Saturday, October 4, 2008

Boy Math

My mind sometimes wanders toward nerdy thoughts like these...

To have three boys so far, we have rolled the dice and fallen on one side of the 50% odds to come to the following percentage--.5 x .5 x .5 = 12.5% chance of having three children all of the same gender.

As of right now, it also appears Baby J will be keeping his beautiful blue eyes just like his big brothers (how did God know I desperately longed for blue eyes as a child and, of course, would want them for my own children?) 

Both GG and I are brown-eyed and each carry a recessive allele for blue eye color from Pappy and Mimi, respectively (science teacher coming out...)  So each of our children has a 25% chance of having blue eyes (think Punnett Square)--.25 x .25 x .25 = 1.6% chance of having three blue-eyed kids.  

Thus, the chance of winding up with THREE blue-eyed baby boys goes something like this = .5  x .5  x .5  x .25  x .25  x .25 = .0019 = .19%

That means our family is a .2% Godly "coincidence."
Gosh, we feel pretty special!!
Happy Saturday!

5 comments:

Jess said...

I love to see your biologist breaking through sometimes!! I'm not sure you can do the math, but it's probably an unbelieveably small probability that you'll have 3 blue-eyed boys who all study horses!

Anonymous said...

OH M

Your "non-math mother" is so chuckling at all of these stats. As usual, I am WOWED!!

God Bless Blue-eyed and Brown-eyed people! ;)

B-Mama said...

How much I would love to cultivate a love for horses in my boys... maybe future cowboys? I think we need to venture west to ensure such an outcome. Jess, maybe we should just head down to Shackleford. That's all it took for me!! :) Great memories...

Carolina Girl said...

okay, that is kinda nerdy!! lol! ;)

Donna said...

Hey B-mama! Thank you so much for stopping by my blog! Your boys are so precious- I know you kiss on that baby all day- I LOVE chubby cheeks on a baby! I also love your building cathedrals blog-you have great thoughts. Hope you are doing well- thanks again for introducing yourself!

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