Hearty-Eating Moms More Likely to Have Boys

I think the difference lies how alkaline or acidic the female environment is. "Male" sperm survive better in one and "female" sperm the other.

I forget which is which.

However, I've never actually looked up the validity of that claim...
 
No, that is not possible. Not unless the body reabsorbs "female" sperm faster than it does "male" ones (or vice versa, of course).
 
with all the birth defects in the world, why couldn't a man produce sperm of only 1 sex? There are sperm with 2 tails, sperm with 1/2 a head, why not 1 sex?

If its not possible, why?
 
If it has to do with the man's sperm, the woman's diet has nothing to do with it. Maybe they are looking at the wrong person.
 
Orleander said:
If it has to do with the man's sperm, the woman's diet has nothing to do with it. Maybe they are looking at the wrong person.
Click to expand...

Or maybe what the women eats is what the man is eating too (assuming they are couples that have breakfast and diner with each other), you got a point they should run a control comparing sync and unsync diets between man and women affecting sex ratio of progeny.
 
Orleander said:
with all the birth defects in the world, why couldn't a man produce sperm of only 1 sex? There are sperm with 2 tails, sperm with 1/2 a head, why not 1 sex?

If its not possible, why?
Click to expand...
Well, you understand what characteristics of the sperm determine maleness, right? The sperm carrying a copy of the Y chromosome will more than likely create a male baby, and those carrying a copy of the X chromosome will likely create a female child. I say 'likely' because there are exceptions but those aren't directly relevant to your question since they occur during development in the mother.

Why can't a man have all male sperm? They can't because of the way the sperm cells are created: via meiosis. A sperm cell starts as a single parent cell, which contains one copy of the X chromosome and one copy of the Y chromosome. It duplicates all its genetic material, then splits (so, for a brief period it contains two copies of each the X and Y chromosomes). The two daughter cells each have a single copy of X and a single copy of Y. These two daughter cells then split again, but this time without duplicating the genetic material. This leads to 4 "granddaughter" cells in total -- these will develop into sperm cells. Two of them have a copy of the X chromosome and no copies of Y, and vice versa.

This is also the basic premise behind dominant and recessive genes, because you are splitting the genetic info between the germ cells. Each cell has two copies of chromosomes 1-22, so if you had one copy with one allele (say the dominant allele) and one copy had a different allele (recessive), you would end up with two sperm cells carrying the dominant allele and two carrying the recessive.

Again, unless all the sperm cells carrying the X chromosome were to die, it wouldn't be possible for men to create only "male" sperm.
 
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