RENAISSANCE FEBRUARY 2021

Reflections 38 Monthly Renaissance February 2021 more gay male uncles and cousins on the maternal side of the family than on the paternal side. Gay brothers who showed this maternal pedigree were then tested for X chromosome linkage, using twenty-two markers on the X chromosome to test for similar alleles. In another finding, thirty-three of the forty sibling pairs tested were found to have similar alleles in the distal region of Xq28, which was significantly higher than the expected rates of 50% for fraternal brothers. This was popularly dubbed the “gay gene” in the media, causing significant controversy. 1 Studies show that complex behavior like sexual and romantic relationship in no way could be attributed to one single factor as the study indicates: While our study results provide further evidence for early (pre-natal) biological influences on variation in male sexual orientation, we also emphasize that genetic contributions are far from determinant but instead represent a part of the trait’s multifactorial causation, both genetic and environmental. 2 As far as the studies done so far to discover the “gay gene” there is none discovered as yet. Another study in this regard states: The findings, which are published on 29 August in Science and based on the genomes of nearly 500,000 people, shore up the results of earlier, smaller studies and confirm the suspicions of many scientists: while sexual preferences have a genetic component, no single gene has a large effect on sexual behaviors. “There is no ‘gay gene’,” says lead study author Andrea Ganna, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and 1. “Biology and sexual orientation,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Biology_and _sexual_orientation&oldid=993167300 (accessed December 10, 2020). 2. “Genome-wide scan demonstrates significant linkage for male sexual orientation” Psychological Medicine (2015), 45, 1379–1388. © Cambridge University Press 2014 doi:10.1017/S0033291714002451 (accessed December 10, 2020).