I was particularly impressed by chapter five on psychological tests of sexual preference. I've always been curious about how it's possible to turn this intangible, abstract feeling of sexual attraction into concrete data. It is natural for a psychologist to attempt to transform abstract data into concrete data allowing him to diagnose and treat the symptoms of a disorder. Now, diagnostic tests alone can provide valuable information about a person's inner psychology. However, their terrible power lies in the interpretation and application of the results. People like to correlate things. Gay? They'll say something like, "Oh, he always wore pink." “It’s no wonder he’s gay,” even though the color pink may have no real connection to homosexuality. People feel comfortable if they see the connection between the effect and the cause. Kinsey wrote of this trait: “Only the human mind invents categories and tries to put facts into separate pigeonholes” (p. 123, Finding Out). In other words, he just paved the way for humans to separate themselves from others. the tests. Other psychologists like Kauth, Storms, Benjamin, and Klein continued to create more tests for humans to differentiate their sexuality. Maybe that's why people are desperate to have something tangible to test for, like a "gay" gene. In 1993, Dean Hamer, an American geneticist, claimed to have discovered this particular gene in homosexual men. However, there is no definitive proof for this claim (Hamer, 2000). Yet it is downright dangerous to use such a test on people for biological reasons. I'm afraid to imagine the impossible scenarios where mothers abort their children because of their "gay" gene or force a soldier to take a test to find out his preferences. I can easily imagine this because it has already happened to deaf people. A certain group of people actually carry a gene responsible for deafness. My good friend comes from a family of nine siblings, all deaf because both of her parents had the “deaf” gene. Fortunately, their parents have embraced deaf culture and don't worry about their children's deafness. The situation could easily be different for his parents. They could have tested this gene first and decided not to have children. Then my good friend will no longer exist. There is a good example of a nature-nature theory gone wrong..