Gregory Cochran

Gregory M. Cochran (born 1953) is a research associate at the University of Utah who blogs about human biodiversity (HBD) topics.

Cochran is best known for his frequent collaborations with the late Henry Harpending, considered a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Despite the fact that he is by profession a physicist, and the fact that he has no hard evidence for his opinions, Cochran appeared to believe he understands the origin of homosexuality far better than most people. Cochran claimed that a "gay gene" is implausible from the point of view of natural selection, and that therefore the phenomenon of male homosexuality is most likely "caused" by a brain-infection, a so-called "gay germ", and/or other pathological damage to the brain.

Pseudoscience, meet Haggard's Law.

He seems to positively revel in the reaction his "theory" will cause in the LGBT community and its progressive allies:

Expansion:

Cochran believes that many proposed explanations of homosexuality confuse evolutionary adaptivity with moral goodness:

It has certainly brought out the stupid in Cochran. If homosexuality were wholly or partially genetic, this might be the result of multiple genes. Many of these, individually or in subsets, may have been selected for, even if together in one person they would have been selected against. Examples of this when just two alleles are needed for the unfit phenotype include sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis. What makes this especially stupid is that Cochran himself has claimed that those Ashkenazi Jews who are heterozygous for various neurological diseases have higher IQs as a result.

Furthermore, Cochran draws a false dichotomy between genetics and environmental influences. He misses the possibility that even if there were a single "gay gene", it may be that in the past or in different environments, the same gene did not cause homosexuality or at least did not cause low average fertility in homosexuals (due to e.g. extremely strong social pressure to get married and have children &mdash; a phenomenon that is still found even today in some countries, like Iraq).

He also failed to consider other alternatives to the theory that homosexuality is solely caused by a "gay gene" or genes, that are now seeming more plausible, such as epigenetics, and (with regard to the fact that an identical twin of a gay man is not always gay) the fact that even genetically-identical twins can have potentially-relevantly different experiences in the womb (for example, ). He did later consider epigenetic theories, only to dismiss them out of hand.

That Cochran is the most intelligent of so-called HBD bloggers shows how very lowbrow this crowd is.

Cochran believes that easy discoveries can be made when the answers are offensive, which may explain his interest in controversial topics:

He has feuded with various biologists including whom he accused of being an idiot who doesn't understand simple arithmetic.