Following the excitement of seeing Karin from Cafe Bebe’s gorgeous new bundle of joy on twitter tonight, it got m thinking to myself that there seems to have been lots of boys born this year. In fact I would even go as far as to say that there seems to have been a bit of a baby boy boom, if twitter is anything to go on. Obviously I had one myself back at the end of March but it just feels like everyone I have congratulated this year has been on the birth of their baby boy.
So I sent out a little tweet
@JennyPaulinJenny Paulin
ok quick poll please – if you or anyone you know had a baby this year what was their sex? thanks xx
Within minutes I received about 35 replies (thank you to everyone who did) and the results seem to back up my baby boy boom
Boys = 39
Girls = 23
Ok so obviously that was only a quick survey and its not scientific or absolute proof that there have been more male births than female ones this year. However, it does at least back up what I have been thinking and proved that I had been paying attention on twitter!!
Anyway, it got me wondering if there were reasons why more boys could be born that girls so I started searching good old google for any answers.
War has been attributed to a baby boom in the past and indeed it evokes a strange pattern that results in an increase in boys being born. The exact cause of this baby boy bloom has long since baffled scientist and philophsophers and suggestions have varied from the
coital – soldiers returning home have more sex and are more likely to impregnate a woman at the time in
her cycle when boys tend to be made
theological – some kind of divine intervention where men lost on the battle ground need to be replaced
he couldn’t believe his luck!!! |
A curious shift occurs during and right after a war: more boys tend to be born than girls. It’s been documented for decades in many nations, especially during long conflicts with many troops deployed. The cause of this boy boom has long flummoxed thinkers and scientists. Ideas have veered from the theological—a divine call for new men to replace those lost in battle—to the coital—returning soldiers have lots of sex, and so will be more likely to fertilize at a time in their ladies’ cycle that’s ripe for making boy babies. A new study in the journal Evolutionary Biology rejects them all. Instead, it pins the “returning soldier effect” on a gene expressed by men only. It also shows how researching your family tree can help you place bets on the sex of your next kid.
“I wasn’t satisfied with the explanation that it was due to couples having more sex,” says Newcastle University’s Corry Gellatly, who did the work as part of his Ph.D. thesis. Gellatly was curious about studies of male shrimps, marine worms, and yes—human males—that showed that their likelihood of producing male offspring seemed to mimic that of their parents. In other words, males who have more brothers than sisters would in turn produce more sons than daughters. Thinking this may be the root of the wartime peaks, Gellatly sought to investigate the trend on a large scale. He sifted through 927 North American and European family trees posted on an online database by both amateur and professional genealogists, and tallied the sex ratios of siblings for each generation.
“The family tree study showed that whether you’re likely to have a boy or a girl is inherited,” says Gellatly. “We now know that men are more likely to have sons if they have more brothers but are more likely to have daughters if they have more sisters.” Women, however, did not have the same tendency.
Gellatly argues that a gene—which is carried by both men and women but only active in men—influences what proportion of a man’s sperm carry the X chromosome and how many carry the Y. The sperm’s X or Y status determines the sex of the baby upon meeting the egg, which only carries the X chromosome. More Y sperm=more XY (male) babies.
Della
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