Does your husband only have brothers (discussion of Gellatly's work) ?

Is anyone familiar with this study

http://www.collective-action.info/si...Sex-Ratios.pdf

To put it in simple English, after studying 1000 families, Gellatly came to the conclusion that men with brothers are more likely to have sons and men with sisters are more likely to have daughters. 20% of men in our population have a sex-selecting bias. I have often found this to be true with my own friends and family. I have a family members whose husband has 3 brothers (and grandfather has 4 brothers) who went on to have 5 boys and 1 girl.

"A test for heritability of the sex ratio in human
genealogical data is reported here, with the finding that
there is significant heritability of the parental sex ratio by
male, but not female offspring."

It just makes me wonder for those whose husbands have all brothers if their pink sway is a bit more of an uphill climb?

Why has this post been moderated???

yes I am familiar with it and happy to reply but it says it's a moderated post and I don't want to waste time if it's going to be deleted???

Well, I'll go ahead and answer it even though it says "moderated".

Long story short, this is a misleading study and the way it was reported on in the media is even more so (suggesting that there is a gene involved, when no such gene has been found).

What the study found was that yes, there are some families that seem to be more boy or girl heavy than the 50-50 expectation would have us believe. WELL DUH. That could be down to lots of different things - llifestyle, social status, other genetic factors such as height or muscle mass, and to jump to the rather shocking and utterly unproven conclusion that this is down to genes, is silly and not supported by the facts.

It makes the most evolutionary sense for people to be able to make both boys and girls based on cues from the environment about which gender has the best odds of survival to pass down genes to future generations. If there were some gene that made people more likely to have sons, firstly it puts those families at a huge genetic disadvantage right at the start because of all the men who ever existed, only 40% have surviving descendants whereas 80% of all the women who have ever existed have surviving descendants. And secondly, whenever there was a war or other conflict where predominantly males were killed which has happend again and again across time, people who had all their "eggs in one basket" and had only sons, could easily have had their entire genetic contribution wiped out in one fell swoop. Evolution does not favor genes that put you at a 50% disadvantage from the start and then run the risk of being total dead ends at any time.

So just to share our family history, my husband's grandpa was one of three sons and those three sons did happen to go onto have quite a lot of sons. But DH's grandpa (had 5 boys, 4 lived, and then one girl), his kids all had 50-50 boys and girls. And then those kids (my husband's generation) all had 50-50 boys and girls. They all had pigeon pairs and my husband has a little sister, no brothers whatsoever. Except us, who had 4 boys and then one girl. So that would be one hell of a selective gene, that affected two generations, then skipped two generations, only to settle on just us, yk? But if a researcher looked at this family and counted up B vs. G, it may very well be the case that on paper it appeared to be more boy heavy than girl heavy (and it is, in terms of numbers alone) but that doesn't mean that there was any such gene involved.