Talk:Genetic sexual attraction

But isn't it always said..
That people are more attracted to people genetically different from them, so as to promote healthier offspring with a more varied immune system? Everything I've read on sexual attraction supports that. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.122.63.142 (talk) 16:18, 6 December 2006 (UTC).


 * Yes, but that is only half of the story.


 * Generally, there are two powerful forces at work: exogamous attraction (attraction to people very *different* to oneself), and endogamous attraction (attraction to people very *similar* to oneself), and there is a powerful interplay between these two attractions. 49.184.174.144 (talk) 21:49, 25 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Something like that, although a person with a strong immune system mating with a person with a weak immune system ends up with a weaker child. Not to mention artificial medicines screwing everything up. Consider what that means, someone who is healthy will not target someone who is unhealthy for a mate; which means that healthy people end up seeking healthy people and unhealthy people have to settle for other unhealthy people (of course we are not simply talking about health here). This results in a stratification of society with essentially same strata of people (rich, middle, poor; buff, average, ugly; smart, average, dumb) mating over and over again until that order is disturbed by a powerful disease or other disaster and the survivors (weather previously weak or strong) become dominant. If the same people mate over and over again, who is more same to you than your own family? Of course our societal mores and psychology prevent us mating with people we grew up with but that hardly applies in people who are biologically related yet meeting for the first time. If your postulation was correct then every single family in the world would be interracial because couples of different races would not be able to resist each other. 99.236.220.155 (talk) 06:26, 5 September 2009 (UTC)


 * a person with a strong immune system mating with a person with a weak immune system ends up with a weaker child. Barring certain genetic diseases, that isn't how it works. The immune system is the classic textbook example for Frequency-dependent selection and Heterozygote advantage. All else being equal, alleles that are less common in a given population will be selected for (being "stronger", in your terms), and those individuals who are heterozygous will have an advantage over either homozygote. 128.104.41.198 (talk) 19:30, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Name
Since one doesn't currently exist, perhaps consanguinitaphilia (literally "blood-related love") could be a concise, single word for this phenomenon. It may be a rather long word, but so are many other -philias. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.187.249.201 (talk) 06:39, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, but the Neologisms section of one of our policy pages makes it clear that Wikipedia should avoid creating or promoting words that do not yet have significant usage in reliable sources. "Instead, it is preferable to use a title that is a descriptive phrase in plain English if possible". It is a general Wikipedia philosophy that we try to reflect, follow, and summarize what is already written in reliable sources. Alsee (talk) 18:00, 1 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Also, "genetic sexual attraction" is the term used by sources in the article and elsewhere on this topic. It is the WP:Common name. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 23:10, 1 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Where I'm from, they call it "normal".
 * In all seriousness, GSA or "Genetic Sexual Attraction", usually in title case is the only formal name I've ever seen for it, though my reading has not been that broad. I've seen incestuous feelings used, but that's pretty clearly just a descriptive term. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants   Tell me all about it.  02:42, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

"Consanguinitaphilia" would essentially be another (more official-sounding) word for "incest fetish". It would have a different connotation from "genetic sexual attraction". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:A000:1236:C190:FC1D:92C0:B0A:3D17 (talk) 20:30, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

Reverting *Treker's edits
The user *Treker completly ruined this article with his biased POV (removing entire sections and lot of sources). Someone needs to undo his stuff (I won't myself as I'm not a confirmed user and thus will be considered a bot if I do). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.241.175.56 (talk) 23:27, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

The user Treker and the protection of the article
Treker is the one constantly vandalizing the article to insert his unsourced viewpoint. His edits should have been undone before protecting the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.119.68.246 (talk) 04:52, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I have audited their edits and agree with them per WP:FRINGE. — Paleo Neonate  – 06:55, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Changes to pseudoscience statement in header, including changing "direct" to "quantitative" and "actual" to "widespread"
While I agree that many claims and attitudes surrounding GSA constitute pseudoscience, it certainly has occurred in the lives of "actual" people who can provide "direct" evidence for their experiences; see case studies, interviews, groups. Acknowledging that some people have experienced something that fits the descriptor of GSA is important because erasing those experiences using inappropriate claims of scientific invalidity would constitute another kind of pseudoscience.

GSA functions as a pseudoscience because adherents claim it is predictive and could happen to anyone. Yet quantitative science doesn't find GSA in the general population. In the population, genetic similarity is correlated negatively with attraction.

But there is still qualitative evidence for GSA occurring in some people's lives, and scholarly analysis of those cases. And no, it doesn't all trace back to Gonyo. Lifton (1994) and Childs (1998) describe multiple cases that they have worked with. See pages 20-22 of "Genetic sexual attraction: Healing and danger in the reunions of adoptees and their birth families" for these example cases. These articles in qualitative psychology are not pseudoscience; they are scientific inquiry with a very limited scope.

Basically, "pseudoscience" isn't the consensus among scientists. It cannot be used unequivocally in the opening paragraph.

The single source for the claim of pseudoscience is still not adequate, by the way. If we are going to say GSA is regarded as pseudoscience by anyone other than author Sophia Bull we need to cite other people in addition. And they should be psychologists or sexologists because those are the areas of science where GSA is claimed to be relevant. Actually the source for the first part of the statement is also inadequate. There are better sources from elsewhere in this article that could be used to support both claims in this statement but I have to go to class now, sorry. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Livin270 (talk • contribs) 17:50, 16 March 2021 (UTC)


 * That is not how sourcing works on Wikipedia. See WP:GEVAL and WP:MEDRS. "Qualitative" studies with little statistical power and muddled with subjectivity are not treated as equivalent to MEDRS sources. We certainly do not water down sourced text. Crossroads -talk- 21:18, 16 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Alright, you didn't like the language I used, but the language you reverted it to makes no sense and is still abysmally sourced. "Direct evidence" is most often used to refer to first-hand accounts and direct observation - which is pretty much the only evidence that does exist for GSA, i.e. people giving first-hand accounts of it in their own lives, and social workers directly observing these relationships. I see that "primary sources should not be used for medical content", but technically primary sources are the only direct sources, so find a word that you like better. You could just say "There is no evidence for GSA being a widespread/general phenomenon" and that would be accurate because the types of evidence you use to determine whether something is found in general population are not primary sources, they are quantitative studies. "Actual phenomenon" is vague, confusing, and unscientific unless we were talking about an event that truly isn't observed in nature, or the statement is made more specific. The "phenomenon" to which this applies is not unwanted attraction occurring between reunited family members - that phenomenon has been observed in actuality. The phenomenon is the hypothesis that this is a universal trait which could happen to anyone in that situation. That just needs to be made more clear if this language continues to be used. And the sources need help. Livin270 (talk) 17:08, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
 * The idea that this concept is a phenomenon, rather than an attraction that individuals claim applies to them but is actually caused by something else or by coincidence, is what there is no evidence for, per the high quality source there. I did remove "direct" to avoid confusion. Crossroads -talk- 19:01, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm just going to tack on this one here, since it's more of the same. I disagree with all the skeptics and "pseudoscience" folks. I came to the talk page because I couldn't believe the main claim that this is pseudoscience is a Salon article! Plus, it looks like there are so many sources that are focused on criminal rape and incest, rather than grown genetic relatives who met for the first time as adults. It's a very different scenario.

As someone who is active in the adoption advocacy and donor conceived adults space, I'm also annoyed that there are so many random public people with opinions who have NO idea what it's like to grow up without genetic mirrors. Listen to the people who are actually experiencing this! Ugh.

The Salon article needs to be deleted from this article, or at the VERY minimum, reduced in prominence. Not academic, and not OwnVoices. 71.114.65.18 (talk) 02:38, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Related to above: Intro
I've reworked the intro in light of the sources used. I have no background familiarity with this topic, but I was bothered by the encyclopedia source offered in the intro to say there was "no evidence" for the position—not because it wasn't a reliable source (obviously), but because it was describing something different than what the introduction was talking.

The article previously introduced the topic this way:


 * Genetic sexual attraction is a concept in which a strong sexual attraction may develop between close blood relatives who first meet as adults. There is no evidence for genetic sexual attraction being an actual phenomenon,1 and the hypothesis is regarded as pseudoscience.2

The first reference was to page 200 of the encyclopedia. I checked the encyclopedia to ensure accuracy. This is how page 200 discusses the concept:


 * . . . Tsoulis-Reay also refers to Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA), which suggests that sexual attraction might be a product of genetic similarities, although as yet there is little scientific evidence for such a position.

That yields two distinct substantive issues: First, those are different definitions, and saying there is little evidence for one of those definitions doesn't necessarily imply there is little evidence for the other. Second, the term "little scientific evidence" isn't tantamount to "no evidence."

Just for clarity: I'm referring to the Encyclopedia's definition as the "causal definition" and the phenomenon as the "phenomenon definition." Most sources cited in the article seem to focus on the causal definition—the Slate op-ed, for example, quoted at length, says, "A better way to put it is that there is no real research supporting the notion that sharing genes with someone makes you more likely to want to have sex with them." However, I found plenty of other sources that appear to define the term as the phenomenon. As such, I changed the intro to reflect both the definition used in the encyclopedia and the supposed phenomenon.--Jerome Frank Disciple (talk) 15:38, 16 March 2023 (UTC)