• Question: Why are some people attracted to the other sex while their parents genes are not?

    Asked by to Amelia, Clem, Izzy, Sarah on 14 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Which sex you are attracted to is a very complicated thing and not completely understood yet! Whether someone likes the same or the opposite sex is thought to be determined by a combination of many different things including:
      genes
      hormones
      surroundings
      up bringing
      brain structure

      You share your genes with your parents but everything else on this list will differ between parents and children. This means that parents and children won’t always be the same in terms of what sex they like. This is different to, for example, eye colour, which is controlled completely by your genes – your eye colour is determined 100% by what genes your parents have given you and your environment has no effect.

    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      We don’t yet understand what makes people attracted to the opposite sex. We don’t know if it is something in DNA, or if it is caused by changes in the brain. A lot of people think that it is a combination of both.

      We only have 50% of each of our parents genes, and then the chromosome from your dad pairs up with the chromosome from your mum. Since you have two matching pairs, only one of these can win (the winner is ‘dominant’ and the loser is ‘recessive’). At the same time, more than one gene might contribute to a feature. One example is that my mum is brown haired and my dad is black haired, but I have blonde hair – because they each had a recessive blonde gene. We don’t know anything about a gene for which sex you are attracted to, so we don’t understand yet if it is one gene or a combination of genes.

      Your environment also has an effect on what genes are expressed – for example, the genes to make melanin, which makes you tan, are only expressed in sunlight. If we don’t know what genes are causing something, we can’t properly understand what makes them be expressed.

      Lots more research needs to be done to understand why people are attracted to different people – and so at the moment we don’t have an answer. But people are doing research to try and understand it, so maybe one day we will have an answer.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 20 Mar 2014:

      This is an area which scientists do not yet know the full answer.

      I feel attraction, as with many other behaviours is based on both genetics and the environment.

Comments