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...
> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
