 81% of the time.

When shown five photos of each man, it attributed sexuality correctly 91% of the time.

The model performed worse with women, telling gay and straight apart with 71% accuracy after looking at one photo, and 83% accuracy after five. In both cases the level of performance far outstrips human ability to make this distinction.

Using the same images, people could tell gay from straight 61% of the time for men, and 54% of the time for women. This aligns with research which suggests humans can determine sexuality from faces at only just better than chance."

Sexual orientation not so much a lifestyle choice after all.

Vanity

Keith Vaz, the vain and oleaginous Labour MP, has been 'outed' by the Sunday Mirror as a user of 'male escorts'.

The story is typically sordid.

"Labour MP Keith Vaz paid for the services of male escorts, the Sunday Mirror has reported.

"The married father-of-two paid for the men to visit him one evening last month at a flat he owns in London, it claims."

It looks like he's in political trouble.

"He also described it as a "privilege" to be the chairman of the select committee, which monitors crime and drugs policy, for the past nine years.

"I will of course inform committee members first of my plans when we meet on Tuesday. My decision has been based entirely on what is in the best interests of the committee."

The Express takes up the story,

"The paper revealed footage that showed the MP meeting with two Eastern European male prostitutes, who he told his name was Jim and he worked as a washing machine salesman, for sex eight days ago."

But in liberal bubble-land where disgust and shame barely register, I don't quite see why this is so problematic.

• Homosexuality? Check, OK. 
• Sex workers? Check, OK.
• Party Poppers? Check, OK.

He appears to have done nothing illegal.

So why all the fuss? Jeremy Corbin, being consistent, says it's "a private matter."

I wonder what The Guardian will make of it.

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[Trigger warning: link below not safe for work; generous use of four letter words, asterisked here]

Peter Watts discusses at length an interesting dilemma:

"Did you know that Blindsight contains 73 instances of the word “f***” and its variants? I’ve recently been informed of this fact by a high-school teacher down in a part of the US that - well, in the name of protecting the identities of the innocent, let’s just call it JesusLand.

"The ubiquity of “F***” -  not just in Blindsight but in other contexts as well -  carries a number of ramifications. For one thing, it implies that the characters who use it have better vocabularies and language skills than those whose mouths are squeaky clean. It also means that they probably have a greater tolerance to pain.

"And in the case of this particular teacher -  here in the Twenty First Century, for chrissake - it means she could lose her job if she taught Blindsight, unexpurgated, to her advanced English class.

"Apparently high school students in her part of the world are blissfully unfamiliar with this word. Apparently all sorts of calamities might ensue should that precarious state of affairs ever change."

Blindsight is a fascinating book, looking at deep conceptual questions of evolution and consciousness. In the conservative south of all places, the cuss-words would be the least of it.

The reason I mention Peter's little anecdote here is buried deeper in his post.

"As it happened, Omni had recently stuck my name on a list of “Greatest Sci-Fi Writers of All Time”, right up there with Orwell, Wolfe, and Le Guin. It was completely bogus, of course— my name doesn’t belong anywhere near those folks, not yet at least— but somehow it had slipped in, and maybe that would be enough to classify Blindsight as a “classic”? No?

I just love this little piece of authorial vanity. It's called humble-bragging, no?

Evolutionary roots of homophobia

From The Economist: legality of homosexuality

The Economist this week has a main feature on Gay Rights. Some countries are moving forwards, while others move backwards. The map above, showing where homosexuality is permitted in law (shades of blue-green) and where it is illegal (orange and red), cries out for explanation. It is very far from random.

There is a hint, perhaps, in the language used by red-zone politicians. The Economist writes

"IN THE argot of human rights, LGBT means lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender—a catch-all term for sexual minorities. But Yahya Jammeh, president of Gambia for 20 years, has a different reading. “As far as I am concerned,” he thundered during a televised speech in February, “LGBT can only stand for leprosy, gonorrhoea, bacteria and tuberculosis.” He compared gay people to vermin, and said his government would fight them as it does malaria-bearing mosquitoes, “if not more aggressively”."

The Economist also notes that:

"Revulsion against homosexuals is ancient, deep and, in its way, sincere."

Why?

Homophobia clearly draws on ancient, powerful emotions - chiefly disgust. Some of us oldies will remembers literary dialogues of the mid-twentieth century, where a refined woman gets to drawl in genuine puzzlement: "But what exactly do homosexuals actually do?"

Sex is inherently a mucky and disease-prone activity; we've all heard of sexually-transmitted diseases. Arguably, certain homosexual practices are more disease-prone. Some people find the whole idea of sexual activity frankly disgusting: homo- or heterosexual. However, any male or female who believes this sufficiently strongly is not going to leave any descendants - so genes coding for that emotional reaction are unlikely to spread widely in the population.

Some small percentage of the population (c. 3-4%) is significantly into homosexual practices. As this kind of sexual activity can't lead to descendants how can such people exist? Greg Cochran thinks the culprit is some kind of infectious agent priming an underlying heritability of 0.3 - 0.4; we know that sexuality is on a hormonal continuum so perhaps LGBT people are simply 'on the spectrum'?

Still, like all practitioners of sex, homosexual people historically engage in a potentially disease-spreading activity. And there is no genetic come-back from disgust in the heterosexual community, as so graphically articulated by Yahya Jammeh, President of Gambia above.

In the West, our standards of hygiene are higher and perhaps we're rather more self-controlled and empathic. We've become 'tolerant' (there's a word!) and of course we should be - LGBT people are what they are - and in the last decades we've agreed not to use the power of the state against them.

But let's not pretend - in some blank slate fashion - that those underlying, ancestral, selected-for emotions have somehow been edited out, because they plainly haven't.

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Sparse pickings on the Internet for this topic. A Scientific American article makes a brave attempt but looks to paedophilia and xenophobia for explanations - disconfirmed both by common sense and the evidence. The whole area is stymied by liberal hand-wringing.

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In case it wasn't obvious, let me summarise the speculative thesis of this post.

The reason for an evolved heterosexual disgust towards homosexuals (mislabelled as 'homophobia') is that in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) homosexuals were more likely to be disease vectors.

See also: "The 'is' and 'ought' of homosexuality".

Gay; Asperger's syndrome; football

Here's a thesis. Being gay and being an "Aspie"  are both under the control of a large number of alleles of small effect.

In the 'gay'  case, less means a sympathetic, empathic personality; in the Aspie case,  less means a focused, dispassionate and logical intellect.

In both cases the full deck decreases reproductive success while a partial hand can enhance it.

Perhaps Asperger's syndrome is the gentile equivalent of Tay-Sachs disease and similar neurological collateral damage found in Ashkenazi Jews under selection for systemic, analytical intelligence in the mediaeval middle classes.

World Cup: England loses to Uruguay. The English looked hard-working, stolid and flat-footed ; the South Americans  (of Mediterranean lineage)  were dynamic and explosive. What do you think, agrarian farmers  vs  pastoralists?

Once you get your eye in, genes are everywhere!

Gay genes or gay pathogens?

What are we to make of this? (Hannah Devlin, The Times, Feb 14th 2014).

"Scientists have found the strongest evidence yet for the existence of genes that increase the chance of a man being gay. The study, which involved more than 400 gay brothers, identified two small areas on the male genome that appear to be linked to sexuality.

Michael Bailey, from the Northwestern University in Chicago, who carried out the research, said: “Sexual orientation has nothing to do with choice. Our findings suggest there may be genes at play and we found evidence for two sets that affect whether a man is gay or straight.”

In the study, presented yesterday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Chicago, scientists took blood from 409 gay brothers and heterosexual members of their family. On average, siblings share 50 per cent of their DNA, but ought to have a higher chance of sharing any genes involved in determining sexuality.

In the 1990s the American geneticist Dean Hamer identified an area that appeared to influence male sexuality on the X chromosome, which men inherit from their mothers. The results, however, have remained controversial.

The latest research confirmed that this region on the X chromosome, known as Xq28, is more likely to be shared by the gay pairs of brothers than by the brothers and their other siblings. The study also identified a second genetic region, on Chromosome 8, which also appeared to predict whether a man would be homosexual.

While the pairs of brothers shared gene variants in these regions, however, there were not individual genes that stood out across all the participants in the study.

The findings suggested that overall a man’s sexuality depends about 30 to 40 per cent on genetic factors, while the rest depends on environmental factors, such as the hormones a baby is exposed to in the womb."

Putting aside discredited "nurturist" theories of homosexuality, a leading non-genetic explanation is the pathogen theory advocated by Paul W. Ewald, a biology professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and Gregory Cochran, an independent physicist in Albuquerque, New Mexico (outlined in this article by Caleb Crain). Their argument against "gay genes" is that these are so detrimental to reproductive fitness that they would have been removed from the population through natural selection. However, Hannah Devlin's Times article has this to say:

"Previously, homosexuality has been viewed as a “Darwinian paradox” because if male homosexuality were genetic, and gay men reproduced less than heterosexuals, the trait should eventually disappear from the population over time. This has led some critics to dismiss the genetic argument.

"However, there is now some evidence that genes linked to male homosexuality could increase fertility in women. One study by Italian scientists found that female relatives of gay men tended to have more children than those of straight men."

Ewald and Cochran rejected this argument as explained at the end of the Caleb Crain article:

" ... perhaps homosexuality is an unintended side effect of a gene for something else—a side effect more marked in one gender than the other. That might explain why more men than women are exclusively homosexual. Hamer, the discoverer of the Xq28 link, favors this explanation. “Suppose you had a gene that tended to make men gay, but the same gene in women made them more reproductive,” Hamer suggests. He proceeds to give examples. “If you had a gene that made people more attractive and intelligent, it might make men gay, but it might make women more likely to reproduce. Or suppose you had a gene that made people attracted to men. If you gave it to a guy, he would probably be gay, but if you gave it to a woman, she would simply be . . . well, let’s say, ‘exceptionally attracted to men.’ ”

"But Cochran and Ewald doubt this explanation, too. Evolution tends to balance out any gender inequity as severe as Hamer describes. After a while, some mutation would come along that jiggered our hormones to reduce the gene’s fitness cost to men, while retaining its benefit for women. “In the long run,” Cochran says, “sex-antagonistic genes are tamed.”

The argument for a sex ratio of 1:1 male-female (which means reproductively-capable males and females) was one of the first great triumphs of quantitative population genetics, going back to Ronald Fisher in 1930. Here's the argument as presented by W. D. Hamilton.

1. Suppose male births are less common than female.
2. A newborn male then has better mating prospects than a newborn female, and therefore can expect to have more offspring.
3. Therefore parents genetically disposed to produce males tend to have more than average numbers of grandchildren born to them.
4. Therefore the genes for male-producing tendencies spread, and male births become more common.
5. As the 1:1 sex ratio is approached, the advantage associated with producing males dies away.
6. The same reasoning holds if females are substituted for males throughout. Therefore 1:1 is the equilibrium ratio.

In modern language, the 1:1 ratio is the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). In a population of individuals playing the ESS (i.e. producing equal numbers of sons and daughters), any other strategy (e.g. 51% sons and 49% daughters) would have lower fitness, and hence would be selected against.

What would resolve this debate would be to know more about the genes hanging around the Xq28 region and on chromosome 8 and what they do. Then some modelling of the evolutionary dynamics. Without a quantitative analysis this debate will run and run, even without all the social agendas swirling around.