Weather and Conception

In: Culture Environment/weather Interactive Maps

26 Sep 2011

Statistics indicate that more people are born in the fall (in the USA anyway), with the quick explanation being that we have more sex during the winter holidays (9 months earlier).  GE takes a cut at this notion by comparing average temperatures and deviations from the national average birthrate. Statistically, however, using annual data adds enough noise in my mind to make drawing conclusions kind of tough. Anyone want to dig up the monthly data (even for one state) and do a lagged scatter plot? Hmmmm… how would you seasonally adjust this data?

image

(one minor complaint: the 3d scale is interesting for comparing states, but you can’t tell what the values are for any of them because of the angle)

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1 Response to Weather and Conception

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Mark

September 26th, 2011 at 1:37 pm

I think the answer is simpler than that. Fall births are actually holiday babies. They were conceived during the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holidays. You may find correlation with temperature but you’ll find causality in alcohol. :)

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