Hawt female mouse on female mouse action

[Cain]

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/11/62

Apparently, deleting a single gene can make mice gay.

See also http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2010/07/researchers_create_lesbian_mice.php

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

The name of the gene they removed is "FucM "

[Suu]

Great, that's all people need to hear. That homosexuality is a genetic disorder. Soon it'll get a name like Trisomy-Gay, parents will want to get their child tested, and then put them in special ed.

[Cramulus]

I've picked up a pet peeve about research like this

namely that studies like this should be conducted double-blind. That is, the person counting the lordosis behavior shouldn't be aware of what group the mouse is in.

When you study mammal sexuality, generally you use rats or mice. This is because they're cheap, they mature quickly, and their bodies are very similar to ours. Researchers have identified a number of rat behaviors that they believe correspond to human behaviors - one of them is Lordosis.

Lordosis is when a rat raises its ass in the air, inviting another rat to come mount it.

The thing is, rats also do this during play. The scientist is basically watching these rat videos and counting the number of times it sticks its ass in the air.

The scientist has to differentiate between "actual lordosis" and "just play behavior". If the scientist knows which group the rat is in, it influences the way the lordosis is counted.

A lot of the early research on the effects of hormones on behavior were influenced by this "counting" problem. Double-blind replication has revealed different results in a number of studies, but the initial results are already embedded in scientific literature.

This "counting" problem is very common in experimental psychology - you tend to include or throw out liminal cases that only marginally fit your criteria based on what you want the data to show.

It may be that double blind replication produces the same results.. but we can't really know for sure until somebody does it.

[Sir Fronkensteen, The Hawk]

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/11/62

Apparently, deleting a single gene can make mice gay.

See also http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2010/07/researchers_create_lesbian_mice.php

The FucM gene   Fuck 'em!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I pretty much entirely reject sexuality behavior studies in other mammals in terms of relevancy to human sexuality. The reason for this is that humans have very different sexual behavior from most mammals, and most mammals also have very different sexual behavior from each other. Mammals develop different sexual behaviors for their own evolutionary niches, and it's pretty safe, IMO, to say that human sexuality, including homosexuality (which fulfills many social roles in our social species) is very well adapted to further our survival as a species, but probably not well adapted to further the survival of rats, dogs, or manatees, which is why they don't act like us.

If I am a gay man and my partner and I provide essential social support for my sister and her kid that allows that child to go on and spawn more kids, do my genes win? Oh snap, yes they fucking do. Suck my genetically successful non-reproducing dick, Christians!

[Sir Fronkensteen, The Hawk]

Korean researchers found that deleting the appropriately named FucM gene,

Looks like they caught on too

[Requia ☣]

I've picked up a pet peeve about research like this

namely that studies like this should be conducted double-blind. That is, the person counting the lordosis behavior shouldn't be aware of what group the mouse is in.

When you study mammal sexuality, generally you use rats or mice. This is because they're cheap, they mature quickly, and their bodies are very similar to ours. Researchers have identified a number of rat behaviors that they believe correspond to human behaviors - one of them is Lordosis.

Lordosis is when a rat raises its ass in the air, inviting another rat to come mount it.

The thing is, rats also do this during play. The scientist is basically watching these rat videos and counting the number of times it sticks its ass in the air.

The scientist has to differentiate between "actual lordosis" and "just play behavior". If the scientist knows which group the rat is in, it influences the way the lordosis is counted.

A lot of the early research on the effects of hormones on behavior were influenced by this "counting" problem. Double-blind replication has revealed different results in a number of studies, but the initial results are already embedded in scientific literature.

This "counting" problem is very common in experimental psychology - you tend to include or throw out liminal cases that only marginally fit your criteria based on what you want the data to show.

It may be that double blind replication produces the same results.. but we can't really know for sure until somebody does it.

What exactly makes you think it was not double blind?

[Cramulus]

that it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the paper

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I've picked up a pet peeve about research like this

namely that studies like this should be conducted double-blind. That is, the person counting the lordosis behavior shouldn't be aware of what group the mouse is in.

When you study mammal sexuality, generally you use rats or mice. This is because they're cheap, they mature quickly, and their bodies are very similar to ours. Researchers have identified a number of rat behaviors that they believe correspond to human behaviors - one of them is Lordosis.

Lordosis is when a rat raises its ass in the air, inviting another rat to come mount it.

The thing is, rats also do this during play. The scientist is basically watching these rat videos and counting the number of times it sticks its ass in the air.

The scientist has to differentiate between "actual lordosis" and "just play behavior". If the scientist knows which group the rat is in, it influences the way the lordosis is counted.

A lot of the early research on the effects of hormones on behavior were influenced by this "counting" problem. Double-blind replication has revealed different results in a number of studies, but the initial results are already embedded in scientific literature.

This "counting" problem is very common in experimental psychology - you tend to include or throw out liminal cases that only marginally fit your criteria based on what you want the data to show.

It may be that double blind replication produces the same results.. but we can't really know for sure until somebody does it.

What exactly makes you think it was not double blind?

STOP

You're both wrong. Neither of you read the study, did you? Read the fucking study, THEN leap to conclusions.

[Cramulus]

uhm I did read the study. Please rephrase your objection in the form of substance.

[Cramulus]

okay anyway...

here's a passage by old mentor, writing about why animals are not good ways to study human sexuality. This excerpt refers to a lot of hormonal research, but its points are general enough to apply to genetic research.

http://books.google.com/books?id=As563HBuZcAC&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=suzanne+kessler+lordosis&source=bl&ots=EkrEpf-aUM&sig=MtV-1pgdIPw_UX93icRve1NKFVY&hl=en&ei=w-K9TIiIHc35nAeP7sSJDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA

One of the major advantages of animal studies is that [certain] types of "bias" can be eliminated, and controlled experiments that would be unethical using humans can be conducted. On the other hand, there are difficulties in generalizing from the results of research on animals to human beings. The majority of studies with rats, mice, and guinea pigs take as their dependent variable adult sexual and and reproductive behavior. Other "gender" differences that have been studied include activity level and structural differences in the brain. Those who study animal behavior are aware of certain difficulties in the interpretation of the studies. For example, the effects of hormones may be indirect. Hormones change body structures which change behavior. Androgens administered to female animals greatly enlarge the size of the clitoris. This morphological change rather than direct hormonal effects may be the critical factor in the increase of mounting and thrusting behavior seen in such animals.

In addition, animal sexual behavior is not gender role behavior. Even if we accept traditional definitions of gender role, these definitions clearly go beyond the instinctual responses of animals. To compare lordosis and mounting with the range of human sexual activities and relationships is absurd. To what are we to compare lordosis? A naked woman lying on her back with her legs open? Is the wearing of lipstick really analogous to the "sex swelling" of primates, as some have implied (Morris, 1967)? Should we compare estrous cycles (where the female animal exhibits clear physical signs of sexual arousal at the time of ovulation) to human menstrual cycles (where there are no clear signs of arousal, where the timing is not during fertile periods, and around which a complex social mythology has developed)? What is the subhuman analog of women or of the alleged insensitive, logical behavior of men? Traditionally, scientists have dealt with this problem by conceiving of human behavior as more fluid and more under environmental control. Nevertheless, they maintain that the basics of all behavior, the biological foundations, can be understood through the sudy of animal behavior.

It is noteworthy that even the rigid dichotomization of animal and sexual behavior is beginning to be questioned by some biologists. This new assertion is that the dichotomy is not absolute. Animals of both genders IN ALL SPECIES exhibit both types of sexual behaviors. It is the ratio of behaviors which varies within genders, between genders, and between species. Such "new" findings illustrate the social construction of science. Are animals getting more androgynous? it seems more likely that, as society in general constructs new ways of seeing the world, scientists are looking for, and therefore finding, "new" behaviors in their animals. Facts depend on what the scientist brings with her/himself to the lab.

If we think about each of the three components of gender, the relevance of animal studies to understanding gender in humans becomes very tenuous. Rats and other animals do not have gender roles or gender identities. In fact, animals do not have genders at all--merely sexes.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

uhm I did read the study. Please rephrase your objection in the form of substance.

My objection to you was that the researchers followed through by counting the number of times the female mice engaged in masculinized mating behavior, so the lordotic behavior was not the only value the mice were being assessed on.

My objection to Requia is that duh, if it had been double-blind it would have been stated in the study.

Male-typical coital behavior displayed by the mutant mice

The lack of female receptivity in FucM mutants further led us to test whether the KO females exert male-typical sexual behavior, which was examined over three weeks by placing an E2-stimulated female partner of WT into the home cage of an ovariectomized female (WT, n = 13; HZ, n = 12; KO, n = 10). The mutant female mice showed masculine behaviors, such as attempted mounting, mounting, and pseudo-intromission, towards an estradiol-primed partner female (Figure 2B). The male-typical behaviors were scored for 30 min. For the third trial, the ovariectomized females were injected with 500 μg of progesterone. Repeated measures ANOVA indicated that the frequencies of attempted mounts and actual mounts of female partners by tested females were significantly higher than that of the control females [F(2,32) = 15.03, P < 0.001], and there was a significant effect of repeated testing [F(2,64) = 16.49, P < 0.001] as well as a significant factor interaction [F(4,64) = 6.15, P < 0.001]. Differences between groups were obtained by Fisher's post hoc analysis, in which the KO females can be compared to the WT and HZ females (P < 0.001) with significance. Unlike the lordosis behavior, the male-typical coital behavior of the mutant females were notably reduced by the hormone (E2) treatment.

[Cramulus]

uhm I did read the study. Please rephrase your objection in the form of substance.

My objection to you was that the researchers followed through by counting the number of times the female mice engaged in masculinized mating behavior, so the lordotic behavior was not the only value the mice were being assessed on.

the counting problem applies to mounting behavior as well

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

uhm I did read the study. Please rephrase your objection in the form of substance.

My objection to you was that the researchers followed through by counting the number of times the female mice engaged in masculinized mating behavior, so the lordotic behavior was not the only value the mice were being assessed on.

the counting problem applies to mounting behavior as well

It could, yeah. But you know how academia is. It's pretty fucking hard to find someone who's willing to come to your lab to count how many times mice try to mount each other, and since both researchers have to work together with the mice, it's equally hard to ensure that the researcher doing the counting won't recognize the mouse in question.