ATTN: Sven Bocklandt, Ph.D.; Eric Vilain, M.D., Ph.D.; Steve Horvath, Ph.D.
Department of Human Genetics
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center
695 Charles E. Young Drive South, Box 708822
Los Angeles, CA 90095-7088

August 13, 2007

Dear Sirs:

The creative discovery of deterministic Barr inactivation in women bearing multiple homosexual prodigy, published in Human Genetics, February 2006, is commendable. I would like to humbly offer your research team some observations that may aid your work, and are of first impression. I have discussed the ideas I present below with Dr. Richard Green, M.D., who is a sexologist associated with Imperial College, London (U.K.), and founding editor of Archives of Sexual Behavior. I am a lay person with some graduate background in biochemistry and neurophysiology. My hope in writing this letter is to encourage your research team to consider an additional avenue of investigating psychosexual identity formation that offers opportunity for empirical support.

I am a pedophile, or person who experiences sexual attraction to pre-pubescent minors. The orientation was established early in my life and was not the result of post-partum environment. I state this on grounds of there being no environmental upbringing element in common between myself, a large number of individuals experiencing a similar condition, and heterosexual peers I have known. I am the participant coordinator in a study currently being conducted by [Researcher] at [University], and this medical sociological study should shed empirical light on the upbringings of pedophiles. The data collection in that project is scheduled to begin September 1, 2007.

I am impacted deeply by the developing theory of a mosaic of differentiated traits in homosexuals (e.g. hair-whorl direction; index and forefinger relation; fingerprint density; etc.). I have long suspected that there are distinct cognitive differences, expressed as a mosaic rather than universally, between those attracted to minors and the majority who are attracted to other adults. No such distinctions, however, are universal to that population.

* There is a disproportionately high number of clinical diagnoses of Aspberger's within the pedophilic population.

* A disproportionately high number of pedophilic individuals show a marked proficiency in rote memorization.

* Kenneth Lanning, M.S., conducted extensive research on child pornography offenders as a researcher with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Behavioral Analysis Unit, and these findings are published by the U.S. Department of Justice and now the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Mr. Lanning was deeply struck, and documented empirically, the phenomena of preferentially-attracted pedophiles maintaining extensive and intricate catalogs of their collection of obscene images. Possession of child pornography is a crime committed primarily by those experiencing a sexual attraction to children, whereas child molestation is a crime committed primarily by those attracted to other adults, for complex reasons (oftentimes substance abuse and relationship problems are causative). This behavior is common to the pedophile, not a characteristic applied solely to unlawful material. It reflects a cognitive structuring of data in the neocortical tissue that differs from the adult-attracted population.

* A disproportionately high number of pedophilic individuals exhibit hyposensitivity or hypersensitivity to certain stimuli and sensory integration problems. Hyperosmia is common in the population.

* A disproportionately high number of pedophilic individuals exhibit an ability to focus intensely on an area of interest. Mr. Lanning notes repeatedly in his reports on obsessive-compulsive-disorder-type of symptoms among adjudicated child pornography offenders.

Some salient facts about the pedophilic population follow:

* Adult-attracted heterosexuals and homosexuals generally carry some sexual attraction towards adolescents, but it is keyed to the full expression of secondary sexual characteristics. When giving an age on the low range of what their attraction might span, they are generally representing precocious individuals appearing older or exceptional cases.

* Those attracted to minors are broadly divided into true pedophiles, those sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children, and hebephiles (or ephebophile), those sexually attracted to adolescents. The distinction between the attraction of a hebephile, and someone adult-attracted, is that the hebephile's attraction begins at the onset of puberty, rather than its completion. Thus, this individual might typically describe a minor of age eleven or twelve as sexually attractive.

* Both hebephiles and pedophiles may be attracted to adults as well. It appears that the relative strength of the hebephilic or pedophilic attraction may vary against the attraction to adults, from exclusive attraction to minors, to an even component of minor-attraction and adult-attraction, to a minor component of attraction to youth.

* Pedophiles are more likely to express a lack of strong gender preference than hebephiles, who in turn are more likely to express a lack of strong gender preference than those who are attracted to adults.

A hypothesis on these phenomena:

Following the Swedish research that found important differences in how the brains of straight men and gay men responded to two compounds suspected of being pheromones, and other research that appears to support an imprinting model of psychosexual formation, it may be that the genetic pathway triggering imprinting is activated by aromatic MHC-types of compounds.

It is improbable that visual or audio imprinting is the exclusive mechanism determining psychosexual identity formation. We would see a wide diversity of imprinted non-human objects with a high strength of arousal response in the general population. It is also improbable that we inherit some cognitive neurological structure defining a visual morphological form for the species, and that this structure evolves congruently with the expression of morphological adaptation. However, it is clear that visual imprinting does occur in the formation of one's psychosexual identity and preference. It represents a series of visual snapshots taken over an extended period of time that are categorized by the mind to form idealized forms applied to morphological-forms-of-attraction. This accounts, for example, in the variable arousal that heterosexual men have to women with varying breast sizes.

It is also clear that audio imprinting occurs in psychosexual formation, and that other conceptual memories representing, for example, personality characteristics, are a component of the neurocognitive mechanism which interacts with physiological arousal.

In addition to males and females being distinguishable by scent, children smell differently than adults. Youth who have entered puberty smell different than children or adults. Youth who have completed the secondary sexual characterstic stage of puberty smell similar to adults.

It is entirely possible that psychosexual identity formation is morphologically determined congenitally and keyed to aromatic triggers, in two primary phases: formation of age of attraction, occurring in middle to late childhood, and formation of gender preference, occurring in late childhood or closely before the onset of the pubertal hormone rush. Some process facilitates receptivity to aromatic triggers to the neocortical structure, activated by action of the olfactory bulb, to begin imprinting of all available sensory data. The data collection (for example, a series of visual imprints of different adult women over a period of time) can be abstracted to form a range of preferences within a specific morphological form representing gender and developmental stage. This model avoids creating any circular feedback loop to account for the phenomena. It also offers error-correction for the imprinting process.

It makes intuitive sense (particularly given the strong possibility of selection for traits affecting socialization) that the human animal would imprint both, and separately, the morphological form of other humans and the gender characteristics within that morphological form. I believe the phenomena of those individuals sexually attracted to children or adolescents offers a promising path to understanding psychosexual identity formation.

Sincerely,

Kevin Brown