"Boys Are Always Born In Our Family." We Will Tell You What Is Wrong With This Phrase And Why

"Boys are always born in our family." We will tell you what is wrong with this phrase and why

There is an opinion that in some families there is a predisposition to the birth of predominantly boys or predominantly girls. A new study that looked at data on millions of Swedes starting in 1932 found that the sex of children is determined entirely by chance.

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There is an opinion that in some families there is a predisposition to the birth of predominantly boys or predominantly girls. A new study that looked at data on millions of Swedes starting in 1932 found that the sex of children is determined entirely by chance. The conclusions of the scientific work are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Previously, scientists have expressed many assumptions about the possible predisposition to have children of the same sex. For example, they had hypotheses that such an ability is inherited from the paternal line (specific genes could not be found), that tall parents more often have boys, and beautiful ones - girls.

“We found that humans do not have an innate tendency to produce offspring of one sex or the other. The gender of children is determined completely randomly. If you have a lot of girls or boys in your family, it’s just a fluke,”Brendan Zietsch of the University of Queensland, lead author of the study, told CNN.

The scientists used Swedish birth registers. They tested whether siblings (siblings) tended to produce offspring of the same sex. They used statistical analysis to find out if there are congenital characteristics of the parents that affect the likelihood of having a boy or girl.

“Since siblings have a 50% match of genes, we would see a connection between the sexes of their children, if there was a genetic predisposition to the sex of the children. But the siblings had no tendency to bear children of the same sex. The likelihood that a girl, for example, would appear was not related to whether the other sibling had a boy or a girl,”said Zeich.

Scientists have processed a huge amount of information - data on 4.7 million births, so they are confident in their conclusions.