Heritability of Sexual Orientation
He and biologist James D. Weinrich co-authored a paper which found that homosexuality runs in some families. Pillard feels this is some of his most significant work, and that paper won the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality Hugo Beigel Award for the best paper published in The Journal of Sex Research.
Pillard is also well known for a series of studies he coauthored with J. Michael Bailey, which examined the rate of concordance of sexual identity among monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins of the same sex, non-twin siblings of the same sex, and adoptive siblings of the same sex. In all studies they found rates of concordance variantly consistent with the hypothesis that homosexuality has a significant genetic component. The Council for Responsible Genetics and other researchers have criticized this work for using a self-selected sample, a problem which later studies have attempted to remedy.
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Famous quotes containing the word orientation:
“Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”
—Yolanda Moses (b. 1946)