A Separate Creation
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Chandler Burr |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Sexual orientation |
| Published | 1996 (Hyperion) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 354 |
| ISBN | |
A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation is a 1996 book about the development of sexual orientation by the journalistChandler Burr. The book had a mixed reception.
Expanding on his 1993 Atlantic article "Homosexuality and Biology", Burr discussed the work of researchers such as Simon LeVay, Laura A. Allen, Roger Gorski, and Dean Hamer, and compared the clinical profiles of sexual orientation and handedness, arguing that the best analogy for homosexuality is left-handedness.
Burr described the different views that researchers have expressed of sexual orientation, observing that while some believe that sexual orientations are distributed across a population in a way that could be mapped onto a bell curve between poles of heterosexuality and homosexuality, with most people having some measure of bisexuality, others believe that sexual orientation is bimodally distributed, with most people being either heterosexual or homosexual and few being bisexual. Some researchers, including an anonymous colleague of Hamer who would not let Burr identify him, think that erotic interests divide neatly into sex-specific types. Burr also discussed the various ways in which same-sex behavior among animals is and is not similar to human homosexuality.
In his account of LeVay's research, Burr wrote that LeVay's 1991 neuroanatomical report was the first major biological investigation of sexual orientation. Burr described some of the limitations of LeVay's study. Neurobiologist and psychiatrist William Byne, as Burr noted, pointed out that testosterone effects, medications being used by subjects with AIDS, and disease effects may have had an effect on the comparative size of INAH 3 (the area of the brain LeVay studied), and that measuring these tiny cell groups is difficult. Regarding attempts to change people's sexual orientations through therapy, Burr cited Byne's view that the literature on the subject shows that very few people have been able to successfully achieve such change, and that sexual orientation is largely immutable. Burr mentioned the concern of some commentators that current sexual orientation research has the potential to reinvigorate pathological interpretations of homosexuality. He quoted biologist Richard Lewontin's assertion that researchers need to show why the origins of homosexuality is an important question, and described the views of clinical geneticist Philip Reilly, who believes that women should have the right to abort a fetus predisposed to become gay.
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