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More daughters than sons...
Azul Kho
I think there is a 'natural selection' reason for this....
Where nutrition levels are low, more females survive as the X chromasome 'outperforms' the Y. This has enabled the survival of the human species. Why should this be? The answer is 'genetic-advantage'.
Say for example, one man has 4 wives. Each wife has the potential to produce one healthy live baby per year approximately .... However, the man has the potential to produce 4 healthy live babies per year approximately, with these wives......
So, in very ancient times of the hunter-gatherer (before humans became farmers) there was unpredictable food supply. The human population needed a higher number of females than males, or it would have died out, because the female is the 'limiting-factor' reproductively speaking.
In modern Western societies where nutrition is good, an equal number of male and female babies are born, and survive, as there appears to be no 'genetic advantage' to having more males than females in a population.
In recent history, when territory was in short supply (a physical disadvantage) and had to be constantly defended, societies preferred sons to daughters. During these times (e.g. 5,000 years ago), the humans compensated for this, by investing in sons (feeding them better to make them strong so they could fight the invaders better), and sometimes killing off their daughters......
[Edited by Mourad_A on 25th November 2004 at 23:34]
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