Well, it’s reasonable. If there’s any inherent trait that makes a given couple more likely to have one gender or the other, then that trait will naturally be more common among those who have two children of the same gender. On the other hand, I don’t know of any mechanism that would make a third child more likely to “balance” the genders.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking as well. The sperm is what determines the gender of the child; if a man has more of one than the other, then it stands to reason that the odds are good that all the children will be of that gender.
Was that back when they were turning them into deodorant for teenage boys?
I think I’ve heard that the pH of the woman’s reproductive tract can also make a difference in which sperm are more likely to reach the egg. And there might also be something that causes early spontaneous abortion (which usually isn’t even noticed) to be more likely for one gender or the other. So any propensity, if it exists, could be due to either or both parents.
It would be interesting to see if it applies to births with other parents to see which of the original parents have the propensity or if it is couple linked.
So Andy and Ann have two boys. Would either be more likely to have a boy with different partners.
Way smaller set to get good statistics on, though. I mean, there are enough people in the world that it’s still a large data set, but it’s still a lot to wade through.
This keeps coming up. This would be an interesting random fact if it were actually a fact, but it isn’t.
I’d heard that the more children of one sex you have, the more likely you are to have the same sex the next time. I haven’t heard of two, but of larger numbers.
As an anecdote, two generations back our family has a couple who had eight boys and then two girls. So over the decades circumstances can change.
Or they were flipping an unfair coin, but sometimes even a loaded coin gets lucky and goes the “wrong” way.
US Census has all they data you’d need. Might make a slightly trick bit of programming, but with a couple of passes the computers could tell you the sex ratio between any desired target sets over a hundred years. They could even adjust and sort by ethnicity, urban/rural, whatever. Just have to find a way to get them to run that for us.
Heh, yup. Shouldn’t be an issue.
I’ve tried a number of Google searches but can’t quite come up with the right phrasing.
Ohhhh, you’re so close. The correct answer is, of course, the clouded leopard.
I’ve learned that entering ‘askew’ into Google summons a page that is itself askew.
I’m curious to know whether other similarly themed pages exist.
(Blurred, wobbling, and upside down have been tested and found wanting.)
The one that comes to mind is googling “do a barrel roll”.
Which brought up this article (updated in 2021).
Here’s a comprehensive list. Some of these are time sensitive (i.e. they only work on/around certain dates), and some of them are no longer functioning:
“drop bear” (then click the dangling sign) is a pretty good one.
“Oh, come on Ann. Sure, I got your sister pregnant, but it was an experiment!”
I remember reading years ago that if you went to Google Maps and asked for walking directions to Mordor, it would come back with “One does not simply walk into Mordor!”
There also used to be another easter egg: if you asked for a route from somewhere in Europe to the USA, it gave you road directions up to the European Atlantic coast, with the next instruction: “swim 3000 km through the Atlantic Ocean westwards”.
In a way though, this is a good thing. The status of the giraffes has not changed; our view of how crucial protecting individual populations has.