The Strength of Being Inconclusive: Weakness of Evidence and Environmental Shift of Genetics of Sexual Orientation

• In Event: Something from Nothing: Exploring Non-discovery and Negative Claims

Abstract

This talk is part of an ongoing sociological investigation on the biology of sexual orientation. Although the search for the genetic basis of sexual orientation is a long term scientific enterprise, most of the scientists involved describe their field as “promising” but still predominantly “inconclusive”. Though in the 1990s a few linkage studies pointed a possible role for certain genes on the X chromosome (Hamer et al., 1993), it became rapidly clear that these findings couldn’t be easily replicated. In the 2000s, the main outcome of one of the very few available genome-wide association study (using 23andMe database of over 180,000 individuals) was unambiguous: “We did not find evidence of SNPs associated with sexual identity (…) nor did we replicate previous findings (…)” (Drabant et al., 2012). And even more recently, reviewing the literature on sexual orientation, a group of prominent scholars considered that they could reasonably provide a qualified answer to the question “Is sexual orientation genetic?” That answer is: “Probably somewhat genetic, but not mostly so” (Bailey et al., 2016). In this talk we will adopt a sociohistorical perspective on the construction of the “limits” of genetic knowledge of sexual orientation. What are its core negative claims, but more importantly how do geneticists accommodate these claims practically and conceptually? We will show how the recent environmental turn of the genetics of sexual orientation might be understood as a consequence of this accommodation process.

Author

• Michel Dubois, Epidapo - CNRS - GW