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Comment by DangerousPie | Hacker News Reader

That's why it says "no single genetic cause" and not "no genetic cause".

Technically true, and I'm sure the title wasn't intended to have that effect, but judging by the other comments, it appears some people still seem to be led to believe it meant "no genetic cause" - so it's still worth pointing out.

But yes, that's not necessarily malice or incompetence on the part of the title's author.

> But yes, that's not necessarily malice or incompetence on the part of the title's author.

If it's not malice, then it's linguistic incompetence.

Well, incompetence in that they didn't manage to achieve clarity for all readers, but not in the sense that someone else would've been able to think of a better title that would achieve that, I think.

Sure they would: "Study Finds No Unique Genetic Cause of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior".

It can kinda easily be misread as "not a single one".

I couldn't help reading single as an absolute zero and not a "potentially multiple"

Yet a handful of comments here are already jumping to the "it's environmental, not genetic" conclusion

It's also raging across the right wing internet. Has been for 3 days. Facts don't matter, even here.

Doesn't change the fact that it is misleading. "No single X cause" sounds as if it has no basis in X.

That’s “prone to misreading”, not “misleading”. The title is correct as written but there’s an argument for using a different wording such as “no simple” to reduce the chances of readers misreading it and jumping to conclusions.

Something that’s prone to misreading is misleading. Intent doesn’t factor into whether something is misleading or not and neither does when something is in some sense correct but not understood correctly by many people.

Language can be used in too many ways and not all correct ways to use it are also easily understood. Often enough that doesn’t matter because of context but here context leads actually to people coming to the wrong conclusion because the well known conflict is between some (any) kind of genetic origin of homosexuality and environmental factors being responsible.

Indeed, you're correct. I don't know if someone put it like this intentionally or not, but looking at the number of people who jumped into the incorrect conclusion, it has the same effect as misleading headline.

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