Boy Births on Husbands Side of Family

From what I've read on this site I understand that conceiving children of only one gender is not something that runs in families. I've seen Atomic write that there's no evolutionary benefit to a family line having a genetic predisposition for children of one gender over the other. The few studies I've seen appear to contradict each other about whether this type of predisposition exists, but one claimed a pattern of an inherited likelihood of sons that got passed down on the male side of the family for generations.

I'm bringing this up to ask Atomic (and anyone else who has thoughts) about the patterns she's observed. Have you noticed anything about the sway results for women married to men who have a long run of mostly boy families? Is there anything special recommended for a girl sway when the husband's family has been extremely male heavy? Perhaps certain aspects of the attempt itself should be emphasized, like lowering sperm count?

Yes, we have had many people who have hubbies that come from boy heavy families who got girls. I get this question constantly and I have an essay on it, not sure why I can't find it in the forums but it is here “We only make boys!” :: Natural Gender Selection, IVF/PGD Experts | genderdreaming.com Short version, it is utterly nonsensical that a gene would "tie" itself to one gender vs. the other, especially the male gender. Firstly because males are by far and away more likely to be killed off (and have been repeatedly) and secondly because men are at a huge reproductive disadvantage (of all the men who've ever lived, only 40% have surviving offspring today, vs. 80% of all females who've ever lived) Male offspring are a gamble that pays off big time, but no gene would then tie itself to a gender that is huge a gamble, because with a 50% less likely possibility of being handed down to future generations right from the start and the very real possibility of being wiped out every time Genghis Khan rolled into town and killed off all the dudes, that gene would not have survived to make it into your husband's family.

You can see when you extrapolate this to the other men who came from the grandfather's side of the family that this isn't true. My husband's grandfather was one of 3 boys who went on to father 5 boys and one girl (so everyone told us again and again we only make boys, bla bla bla) but the truth was, all the offspring of those 5 boys had B/G pairs (including my husband) and all those offspring, except us, also had either B/G or G/G. That is one hell of a selective gene that skipped over all the other people in two generations and then settled on us only.

I have read that study and it is nonsense. All they did was go back and look at old family records and find that some families had more sons or daughters than statistics will predict. Well, duh. We know that already. Then they jumped to the huge and ridiculous conclusion that this was a gene and then did some fancy math to "prove" this leaving everyone who actually understands the realities of genetics scratching their heads because it simply is not possible for a variety of reasons like the ones I already mentioned and also this complicated idea called "Fisher's principle" which proves unequivocably that if such a gene ever did spring up it would actually die out very fast because it would spread thru a population and make too many males, and then only people who made females would have a huge evolutionary advantage and the gender ratio would then equalize at about 50-50, which is where it is. They proved this through some even more complicated math to be true and the idea has stayed proven since the 30's (which is kind of a long time for a scientific idea to have held up to scrutiny.)

What makes the most sense from a gene's viewpoint is to stay flexible and not chain itself down to either gender, but especially not males. Size up the environment and send a signal to the body. And that is what we're already doing with swaying.

You could look at it that way, or you could look at it via the lens of statistics and realize that yeah while flipping a coin is 50-50 each time, if you see someone flipping a coin and they just got 10 heads in a row then smart money would be on tails. It's not that the odds change in any one coin flip, but that the odds of 11 heads, 12, 13, and so on become vanishingly small. So it may be "time" for a girl. Even if (and that is a BIG IF) somehow, some way, everyone in your family and/or neighborhood were 80% "set" for boys somehow, a girl would come eventually.

I will tell you the story of my family (not my husband's side but mine) first of all, my greatgrandmother had 6 daughters in a row and then 2 sons at the end, and then in the next generation, we had 7 boys and only one girl but then since that time we have added 4 more girls and another boy. So when you look at someone and say OMG 7 times that doesn't mean it is insurmountable or set in stone. It's really not.

Re whether your husband "caused" it or not - tread lightly even in the confines of your own mind. I have seen people who allowed GD to destroy their relationship or at the least undermine it, and while I can only see from afar and through our very limited lens of our interactions, your husband seems a decent and relatively understanding guy. So let's try to stay away from the blame game because I can assure you that it is no one's "fault" and it just is what it is. :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by atomic sagebrush

You could look at it that way, or you could look at it via the lens of statistics and realize that yeah while flipping a coin is 50-50 each time, if you see someone flipping a coin and they just got 10 heads in a row then smart money would be on tails. It's not that the odds change in any one coin flip, but that the odds of 11 heads, 12, 13, and so on become vanishingly small. So it may be "time" for a girl.

---

I once heard about the phenomenon "regression to the mean". If something is based in luck than extraordinary coincidence is likely to end on the next "play". Conversely, if something is based in skill (biology, social influence, environment, or some X factor we can't understand) than an extraordinary run is more likely to continue than it is to stop. The more extraordinary the run is, the more likely it is to continue.

----

One thing I've wondered about is if there may be something in our minds subconsciously keeping track of which sex the babies around us are, something that feeds that information back to the body for gender selection purposes. Do I sound crazy? Could that alone influence the gender that some people conceive? For example, if all the babies around you are boys than you become more likely to have a girl? Maybe it wouldn't work this way for everyone, but maybe some people's bodies are designed to keep a gender balance in this way...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by atomic sagebrush

Re whether your husband "caused" it or not - tread lightly even in the confines of your own mind. I have seen people who allowed GD to destroy their relationship or at the least undermine it, and while I can only see from afar and through our very limited lens of our interactions, your husband seems a decent and relatively understanding guy. So let's try to stay away from the blame game because I can assure you that it is no one's "fault" and it just is what it is. :)

---

Yes, good point. Thanks! He's a very good man, I love him very much. We are partners, we're in this together. :heart:

Well, yes, but no. The thing is that even streaks that are based in skill, end, because most things are like icebergs (not only swaying) where most of what matters is down below the surface and there are all these other things that we don't even see that are affecting results. The Chicago Bulls are NOT the NBA champs this year. The Yankees are not always winning the World Series. Meryl Streep did not always win the Oscar. People get old, players come and go, tastes in acting change, yadda yadda yadda.

Gender is not a coin flip per se. It's not just luck and it's not 50-50 for many of us. I agree, naturally I agree, and some of us are coming in more blue-friendly than pink, but it IS a coin flip in a way because you do not see a city of all men or a neighborhood of all men or a tribe or even a family of all men because even in the most boy-friendly of families, eventually a girl comes along. IT HAS TO because if it didn't, the entire human race would have died out a long time ago. :)