Saturday, 19 August 2017

The inheritance of acquired sexual preferences

I've long been interesed in the idea that acquired sexual characteristics can be inherited - as part of my more general interest in Lamarckian inheritance. Here is how I have previously described the idea:

The author argues that surgical breast enhancements are inherited, and tend to produce offspring with larger breasts. A mechanism is provided: those with breast enhancements tend to attract mates who prefer larger breasts, and some of that preference will have a genetic basis. Genes in men for a preference for larger breasts will tend to be statistically linked to genes whose expression produces bigger breasts when in women, due to their shared evolutionary history. So: we can expect breast enhancement patients to have offspring with larger breasts than would have been produced if no enhancement surgery had taken place. The reasoning here can be applied to most sexually-selected traits.
I notice that the same logic applies to acquired sexual preferences. A similar example can be used to illustrate this idea. Imagine someone acquires a preference for large breasts - perhaps via exposure to pornography. Their offspring are likely to inherit this preference. How? They are likely to mate with individuals with large breasts, who are in turn more likely than average to carry genes coding for a preference for large breasts.

The fact that the idea also applies to acquired preferences expands its scope. I think that this idea has not been investigated very thoroughly. We don't yet have good theories or models about it. That makes it challenging to judge its overall significance. Another thing that needs doing is empirical testing and quantification. So far, the idea is armchair philosophy. However, the effect should be fairly simple for scientists to measure. It ought to be reproducible with fruit flies or mice, for example. Possibly, data sets suitable for testing the idea may already be out there somewhere.

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