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[Preprint]. 2023 Mar 9:2023.03.07.531528.
doi: 10.1101/2023.03.07.531528.

Contraception ends the genetic maintenance of human same-sex sexual behavior

Siliang Song  1 , Jianzhi Zhang  1
Affiliations

Contraception ends the genetic maintenance of human same-sex sexual behavior

Siliang Song et al. bioRxiv. .

Update in

Abstract

Because human same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) is heritable and leads to fewer offspring, it is puzzling why SSB-associated alleles have not been selectively purged. Current evidence supports the antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis that SSB-associated alleles benefit individuals exclusively performing opposite-sex sexual behavior by increasing their number of sexual partners and consequently their number of offspring. However, here we show that having more sexual partners no longer predicts more offspring since the availability of oral contraceptives in the 1960s and that SSB is now negatively genetically correlated with the number of offspring, indicating a loss of SSB’s genetic maintenance in modern societies.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Phenotypic effect (β) of the number of sexual partners on the number of children in OSB individuals in each of eight 5-year cohorts. Error bar represents the standard error.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Genetic correlation (rg) between SSB and the number of children in each of four decades for male (blue), female (red), or both groups of participants (black). Error bars represent standard errors, whereas asterisks indicate P < 0.05.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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