{"id":712,"date":"2003-05-27T03:29:49","date_gmt":"2003-05-27T03:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=712"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:34:50","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:34:50","slug":"during-famine-more-baby-boys-for-strong-moms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=712","title":{"rendered":"during famine, more baby boys for strong moms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">When times are tough, the strongest women bear  more sons, reported British researchers in the journal <em>Proceedings of  the Royal Society<\/em> last week. University of London evolutionary  anthropologists Mhairi Gibson and Ruth Mace studied mothers in a rural  Ethiopian community undergoing serious food shortages. Overall, fewer  boys than girls were born. It&#8217;s known that sons take more of a  reproductive toll than daughters: boys grow faster and are bigger at  birth. Malnourished baby boys also are more likely to die than  malnourished baby girls. So, from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes  sense that malnourished women would give birth to more daughters. But  the researchers also found a strong link between a child&#8217;s gender and  its mother&#8217;s muscle mass, a marker of how well-fed she is. Women who  were in the upper 25th percentile of arm muscle mass were more than  twice as likely to have had a son than those in the lowest 25th  percentile. A well-nourished mother can most afford the physical cost of  bearing a son. Gibson and Mace&#8217;s study suggests that mothers&#8217; bodies  can somehow manipulate the sex of their children in response to food  availability. While this has been seen in wild animals, this is the  first time it has been observed in humans.<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 5\/27\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When times are tough, the strongest women bear more sons, reported British researchers in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society last week. University of London evolutionary anthropologists Mhairi Gibson and Ruth Mace studied mothers in a rural Ethiopian community &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=712\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1192,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions\/1192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}