Evolutionary psychology, the discipline that claimed we're being manipulated by flowers and evolved to like the appearance of black men, also made the bold assertion that the income of your parents during pregnancy made you...gay?

It's even crazier than that cock-fixated megalomaniac at Berkeley claiming a weedkiller turned frogs gay, though at least evolutionary psychologists made some pretense of showing their data in 2022.(1) They didn't stop with just correlating parental income to becoming gay, they also said it is linked to being more submissive in bed, while high prenatal testosterone leads to more ‘butch’ or ‘assertive’ roles across the LGBTQ+ community.

They cobbled together two things, high fetal estrogen and the income of the parents, and then concluded with statistical significance(2) that the lowest income bracket led to the highest frequencies of same-sex attraction - and also in high-income parents.



How is most of the world not gay if being poor or being rich causes it? Because there is no science in any of it. They instead looked at survey results which included sexual orientation of 116,904 men and 95,972 women and then determined parental income by the self-reported relative lengths of the 2nd and 4th digits (digit ratio ) and believing that is a proxy for steroids. "Low parental income is associated with high 2D:4D (indicating low testosterone and high estrogen in the fetus) and high parental income is linked to low 2D:4D (indicating high testosterone and low estrogen in the fetus) in their children."

This is kind of EXPLORATORY nonsense is fun to dunk on because it is so terribly constructed, and it will certainly be interesting to see if 20 years from now anyone was motivated to be more successful because they didn't want their kid to be gay, but it is as unlikely as an evolutionary psychology finding that political liberals have prettier daughters.

NOTES:

(1) Professor Tyrone Hayes did not, claiming that EPA was a Vast Corporate Conspiracy and so only a few hand-picked people were allowed to see his mystery data, results of which have never been replicated, and which he unwittingly debunked when he signed onto a paper showing the weedkiller had no effect on aquatic life years later. PNAS has, of course, never retracted it or placed a statement of concern on it even though they acknowledge it did not pass real peer review - because after my article in the Wall Street Journal exposed how he got by peer review, they closed that loophole.

(2) Useless, which is why I am a signatory on a paper in Nature asking journals to stop using statistical significance to mean 'valid.' It is nothing of the kind. I can show coin flips are biased against heads or prejudiced tails with statistical significance, and we all know that isn't so.