Specific gene found in the human DNA responsible for the male/female ratio in a population

source: NewCastle University

Conclusion:

“The gene that is passed on from both parents, which causes some men to have more sons and some to have more daughters, may explain why we see the number of men and women roughly balanced in a population. If there are too many males in the population, for example, females will more easily find a mate, so men who have more daughters will pass on more of their genes, causing more females to be born in later generations,” says Newcastle University researcher Mr Gellatly.

Interesting:

In many of the countries that fought in the World Wars, there was a sudden increase in the number of boys born afterwards. The year after World War I ended, an extra two boys were born for every 100 girls in the UK, compared to the year before the war started. The gene, which Mr Gellatly has described in his research, could explain why this happened.

As the odds were in favour of men with more sons seeing a son return from the war, those sons were more likely to father boys themselves because they inherited that tendency from their fathers. In contrast, men with more daughters may have lost their only sons in the war and those sons would have been more likely to father girls. This would explain why the men that survived the war were more likely to have male children, which resulted in the boy-baby boom.

The last part is interesting because this would suggest that the human species is designed to withstand difficulties by naturally favoring one of the sexes to increase survival.



Copyrights:
Academic paper: Trends in Population Sex Ratios May be Explained by Changes in the Frequencies of Polymorphic Alleles of a Sex Ratio Gene. Corry Gellatly.

Published in: Evolutionary Biology, DOI 10.1007/s11692-008-9046-3

Sun, Dec 14, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: dna, human population, genes

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