Solving the Gender Mystery

The next time you go to a gender reveal, this may give you the leg up on which color cupcake to eat. Or maybe you’ll go to great lengths to try to swing the odds in your favor. Truth is, a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to figure this puzzle out. 

I formerly thought that when a tendency to produce the two sexes in equal numbers was advantageous to the species, it would follow from natural selection, but I now see that the whole problem is so intricate that it is safer to leave its solution for the future.

Charles Darwin

Well, what do we know about this strange phenomenon?

  • Billionaires have more sons. 
  • After wars, many more sons are born.
  • More men are born in China. Way more. To the point where they are taking drastic measures to equalize their gender birth ratios.
  • Famine causes a drop in male birth.
  • Older parents are more likely to have daughters.
  • If you have brothers, you are more likely to have boys. If you have sisters, you are more likely to have girls.

So can we neatly package all this into one great theory? Eh…kinda. We know that the father contributes [according to the genetic model] the X or Y chromosome, meaning he would determine the eventual sex of the baby. In looking at the strange facts above, the conditions with less stress produce more boys. So the more you reduce stress, the better chance you have of having a boy.

Think about it.

A famine raises stress. After a war, people are at peace. Billionaires have an unusual amount of comfort in their lives. The diet and lifestyle of those in China and eastern Asia is very different than most of the rest of the world.

Older parents would parallel our proof on Down Syndrome. As parents grow older, they have greater brain entropy, which increases their odds in having a girl.

If you have brothers, you’ll have boys. This is a little trickier to explain. But in short, you’d inherit the mindset from your father. It sounds like science fiction, but we already say that anxiety or depression can run in families. I’m not arguing with that. [I’m arguing that these people were not plagued to be unhappy or anxious from the beginning. And that their misery is reversible.]

Short answer: higher brain entropy [in dads] makes more girls. Don’t misread. It’s not only girls. It just tips the scales in your favor. Billionaires have boys 65% of the time. Give me those odds in blackjack and I’d play all day long. 

Here’s my take on itThe desired result would typically favor boys. To carry on the family name, to continue the dynasty…whatever. The more stress that is introduced to the lives of the parents, the more unstable that household becomes. By having the more unstable families produce more girls, you actually make the world a better place. If the most stressed parents produced the same amount of boys, we’d naturally trend to a more and more unstable environment for our kids. Men were designed to be the leaders of the households, and those closer to their ground states are more likely to have boys. 

Additionally, the people with the most stress in their lives [furthest from their ground state] may not be able to get pregnant at all. It will take us to a human evolution mechanism that we will explore later. 

Sources:

  1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19435018/
  2. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201104/why-are-older-parents-more-likely-have-daughters%3Famp
  3. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/smoking-couples-more-likely-to-conceive-a-girl-5362024.html%3Famp
  4. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/strong-woman-chances-are-youll-have-a-boy-1136674.html%3Famp
  5. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/8830036/Stressed-women-more-likely-to-have-baby-girls.html
  6. https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2008-12-boy-girl-father-genes.amp
  7. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/its-a-boy-the-science-of-gender-selection-814626.html
  8. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161014-why-billionaires-have-more-sons
  9. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/02/chinas-great-gender-crisis
  10. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322368.php
  11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_selection
  12. https://www.google.com/amp/www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/24/the-odds-that-you-will-give-birth-to-a-boy-or-girl-depend-on-where-in-the-world-you-live/%3Famp%3D1
  13. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081211121835.htm
  14. http://theconversation.com/mondays-medical-myth-you-can-control-the-sex-of-your-baby-12896
  15. http://discovermagazine.com/2013/nov/08-sex-ratios.