Scientific clap trap or something in it?

[lollylegs]

Stumbled upon these articles and popping them here for interest - clearly as a mumma to two boys I feel this is not true, but had not come across these theories before (perhaps for good reason?!)

Anyway - no offence intended but here goes ...

Beautiful People Have More Daughters | Psychology Today

Boy Or Girl? It's In The Father's Genes

[bunnywabbit]

Hmm... Again, no offence intended but Honey Boo-Boo and her family came to mind...

Also wondering what the theory would be to explain people who seem to have alternate baby genders (g/b/g/b)

The 2nd link you sent mentions the higher amount of boys born after the war. Wondering if it had to do with heightened testosterone or not (probably wrong...)

[atomic sagebrush]

Ok, I cringe whenever this topic comes up so please everyone accept my apologies in advance for having to write about it LOL.

There is something to the "beautiful people" thing BUT if you read the actual study vs. the awful articles that are written about it, there were 5 categories of attractiveness - beautiful, very attractive, attractive, slightly unattractive, and ugly (or something along those lines.) The study found that both beautiful and ugly people have more girls, and very attractive, attractive, and slightly unattractive people have boys.

It's def. true for me, I had plastic surgery when I was a teenager but until then I was as ugly as the south end of a north bound cow.

The evolutionary logic is as follows - beauty bestows an advantage on females so if you're beautiful to begin with it makes sense to have girls. But since (in nature) most females do get a chance to have offspring, it also makes sense if you're Honey Boo-Boo's mom, to have girls because even Honey Boo-Boo's mom found some guy who was willing to have offspring with her. If Honey Boo-Boo's mom had been a dude...well. Let's just say I know quite a few extremely unattractive dudes that have no offspring while some attractive guys I know have offspring with more than one lady. Only 40% of all the men who ever have lived, had offspring, whereas 80% of all females who ahve ever lived had offspring. It's easier for females to reproduce regardless of what they look like, than it is for males.

The whole thing is right in line with what Trivers Willard predicts - basically you have the gender offspring your body "thinks" has the best shot of surviving and reproducing.

The second study, the "it's in the father's genes" is a bullshit study that makes me mad whenever I see it. All they did was go back through old family trees and find, lo and behold, some families had more boys than they "should" and others have more girls than they "should". That's IT. Well, no kidding, I could have looked in my kids' bedrooms and told you that LOL.

The idea that it's in the genes is totally made up by the guy who did the study, no such gene has ever been found and I'll wager, will EVER be found. There are literally thousands of other things that could be affecting gender ratio, like the diets the families like or the way smoking sometimes runs in a family, and even if there is some genetic factor at play it's not straightforward like the researcher claims - it would be something like, families who are taller have more sons, or families where the women have the tendency for PCOS, or something along those lines.

NOT that men have more X or Y sperm, because that is biologically IMPOSSIBLE since men are made from XY cells and those cells divide to make half X and half Y sperm. It doesn't make sense evolutionarily-speaking, either. Becasue the family that could only make boys, the first time a war came along that killed off all or mostly males, oh-oh, genetic dead end. Plus, given that only 40% of the males who have ever lived, had offspring, those genes would be putting themselves at a huge disadvantage right from the start.

The sensible thing for genes to do is to conceive the gender of the baby that has the best shot of surviving to reproduce given the circumstances and cues from the environment. It would be a really dumb move for genes to hitch themselves permanently to a particular gender because it could be a huge disadvantage.