Random chance: why a Brazilian town has a phenomenal number of twin births
The BBC wants us all to consider a real puzzler- why does one little town in Brazil have such a vast number of twins? The answer being, well, random chance actually. Not that we’d really expect the arts graduates at the Beeb to quite get such a thing. Reality is that somewhere is going to be like that so why not this town?
Cândido Godói is a village of 7,000 inhabitants in the south of Brazil that has a phenomenal number of twin births. The rate is ten times higher than the national average, and no one knows why.
It might strike you that they’re all looking a little Germanic rather than Brazilian and that’s fair enough – they are pretty much all descended from German and Polish immigrants. This also gives us one idea as to why it is happening:
A team of geneticists have been working with the community for a number of years, sampling DNA and learning about families, in an effort to solve the mystery.
A reasonable explanation of the why being that those immigrants generally came from an area where the twin rate is high already. And it’s a known phenomenon that such genetic attributes can be sharpened in a small population. So, that’s that then.
However, there’s a more prosaic explanation available which is that it was going to happen somewhere. The normal rate of twins is about 0.5% of all pregnancies. That rises a bit in certain communities. And all such occurrences are going to be distributed on a Bell or normal curve. Like with height or intelligence, similarly genetically determined things. The twinning rate here is that 10%, about 20 times that in the general population. But then there are 2.5 million or so towns and cities around the world. That’s a large enough number that we would be surprised if one of them didn’t have 20 times the twinning rate.
So, while we can search for the specific answer the general answer is that somewhere was going to do this and it just turns out to be this place in Brazil.
Posted: 17th, September 2018 | In: News, Strange But True Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
