published: July 24, "2005"
Evidence For Herd Thinners

For the past decade I've tried to get media to report my explanation for "herd thinners" and clear up the confusion about same sex attraction. The theory is presented in Rock Prophecy, a book that media has censored since 1999. The men who control media have let this confusion over same sex attraction persist and cause much suffering. Prejudices could have been alleviated if the herd thinner explanation were known.

When Rock Prophecy was copyrighted in 1995, the World Wide Web was new. I didn't have access to the internet while the first draft of Rock Prophecy was being written. My theory about "herd thinners" was developed in the 1980s. I had never seen anything like it. But in later years while searching online I located a report of scientific findings that support my theory about "herd thinners," a theory that was copyrighted back in 1995:

"Ward and Weisz (1980) and Dorner, Gotz, and Docke (1983) have shown that, in rats, stress in midpregnancy causes the male offspring to have permanently low free testosterone levels and homosexual behavior. Dorner has reported low free testosterone in human homosexuals, but no other group has yet confirmed this. His group has also reported a higher rate of stress in pregnancy in mothers of homosexuals than in those of controls (Dorner et al. 1983). Low free testosterone has been found in male temporal lobe epileptics in whom altered sexual behavior, including hypo sexuality, is frequently seen."
- Norman Geschwind & Albert Galaburda - Cerebral Lateralization p. 175
New Biological Books, Dec. 1987

"Research in Britain, America, and Germany has all confirmed that a prenatal exposure to deficiency of testosterone increases the likelihood of a man becoming homosexual…Intriguingly, men who were conceived and born in periods of great stress, such as toward the end of World War II, are more often gay than men born at other times. (The stress hormone cortisol is made from the same progenitor as testosterone; perhaps it uses the raw material, leaving less to be made into testosterone.) The same is true of rats: Homosexual behavior is more common in rats whose mothers were stressed during pregnancy…Gays are also more often left-handed than heterosexuals, which makes a sort of sense because handedness is affected by sex hormones during development."

- Matthew Ridley - The Red Queen pp. 264-5
Harper Collins, Apr. 2003

The research cited above from Cerebral Lateralization presents science to suggest that stress produces gay offspring, but it does not theorize that the context for this is as a mechanism by which nature intends homosexuality as a way of "thinning the herd" - reducing the population.

But what do we make of Matthew Ridley's work? His book came out in 2003, four years after Rock Prophecy was published. Notice the repetition of points made in my book now copied into Ridley's later book:

1999 Rock Prophecy: "Events like the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the ‘40s produced millions of conceptions under conditions of prolonged stress. Many of the boys conceived during this period grew up to become gay men."

2003 Red Queen:"Men who were conceived and born in periods of great stress, such as toward the end of World War II, are more often gay than men born at other times."

1999 Rock Prophecy: "Fifty percent of twins are going to share the same sexual orientation. Do you know what the concordance is for left handedness? Twelve percent...well under the concordance for homosexuality, which suggests, that there’s actually a larger genetic component to homosexuality than there is to left handedness.”

2003 Red Queen: "Gays are also more often left-handed than heterosexuals, which makes a sort of sense because handedness is affected by sex hormones during development."

In 2005, a decade after Rock Prophecy was copyrighted, I located another article on line at viewzone.com and this article is the first I've seen to repeat my theory that premiered in Rock Prophecy back in 1995:

Embryology teaches that early embryos all start out as female. At some point in early gestation, if chromosomes destine the fetus to be male, this female embryo is altered by the genetically programmed addition of certain hormones, called androgens. These androgens, especially testosterone, instruct the embryo to develop male characteristics. In their absence, the embryo continues to develop into a female.

In a paper published almost a quarter of a century ago, a research psychologist at Villanova University was also puzzled about gender. Dr. Ingebog Ward…divided a group of pregnant rats into three groups. Suspecting that something special might be happening in the early stages of pregnancy, she subjected the first group to stress during the first ten days of gestation by irritating the mother rats to bright lights, noise and annoying vibrations. Ten days into a rat's pregnancy corresponds to the first trimester (3 months) of a human pregnancy. The second group was subjected to stress towards the end of their pregnancy, just before birth. The third group was comprised of male offspring from both prenatal stressed mothers and unstressed mothers. These babies were subjected to the same stress producing stimuli.

Dr. Ward then allowed all the males to grow to adulthood without further interference. She then placed each group of males in cages with healthy females to observe their ability and desire to mate with normal adult females. Here's what happened:

Abstract: "Male rats were exposed to prenatal (i.e. before they were born) or postnatal (after they were born) stress, or both. The prenatal stressed males showed low levels of male copulatory behavior and high rates of female lordotic responding. Postnatal stress had no effect. The modifications are attributed to stress-mediated alterations in the ratio of adrenal to gonadal androgens during critical stages of sexual differentiation. Specifically, it appears that stress causes an increase in the weak adrenal androgen, androstendione, from the maternal fetal adrenal cortices, or both, and a concurrent decrease in the potent gonadal androgen, testosterone."

- Parental Stress Feminizes & Demasculizes the Behavior of Males
Science pp. 83-84, January 7, 1972

Her findings showed that if a mother is stressed during the early stages of pregnancy, she will release an adrenaline related hormone into her own bloodstream and that of her unborn baby. This hormone, called androstendione, is structurally similar to testosterone, the male hormone. If the baby carries "XY" chromosomes and is destined to become a male, testosterone needs to be active when the Central Nervous System (including the hypothalamus) is being formed. This is the only way that the CNS "knows" to develop along male lines. Because the stress hormone seems to bind to the receptors that would normally be receiving testosterone, there is the delay or blockage of the effectiveness of testosterone, even if it is plentiful.

In 1972, Dr. Ward had no idea that androstendione in male pregnancies would prevent or inhibit the hypothalamus to develop into a healthy male brain, but this stress-related hormone now appears to do just that. The brain makes its gender commitment very early in development and, once committed to either male or female, it can not change. The interference with testosterone in the later stages of pregnancy, or after birth, does little or nothing to inhibit primary gender development of the other organs of the body.

In Doctor Ward's own words: "...The present data support the hypothesis that exposure of pregnant rats to environmental stressors modifies the normal process of sexual behavior differentiation in male fetuses by decreasing functional testosterone and elevating androstenedione levels during prenatal development. During stress conditions plasma testosterone emanating from the gonads decreases while adrenal androstenedione rises. The molecular structure of the two androgens, being very similar, it is postulated that the two hormones compete for the same receptor sites. Since androstenedione is a less potent androgen than testosterone, the decrease in male copulatory ability and increased lordotic potential seen in the prenatal stressed animals of the present study would be expected. The relative difference in potency between testosterone and androstendione has been repeatedly demonstrated."

It is therefore possible that while the body and organs of an animal can be a "male," the brain can coincidentally be "female." This extreme reaction to maternal stress even has a very logical and natural purpose. Sensing that a population is under the stress of crowding or poor living conditions, nature provides this hormonal mechanism as a means to limit population growth and thereby reduce the cause of the stress. Homosexual behavior results in less offspring than heterosexual behavior.

Again, in Doctor Ward's own words: "The resulting alterations in sexual behavior provide the basis for an effective population control mechanism, since offspring so affected would not possess the behavioral repertoire necessary to contribute to population growth. Thus, the environment, by triggering an adrenal stress response, may control the reproductive capacity of successive generations of differentiating fetuses and, thereby, population size."

…Prenatal stress in early pregnancy seems to be a rational and plausible explanation for male homosexuality and should be viewed as a natural population limiting phenomenon. Personal choice in homosexuality appears to be an insignificant factor in those offspring who are born with a female hypothalamus, encapsulated in an otherwise normal male body.