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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 3668850" data-attributes="member: 11697">Most of the studies that have been published in more hard science sources, as opposed to sociology/social science journals and books show a pretty large difference in numbers. It's possibly just what questions are being asked, what pooled population they're each looking at, or even what they're choosing to report for purposes of pushing a point. We can only speculate.Five minutes on Pubmed and I snagged the following two for examples:One study (Mercer CH, et al. Women who report having sex with women: British national probability data on prevalence, sexual behaviors, and health outcomes. Am J Public Health. 2007 Jun;97(6):1126-33. Epub 2007 Apr 26.) reported a 4.9% rate of homosexual experiences in the lifetime of the women in the study population (that's experiences, not necessarily orientation or self-identified orientation) with half of that number ~5% reporting experience with both genders. A far cry from 10-15% certainly.Another study (Aaron DJ, et al. Estimating the lesbian population: a capture-recapture approach. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2003 Mar;57(3):207-9.) reported a 1.87% rate, which is the lowest number I've seen.I'd look at the aims of who is reporting any particular number, what they were asking, how they were asking it, how solid their science and statistics were, if their tested population was representative of the overall population, and what goals they might have in the numbers.There are some suggestions of a genetic component (at least for men), but since the Hamer work on the topic I think most of the evidence weighs massively against it being as simple as that. That said, recent work is strongly suggestive of it being a physical thing, with persuasive evidence for an underlying biological influence on prenatal brain development being the root cause (hormonal influence in-utero is one possibility).</blockquote>

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