8 ms·

Fascinating! To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter after several sons, but sometimes the process "fails" and

Fascinating! To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter after several sons, but sometimes the process "fails" and produces an effeminate male instead - a gay son. Alternatively, some kind of meta-level mechanism to reduce competition over women in the community, ultimately improving its collective health and well-being.

danbolt 6y ago
Given the number of comfortably-masculine gay men I've known, I have a feeling the womb isn't necessarily trying to ensure it eventually creates a Disney Princess. It feels a bit far-fetched, to be honest.
- golemiprague 6y ago
  I have never met a gay men who I could say is a masculine in the same way straight men are. There is always something a bit off even in the most straight passing gays. So my anecdote cancels yours and the theory stands.
mc32 6y ago
That... seems unlikely. That implies a woman's reproductive system knows and remembers or at least keeps a tallies of the sex of the offspring it has produced...
- hansvm 6y ago
  Or that exposure to a fetus for prolonged periods of time has a measurable effect. You can reliably tell the sex of a fetus with a mother's blood test a couple months after conception. I still think it's a bit unlikely that there's a meaningful connection to be had there, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if I were proven wrong.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
  Why couldn't it? There's a lot of hormones (and other things) involved in pregnancy, right? Wouldn't some of these cause lasting effects?
- psychometry 6y ago
  It's extremely likely. This is literally what epigenetics is all about (among other things).
- the_af 6y ago
  The article in Wikipedia seems to imply the mother's womb does "remember" prior pregnancies; after all, what are antibodies and the immune response if not a form of memory? From Wikipedia: > The mechanism is thought to be a maternal immune response to male fetuses, whereby antibodies neutralize male Y-proteins thought to play a role in sexual differentiation during development. The article states even interrupted pregnancies are thought to generate this response.
  - mc32 6y ago
    This goes beyond that an implies "counting" and that the reproductive system in addition wants to achieve an output balance in a non random manner. That said, it would be very interesting if the body did actually count and take measures to keep things even.
    - the_af 6y ago
      In what sense does this go beyond? Generating antibodies or an immune response is a form of "remembering". It's how your body "remembers" past invading viruses and "learns" how to fight them. The reproductive system doesn't "want" anything any more than your immune system "wants" to fight viruses and invading pathogens. Why couldn't a similar mechanism be at play here?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > That implies a woman's reproductive system knows and remembers or at least keeps a tallies of the sex of the offspring it has produced... It doesn't require a tally, it just requires that the body stores something that correlates with number and gender of previous children. Like, say, indefinitely retaining genetic material from each of them. Which, you know, mother's bodies do: “Not only fetal cells, but also fragments of fetal DNA can be present in the maternal circulation indefinitely after pregnancy. This finding has practical implications for non-invasive prenatal diagnoses based on maternal blood, and may be considered for possible pathophysiological correlations.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12107445/#:~:text=Not%20only%20fetal%20cells%2C%20but,considered%20for%20possible%20pathophysiological%20correlations https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12107445/#:~:text=Not%20only....
- 4b11b4 6y ago
  Purely speculative: but I wouldn't be surprised if this level of intelligence were going on in life. The seeds of a plant do remember their previous growing environment.
wyldfire 6y ago
It seems more likely for it to be an emergent property of children serving as hunter/gatherer resources but not competing for procreation. It is either a novel mutation or something that is selected for.
- Zardoz84 6y ago
  > It is either a novel mutation or something that is selected for. You know that homosexuality it's very know to happen on many animal species ? It's not a "novel mutation"
  - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    The mutation may not be, but perhaps the selection for it is. Few species hunt and gather.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Evolutionary psychology is always such a stretch, but I had never considered that possibility before. If there are a lot of extra males, if all were heterosexual there could be destructive competition over female mates. So asexual/homosexual/etc may become selected for if a disproportionate number of males were in a community (still community resources as you say but not destructively competing for mates).
jabberwcky 6y ago
> effeminate male > gay son This is a dangerous stereotype that is equally harmful to people of any sexuality, I'd encourage you to correct it. Most of the gay folk I know personally tend towards the athletic end of the spectrum
- spodek 6y ago
  Is there some law of the internet that when someone corrects someone, they often commit the error they're pointing out? Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic?
  - jabberwcky 6y ago
    The inverse of effeminate by definition is butch, I purposefully avoided using it as it invokes yet more popular and inaccurate gay stereotypes that in no way capture the folk I was describing
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    > Is there some law of the internet that when someone corrects someone, they often commit the error they're pointing out? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
  - filoleg 6y ago
    >Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic? Agreed, the terminology used by the parent comment was a bit strange, but I got the idea of what they meant. They were talking about an effeminate skinny type of a male compared to a very masculine athletic "macho man"-looking type. In terms of celebrities and purely their appearances, think of young David Bowie vs. Arnold Swarzenegger. I guess the parent comment simply conflated athleticism with masculinity, but that's just an aspect of it, and not all kinds of athleticism are inherently "masculine" (think yoga or acrobatics or figure skating).
- tofery 6y ago
aspaceman 6y ago
Comments like these are so hilariously idiotic. Props for making me guffaw out loud. “A meta level mechanism to reduce competition in the community” what the fuck is this saying. Why would gay men reduce competition? In a society that doesn’t accept homosexuality, they would still be with women. In a society that does, why would the woman’s body find it any more favorable to produce. This kind of navel gazing about evolution really pisses me off. Never feels reasoned in the slightest but works great on so called “rational” people. Just vaguely allude to evolution. Also yeah, gay doesn’t mean effeminate. Some gay men are more effeminate. This is usually social. It’s actually pretty funny you assume that. Why would gay men become more effeminate? Do you think the woman’s body sends lady cooties at the baby once they have too many? Like magic lady fairy dust that makes you girly and gay? Why would wanting to suck dick mean I’m girly? Or feminine? Some gay guys will act girly and feminine _because_ they want to suck dick and that’s one way to do it. Similarly, why is wanting to fuck another mans ass girly and feminine? Would love to hear your answers to these questions.
- tofery 6y ago
  >Why would gay men become more effeminate? Well, if we take "effeminate" to mean "Exhibiting behaviour or mannerisms considered typical of a female" [1], then wanting to have sex with men, something straight females (the majority of females) and gay males have in common, is effeminate. So I'd say it's not so ridiculous to think that gay men are typically more effeminate. 1: From https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/effeminate#Adjective https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/effeminate#Adjective, definition 1, which is also what I interpreted the word to mean
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  You’ve made valid points cogently, and asked relevant questions that could be answered using scientific methods, but you’re getting downvoted, which is a polemic response. Why?
  - tofery 6y ago
    Not sure, but perhaps statements like "Comments like these are so hilariously idiotic. Props for making me guffaw out loud." are why people downvote. Personally I think that OP contributed to the conversation so I wouldn't have downvoted (if I could), but maybe some people did because of that.
scythe 6y ago
>To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter But if that were true, it must succeed sometimes. Evolution doesn't select for things that don't work. We should see an equally strong correlation with sex of offspring and birth order. We don't. One possibility is that the effect reduces the harmful effects of sibling rivalry by making second sons more empathetic. However, this is basically a random guess — there are so many variables in biology that it could be a million other things instead.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > But if that were true, it must succeed sometimes. We should see an equally strong correlation with sex of offspring and birth order. There is a correlation in the opposite direction between sex and birth order, but that could be explained with a slight variation on the upthread hypothesis; instead of trying to bend things toward girls and sometimes failing with an effeminate boy, one could speculate that it is “trying” to bend things toward boys and sometimes succeeds incompletely, resulting in an effeminate boy. (“Trying" in this case meaning nothing having to do with intentionality, but merely the effect of the process for which it was selected.)
- watwut 6y ago
  > possibility is that the effect reduces the harmful effects of sibling rivalry by making second sons more empathetic. Is there any reason to believe that gay men are more empathetic?
  - scythe 6y ago
    The question is not whether they are more empathetic overall, but whether they are more empathetic towards similarly aged men, and when considering that specific object of empathy, I would imagine there is a strong correlation.
Zardoz84 6y ago
> Fascinating! To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter after several sons, but sometimes the process "fails" and produces an effeminate male instead - a gay son. You know that a homosexual not are "effeminate males" ? Man, try to revise these stereotype that you have.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  I'm not sure the parent comment meant effeminate in demeanor. There is some indication that the brains of homosexual men have some similarities to female brains[1]. The GP's speculation doesn't need to rely on "stereotypes" to describe the homosexual male brain as closer to (heterosexual) female than the heterosexual male brain. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/study-says-brains-of-gay/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/study-says-brains...
  - billyruffian 6y ago
    'Effeminate' is an adjective of demeanor.
    - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
      lol @ all these comments immediately jumping to stereotypes. My English is great but it's not my first language. What's the right word here? Feminine? "More female in brain structure"?
      - ben_w 6y ago
        I’d say there is no “right word” at the moment, and the topic is a euphemism treadmill because, as with so many other disenfranchised groups, social norms have not yet universally settled onto “that’s fine, no seriously it’s fine”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      That's fair. I suppose I just find it plausible that the parent commenter made a minor misnomer between feminine and effeminate, instead of jumping to conclusions about stereotyping. But I know I usually have a terminal case of being too charitable, so maybe this is just a blind spot for me. Edit: apparently my assumption was correct, per the commenter in question elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26076929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26076929
simonh 6y ago
The only way to 'nudge' the chances of a girl baby is to select the sperm based on which sex genes they carry. Any hormonal or such changes induced in the fetus down the line is too late to have any effect on genetic gender.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  Today I learned that human sex is determined at sperm production! Didn't know that, thanks.
  - KMag 6y ago
    Also, the Y chromosome has slightly lower mass, and so the male sperm swim slightly faster. I would suspect, though I haven't seen any studies, that some fertility treatment steps unintentionally have mass-sorting properties similar to the barrier diffusion Uranium enrichment technique used in the Manhattan Project.
estaseuropano 6y ago
That doesn't seem to make any sense as gender is determined by the sperm cell reaching the egg. Unless gay-dna sperm are somehow faster...
dang 6y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26070754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26070754.

danbolt 6y ago

Given the number of comfortably-masculine gay men I've known, I have a feeling the womb isn't necessarily trying to ensure it eventually creates a Disney Princess. It feels a bit far-fetched, to be honest.

golemiprague 6y ago
I have never met a gay men who I could say is a masculine in the same way straight men are. There is always something a bit off even in the most straight passing gays. So my anecdote cancels yours and the theory stands.

mc32 6y ago

That... seems unlikely. That implies a woman's reproductive system knows and remembers or at least keeps a tallies of the sex of the offspring it has produced...

hansvm 6y ago
Or that exposure to a fetus for prolonged periods of time has a measurable effect. You can reliably tell the sex of a fetus with a mother's blood test a couple months after conception. I still think it's a bit unlikely that there's a meaningful connection to be had there, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if I were proven wrong.
onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
Why couldn't it? There's a lot of hormones (and other things) involved in pregnancy, right? Wouldn't some of these cause lasting effects?
psychometry 6y ago
It's extremely likely. This is literally what epigenetics is all about (among other things).
the_af 6y ago
The article in Wikipedia seems to imply the mother's womb does "remember" prior pregnancies; after all, what are antibodies and the immune response if not a form of memory? From Wikipedia: > The mechanism is thought to be a maternal immune response to male fetuses, whereby antibodies neutralize male Y-proteins thought to play a role in sexual differentiation during development. The article states even interrupted pregnancies are thought to generate this response.
- mc32 6y ago
  This goes beyond that an implies "counting" and that the reproductive system in addition wants to achieve an output balance in a non random manner. That said, it would be very interesting if the body did actually count and take measures to keep things even.
  - the_af 6y ago
    In what sense does this go beyond? Generating antibodies or an immune response is a form of "remembering". It's how your body "remembers" past invading viruses and "learns" how to fight them. The reproductive system doesn't "want" anything any more than your immune system "wants" to fight viruses and invading pathogens. Why couldn't a similar mechanism be at play here?
dragonwriter 6y ago
> That implies a woman's reproductive system knows and remembers or at least keeps a tallies of the sex of the offspring it has produced... It doesn't require a tally, it just requires that the body stores something that correlates with number and gender of previous children. Like, say, indefinitely retaining genetic material from each of them. Which, you know, mother's bodies do: “Not only fetal cells, but also fragments of fetal DNA can be present in the maternal circulation indefinitely after pregnancy. This finding has practical implications for non-invasive prenatal diagnoses based on maternal blood, and may be considered for possible pathophysiological correlations.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12107445/#:~:text=Not%20only%20fetal%20cells%2C%20but,considered%20for%20possible%20pathophysiological%20correlations https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12107445/#:~:text=Not%20only....
4b11b4 6y ago
Purely speculative: but I wouldn't be surprised if this level of intelligence were going on in life. The seeds of a plant do remember their previous growing environment.

wyldfire 6y ago

It seems more likely for it to be an emergent property of children serving as hunter/gatherer resources but not competing for procreation. It is either a novel mutation or something that is selected for.

Zardoz84 6y ago
> It is either a novel mutation or something that is selected for. You know that homosexuality it's very know to happen on many animal species ? It's not a "novel mutation"
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  The mutation may not be, but perhaps the selection for it is. Few species hunt and gather.
Robotbeat 6y ago
Evolutionary psychology is always such a stretch, but I had never considered that possibility before. If there are a lot of extra males, if all were heterosexual there could be destructive competition over female mates. So asexual/homosexual/etc may become selected for if a disproportionate number of males were in a community (still community resources as you say but not destructively competing for mates).

jabberwcky 6y ago

> effeminate male > gay son This is a dangerous stereotype that is equally harmful to people of any sexuality, I'd encourage you to correct it. Most of the gay folk I know personally tend towards the athletic end of the spectrum

spodek 6y ago
Is there some law of the internet that when someone corrects someone, they often commit the error they're pointing out? Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic?
- jabberwcky 6y ago
  The inverse of effeminate by definition is butch, I purposefully avoided using it as it invokes yet more popular and inaccurate gay stereotypes that in no way capture the folk I was describing
- waterhouse 6y ago
  > Is there some law of the internet that when someone corrects someone, they often commit the error they're pointing out? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
- filoleg 6y ago
  >Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic? Agreed, the terminology used by the parent comment was a bit strange, but I got the idea of what they meant. They were talking about an effeminate skinny type of a male compared to a very masculine athletic "macho man"-looking type. In terms of celebrities and purely their appearances, think of young David Bowie vs. Arnold Swarzenegger. I guess the parent comment simply conflated athleticism with masculinity, but that's just an aspect of it, and not all kinds of athleticism are inherently "masculine" (think yoga or acrobatics or figure skating).
tofery 6y ago

aspaceman 6y ago

Comments like these are so hilariously idiotic. Props for making me guffaw out loud. “A meta level mechanism to reduce competition in the community” what the fuck is this saying. Why would gay men reduce competition? In a society that doesn’t accept homosexuality, they would still be with women. In a society that does, why would the woman’s body find it any more favorable to produce. This kind of navel gazing about evolution really pisses me off. Never feels reasoned in the slightest but works great on so called “rational” people. Just vaguely allude to evolution. Also yeah, gay doesn’t mean effeminate. Some gay men are more effeminate. This is usually social. It’s actually pretty funny you assume that. Why would gay men become more effeminate? Do you think the woman’s body sends lady cooties at the baby once they have too many? Like magic lady fairy dust that makes you girly and gay? Why would wanting to suck dick mean I’m girly? Or feminine? Some gay guys will act girly and feminine _because_ they want to suck dick and that’s one way to do it. Similarly, why is wanting to fuck another mans ass girly and feminine? Would love to hear your answers to these questions.

tofery 6y ago
>Why would gay men become more effeminate? Well, if we take "effeminate" to mean "Exhibiting behaviour or mannerisms considered typical of a female" [1], then wanting to have sex with men, something straight females (the majority of females) and gay males have in common, is effeminate. So I'd say it's not so ridiculous to think that gay men are typically more effeminate. 1: From https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/effeminate#Adjective https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/effeminate#Adjective, definition 1, which is also what I interpreted the word to mean
wombatmobile 6y ago
You’ve made valid points cogently, and asked relevant questions that could be answered using scientific methods, but you’re getting downvoted, which is a polemic response. Why?
- tofery 6y ago
  Not sure, but perhaps statements like "Comments like these are so hilariously idiotic. Props for making me guffaw out loud." are why people downvote. Personally I think that OP contributed to the conversation so I wouldn't have downvoted (if I could), but maybe some people did because of that.

scythe 6y ago

>To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter But if that were true, it must succeed sometimes. Evolution doesn't select for things that don't work. We should see an equally strong correlation with sex of offspring and birth order. We don't. One possibility is that the effect reduces the harmful effects of sibling rivalry by making second sons more empathetic. However, this is basically a random guess — there are so many variables in biology that it could be a million other things instead.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> But if that were true, it must succeed sometimes. We should see an equally strong correlation with sex of offspring and birth order. There is a correlation in the opposite direction between sex and birth order, but that could be explained with a slight variation on the upthread hypothesis; instead of trying to bend things toward girls and sometimes failing with an effeminate boy, one could speculate that it is “trying” to bend things toward boys and sometimes succeeds incompletely, resulting in an effeminate boy. (“Trying" in this case meaning nothing having to do with intentionality, but merely the effect of the process for which it was selected.)
watwut 6y ago
> possibility is that the effect reduces the harmful effects of sibling rivalry by making second sons more empathetic. Is there any reason to believe that gay men are more empathetic?
- scythe 6y ago
  The question is not whether they are more empathetic overall, but whether they are more empathetic towards similarly aged men, and when considering that specific object of empathy, I would imagine there is a strong correlation.

Zardoz84 6y ago

> Fascinating! To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter after several sons, but sometimes the process "fails" and produces an effeminate male instead - a gay son. You know that a homosexual not are "effeminate males" ? Man, try to revise these stereotype that you have.

wutbrodo 6y ago
I'm not sure the parent comment meant effeminate in demeanor. There is some indication that the brains of homosexual men have some similarities to female brains[1]. The GP's speculation doesn't need to rely on "stereotypes" to describe the homosexual male brain as closer to (heterosexual) female than the heterosexual male brain. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/study-says-brains-of-gay/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/study-says-brains...
- billyruffian 6y ago
  'Effeminate' is an adjective of demeanor.
  - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    lol @ all these comments immediately jumping to stereotypes. My English is great but it's not my first language. What's the right word here? Feminine? "More female in brain structure"?
    - ben_w 6y ago
      I’d say there is no “right word” at the moment, and the topic is a euphemism treadmill because, as with so many other disenfranchised groups, social norms have not yet universally settled onto “that’s fine, no seriously it’s fine”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    That's fair. I suppose I just find it plausible that the parent commenter made a minor misnomer between feminine and effeminate, instead of jumping to conclusions about stereotyping. But I know I usually have a terminal case of being too charitable, so maybe this is just a blind spot for me. Edit: apparently my assumption was correct, per the commenter in question elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26076929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26076929

simonh 6y ago

The only way to 'nudge' the chances of a girl baby is to select the sperm based on which sex genes they carry. Any hormonal or such changes induced in the fetus down the line is too late to have any effect on genetic gender.

hypertele-Xii 6y ago
Today I learned that human sex is determined at sperm production! Didn't know that, thanks.
- KMag 6y ago
  Also, the Y chromosome has slightly lower mass, and so the male sperm swim slightly faster. I would suspect, though I haven't seen any studies, that some fertility treatment steps unintentionally have mass-sorting properties similar to the barrier diffusion Uranium enrichment technique used in the Manhattan Project.

estaseuropano 6y ago

That doesn't seem to make any sense as gender is determined by the sperm cell reaching the egg. Unless gay-dna sperm are somehow faster...

dang 6y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26070754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26070754.