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Study Explains Why Women Miscarry More Males During Tough Times
sciencehabit writes In times of trouble, multiple studies have shown, more girls are born than boys. No one knows why, but men need not worry about being overrun by women. An analysis of old church records in Finland has revealed that the boys that are born in stressful times survive better than those born during less challenging periods. The work helps explain why women may have evolved a tendency to abort certain males and could lead to a better understanding of miscarriages.
The selfish gene wins.
Maybe it needs global climate change for the next step...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
...and one of the other things it found was that pregnant women who found out their loved ones were killed during the Winter War and Continuation War were more likely to have children who exhibited certain psychological conditions and behavioral pathologies.
Times of stress/trouble usually mean a loss of population. The arithmetic's simple: one woman can bear one child every 9 months to a year, while one man can sire multiple children in that same time. That means that adding female offspring at the expense of male will make it easier to recover the population loss. And of course sacrificing the least resilient male offspring favors the ones that'll survive the longest and sire the most children. The fun question is how the mechanisms that've evolved to make this happen actually work. Figuring that out's going to keep researchers occupied for the next century or two.
Probably because one male can impregnate lots of females, and in times of trouble you want more babies to up the survival ratio.
Fatherless children have more problems anyway - was this allowed for?
"Cats like plain crisps"
Be forewarned, this message ain't gonna be Politically Correct
Babies born under hard times don't grown up to be homosexuals
If we are to survey the demography of various countries there is a clear pattern ... that countries with larger percentage of homosexuals, bisexuals, trans-sexuals, and all that (male or female) tend to be those that are relatively more peaceful, with more plentiful offerings of food, and all that
Not to say that there is an absolute zero percentage of baby born during hard times that grow up to be homosexual ... there are always the exception
Take China, for examples ... during the warring / turbulent years (since the late 1800's to the late 1960's) percentage of Chinese homosexuals were very low
Now? With relative wealth and comfort, new generations that were born into kinder and gentler surroundings are experiencing an increase of the homosexual population
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Someone, somehow, is going to find a way to drag this into the abortion debate. Should be entertaining.
are those women that you speak of?
I've always looked at eveloution as an observation about statistics, not a method or even a specific process.
Simply put those things with an "advantage" tend to have more offspring and if the advantage can be passed down to descendants it is. Where a lot of discussion seems to be generated is around "what is an advantage". I'd argue that anything that tends to improve the chances of having offspring with the characteristic. I know its circular but it does address the fact that what was an advantage may no longer be an advantage.
It also explains why men can't read women's minds. Any mail who has the "gene" developes the ability at some point, as soon as the start reading a female mind their head explodes due to the massive overload ( think car battery hooked into the LHC ;-). Hence the gene gets selected out of the gen pool any time it devlopes.
Parents with psychological trauma cause more trauma in their children. Shock.
He goes after the chicken and egg problem. Most people think of the egg as chicken's way of making a new chicken. But it is equally plausible, the chicken is merely the egg's way of making a new egg. We think we use genes to more copies of ourselves. Can we consider the genes are making more copies of themselves using us, the humans as a species, as mere replicating machine or incubator?
The question he poses is, "Are genes our selfish way of making more copies of ourselves? Or we are merely replicating machines under the control of the selfish genes?". He takes half the book to make people understand the question. Then the other half to prove, indeed the genes are in control and we are mere replicators. Some of the genes we have in our bodies have copies living in other species, other genera. Some of them are 100 million years old. The genes as a whole are the selfish ones vis a vis the organisms as a whole. They survive. We don't. We as individuals, we as species, we as genus are dispensable. The genes, as a whole, are selfish compared to the animal bodies they live in. The Selfish Gene. Not gene for selfishness.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I've read that from a biological point of view, there's kind of a war between a woman's body and a fertilized egg, where the egg basically does everything it can to burrow in and hijack her body, and the woman's body does everything it can to thwart it. (This is why so many fertilized eggs don't actually implant, or are miscarried very early). It makes sense if you think about it- pregnancy and childbearing (and rearing) are risky and a huge drain on the individual woman- The effect this has is that only the most viable conceptions make it to the next stage. One imagines that in times of stress and hardship, the body is even less receptive to potential pregnancies. As male zygotes tend to be slightly less hardy even in times of no stress, it doesn't seem surprising that under even harsher circumstances, fewer xy's make the cut.
I misread this as "Study explains why women miscarry more *than* males during tough times."
I've always wondered about this, but alas, this answered a different question.
This study "explains" nothing.
Such a pattern would provide an evolutionary explanation for such culling. It “might be adaptive,” Lee says.
An "evolutionary explanation" isn't an explanation. WHY do more male fetuses die than female during stressful situations? What is the actual mechanism causing this to happen? The answer to that is an "explanation". Further, given the relatively long time frames involved in human reproduction, how would this trait have evolved to cover such a large percentage of the population when it is only needed during stressful situations?
Maybe males require more resources from the mother as a fetus, or maybe the difference in hormones is the tipping point that causes more male fetuses to die in these situations. But just because it appears to be beneficial in some way in the vast scheme of things does not mean that it exists because it is beneficial evolutionary or was selected in some way.
Saying "we found it is beneficial for less male fetuses to be born during stressful situations" does not mean "less males are born because it is beneficial during stressful situations".
Better known as 318230.
Yes. The data was showing that a traumatic emotional event for a pregnant mother was literally causing neurological effects in the developing fetus.
your post and all the other posts here assume that there is some means for the mother deer to tell if she has a weakling in the oven or not, and then also has means to choose to miscarry weaklings.
Here's a less complicated hypothesis that has the same effect: Human's and chimps share >99% of their DNA. But an X and a Y chromosome are largely different. A human male baby is more similar to a male chimp than to his own mother. Whereas a human female baby is more simillar to her mother than a female chimp.
there is thus a much stronger possibility of a male fetus having a negative immune reaction to antigens from the mother. Normally a healthy mother and a healthy fetus can tolerate some mismatch. If the male is more robust or perhaps simply more developed early in the development process then the probability of tolerating the mismatch is higher than for a less developed/less robust fetus.
This is a simpler and more intrnsic mechanism that should be common across mammals.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
YouTube: MinuteEarth - http://youtu.be/3IaYhG11ckA?li...
Reminds me of the debunked maternal impression theories. Clearly that mechanism was wrong. It would be deeply ironic if there was actually some element of validity.
Similarly, a study of World War II mothers in Denmark, I believe, found that not just their children, but their grandchildren had lower birth weights. This was attributed to the famine caused by the war (i.e., the invading soldiers had plenty to eat, the local citizens, not so much), but it was surprising that the effects were also felt in the next generation. Things that you wouldn't think have a connection to the fetus really can, sometimes even for multiple generations.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
In women, one of the X chromosomes is turned off, because men and women are not that different. If a women had two active X chromosomes she's look more different from men than a chimp does. You even explained why.
As much as everyone wants we are not going back to concubines. One life, one wife. People will get married or have children for all sorts of reasons. There's no use in treating this like the weather channel and make silly predictions. The main concern is to make a person's sex or sexual identify valued because no matter how you look at it we only have one chance with this planet. I'm sick of the new breed of "science" zealots that are so determined to be the first to call other people stupid. That's not science.
Are they just wasting time talking about tangental bullshit? Or are there no threads available where they could do the typical establishment shilling and shitpisting? (Taco Cowboy, your tail is showing.)
Again, what did I write to make you hate me so much that you've suggested I kill myself three times?
Maybe you're confusing me with somebody else? For instance:
What did I write to make you accuse me of being a paid oil troll?
The trolls are coming to me now? How excitibg. You flooded that thread with pagee of shaggy dog story filler nonsense, and then acted as if you never did anything of the sort. Somewhat robotic
Just quote whatever I said that made you hate me so much that you've suggested I kill myself three times. Start at the beginning of the thread and make sure you're quoting things I actually wrote, rather than quotes from someone else. Then explain why these words I wrote (rather than quotes from someone else) made you hate me so much that you've suggested I kill myself three times.
If anyone reading this is curious what a troll looks like, find thia dude's "energy conservation" post in that thread. And i'll write your next comment for you to save you from having to consult your one-line script yet again: "y u ask me kill myslef"
Do you mean this post where I explained that Jane Q. Public's climate science denial violates conservation of energy? Again, why did that prompt you to accuse me of being a paid oil troll?
Why would a paid oil troll defend mainstream climate science? This is one reason why I think you might be mistaking me for someone else. Why would the oil industry pay me to debunk the same baseless accusations they're helping to spread?
Another reason I think you might be mistaking me for someone else is that in that post I quoted Jane Q. Public to respond to his baseless accusation: