Chaos vs order and evolution

[Presurmksdimnds]

Last night I had this conversation with my brother:

Me: " it drives me crazy when people say that being gay is some sort of evolution. Evolution being about survival of the fittest - gay relationships left to themselves lead to extinction. #charlesdarwinrolledoverinhisgravesomewheres…

Him: “False; evolution leads to mutations that could or could NOT lead to better chances of survival. Survival has nothing to do with the concept of evolution; that’s natural selection, which describes more the process of evolution. If evolution ALWAYS led toward better chances of survival, then we would not see vestigial organs in ourselves & nature at large.
Along the same line of thought, believing in the idea that gay relationships lead straight to extinction” presumes that there is, in fact, a “gay” gene… which is entirely untrue. It also establishes the mentality of “us” and “them”.

Me: “Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace were the first to formulate a scientific argument for the theory of evolution by means of (wait for it) NATURAL SELECTION.” - I agree, it IS false for them to use these argument, survival has everything to do with evolution in this sense and CD probably rolls over in his grave each time they do. I don’t see where a behavior that leads to extinction implies a gene at all. And furthermore I don’t see, ever, where I’ve made it ‘us against them’. That would be your perception of my disagreement of the lifestyle. Or must I embrace any lifestyle just because someone chooses to live it?

Now here is where he loses me…I will post his response in next comment because it is a bit lengthy.

 

[Presurmksdimnds]

Him: "To elaborate, it seems that if you factor in biology in the form of evolution you’re opening a whole new can of worms so to speak. I’m not specifically referring to “you” as in My Sister, but the metaphorical “you” as in somebody who would actually bring up evolution whether or not they were for or against homosexuality was what I meant with my previous comments.

The trap that an individual would fall into by doing this is the precedent of “us and them”, you’re establishing a boundary that as a heterosexual you evidently do not possess this “gay” gene that evolution should have either dealt away with completely due to natural selection, or that we should all possess due to it’s inherent merits towards survival.

My first comment was more in response to the idea that evolution always favoring the best traits for survival; this is a common misconception that seems small at first but is a pretty major facet to the overall process. Natural selection is a misleading term because there is nothing specifically “selecting” anything; to be completely honest, evolution is synonymous with the chaos theory in that it’s all just random chance. For instance, a higher concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere during the Pliocene epoch was a catalyst for organisms to grow to ridiculous proportions. Evolution moved in a direction of titanic lifeforms in order to better metabolize the disproportionate amount of the CO2 in relation to oxygen. Chaos breeds life; not some process of life being able to select what is the most optimal trait to survive. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have appendixes and everyone would look like chiseled Greek gods for the sake of stimulating procreation."

 

[Presurmksdimnds]

Can someone help me sort out the points he is trying to make? To me, it seems all over the place; at times (chaos makes life) it seems as if he is arguing that it is evolution and/or implying that these relationships can create life. At others, im not so sure. This is my brother so I don’t want to be disagreeable and pursue this if, in a round about way, he is essentially agreeing with me.

 

[Presurmksdimnds]

My thoughts whilst reading this; my God is a God of order. The universe is not chaos.

And that’s all I got

I agree with him there is no gay gene.

 

[rossum]

Last night I had this conversation with my brother…

Two points:

First, there is a temporary ban on the discussion of evolution at the moment – see the stickies at the top of the forum.

Second, research has been done into the genetic influences behind homosexuality. It turns out that there is a set of genes that tend to increase the number of children women have, while tending to make men gay. Sort of a “Phwoar! I fancy him” effect. The extra children from the women more than counterbalance the reduced children from the men, so the genes survive. See Why Gays Don’t Go Extinct.

rossum

 

[Presurmksdimnds]

Two points:

First, there is a temporary ban on the discussion of evolution at the moment – see the stickies at the top of the forum.

Second, research has been done into the genetic influences behind homosexuality. It turns out that there is a set of genes that tend to increase the number of children women have, while tending to make men gay. Sort of a “Phwoar! I fancy him” effect. The extra children from the women more than counterbalance the reduced children from the men, so the genes survive. See Why Gays Don’t Go Extinct.

rossum

Two men or two women can not biologically produce offspring, period. THAT is an ultimate truth. There may be some genetic factors that influence undesired outcomes, but there is no gene that allows a person to procreate with another person of the same sex. That relationship is a dead end for those blood lines. Extinction.

I apologize for not noticing the sticky… Maybe we can dive more into the chaos theory he seems to have brought up?

 

[rossum]

Two men or two women can not biologically produce offspring, period. THAT is an ultimate truth. There may be some genetic factors that influence undesired outcomes, but there is no gene that allows a person to procreate with another person of the same sex. That relationship is a dead end for those blood lines. Extinction.

I apologize for not noticing the sticky… Maybe we can dive more into the chaos theory he seems to have brought up?

The point is that the mothers, sisters, aunts etc. of the men with the genes also have the genes. It is those mothers, sisters, aunts etc. who have more babies and so pass more copies of those genes on to the next generation.

Natural selection is about getting more copies of a gene into the next generation. These genes do that.

rossum

 

[Iron_Donkey]

First, “Chaotic” in the scientific sense does not exactly random, but rather that small changes in initial conditions can cause large changes to the outcome. This can make things somewhat hard to predict for us at times, because small changes may be hard to measure and/or the process whereby the initial conditions translate into final results may be hard to follow.

This does not make God any less a God of order. It just means that the order is complex. Rather like a gumball machine, I imagine: the color order you’d get by repeatedly buying gumballs isn’t really random, but it does depend on how the gumballs are stacked and which one of the several near the opening gets pressed into it depends on how all the forces together end up pushing on each one, and relatively small shake might shift enough gumballs just enough that the order they leave changes entirely.

So, for example, the tendency to be attracted to members of the same sex could depend on many factors. It is possible (though I have no particular reason to believe that it’s true) that some of these factors are genetic. Other conditions (upbringing, etc) would also need to present for the person to actually end up with SSA, and then if he were attracted to the same sex, there’d have to be still other conditions that would have to line up (including his own choices) before it was determined that he did not pass on his genetic material.

If those same genetic reasons under other conditions manifested in a helpful way that increased procreation, and if those other conditions were more common than the conditions under which the person did not have children, then natural selection would not predict the extinction of that set of genes.

Or it could be that it is like a genetic disorder: chromosomes from each parent could line up in such a way as to lead to this increased risk of SSA, but possibly have beneficial effects when paired differently, or have no effects at all when paired differently, so that the disorder survives simply because having “pieces” of it is not on average detrimental enough to cause it to go away (or not to have gone away by now).

But as far as morality goes, it doesn’t really matter. Having a genetic predisposition to do something does not make it ok to do it, nor does it make the condition in some sense “natural”. Certainly a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism doesn’t make it good to spend all your family’s money on drink, and no one would argue that it is natural and good to be missing your arms and legs because one can have a genetic disorder that causes that to happen.

I think the “us vs them” mentality that your brother was warning against (and which I am not saying that you have - and in fact it seems to me that you do not since you rejected the cause) is the possible tendency to group people with SSA as “other’s,” products of some weird cause that shouldn’t really exist, rather than just people who have their own issues like all of us and, like all of us, need the help of their brothers and sisters to live a moral life. That is, it is possible to identify the person with the condition, which would be problematic.

 

[CaptFun]

This lecture by the inimitable Fr. Robert Spitzer (former President of Gonzaga University)
is more in line with the headline of this thread than the specific dispute the OP had with his brother. But I found it fascinating.

It is an hour long … and perhaps the most interesting part of it as at the end with the Q & A session, as Father Spitzer sets aside his detached scientific objectivity (for the purpose of examining all sides of the question of first cause(s) ) and moves from Physics to Metaphysics in comparing the relative probabilities of the theories examined in his presentation “The Anthropic Principle - Theistic Implications.”

youtube.com/watch?v=ncRegFK8wc4

http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSSPba9Ie65Gat8kTPTXJ-OUOcj5bZKa_Hmw8xtRvlOzXB6m0jk