Study: Science doesn’t back popular views of sexuality
Over half the people in the United States believe gays and lesbians are born that way, according to a 2015 Gallup poll. It can be professionally dangerous to believe otherwise, as former presidential hopeful Dr. Ben Carson discovered last year when he said homosexuality was a choice and was later pressured into apologizing.
But, Lawrence Mayer, a biostatistician, and Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist, both from Johns Hopkins University department of psychiatry, examined over 200 leading, peer-reviewed studies from social science, psychology, and biology and found science does not support much of what the general public, politicians, and policy-makers believe about homosexuality. Their 143-page review appears in the fall 2016 issue of the journal The New Atlantis.
Mayer and McHugh found no compelling evidence that sexual orientation was innate. Studies found some minor differences between the brain...