[iguy]

You have an infallible source for this correctness? Offensive to some, sure, not NYT material... that's OK.

We have a lot to learn about viruses. And viral-like ways in which life uses genetic material, that don't quite fit into how we're used to thinking. Probably he's wrong about this idea, but generating lots of such hypotheses & finding ways to test them seems like a great idea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17540094

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16139798

[woodruffw]

Science isn't about infallibility, it's about overwhelming bodies of evidence supporting a conclusion inductively.

There is overwhelming evidence, anthropological and biological, that homosexuality is (at least!) as old as genetically modern humans. There is no evidence of any sort of exceptional origin for homosexuality in humans, especially in light of homosexual behavior in other species. The very idea of a dual (or multiple) emergence of homosexuality across species violates one of the central dogmas of genetics: that the parsimonious explanation is always preferable.

Spitting out a bunch of low quality hypotheses and then building the rest of your career on them (as Cochran did with his claims about Ashkenazi intelligence) is not how good science is done.

[iguy]

I think you may be responding to a stronger, clearly wrong, hypothesis... in which some virus landed on Haight-Ashbury in 1965? And this is kind-of what I'm arguing against -- ruling out a whole line of thought because you take offence at some version.

Every STD has a massive incentive to alter sexual behaviour. Some do: Syphilis makes you horny. And we probably haven't found all of them: if AIDS was no worse for you than Toxoplasmosis, would we have tracked it down? So maybe a whole lot of sexual behaviour is influenced by viruses, maybe in lots of animals. Where would you look to test this? At behaviours which don't seem obviously motivated by standard Darwinian concerns.

Certainly this is a tentative idea, nobody should get too attached to it. Probably there are people saying this more politely than Cochran. Some of us like the blunt style, it wastes less time.