Why are males and females 50%-50%?

[cthulu2016]

39. Me to. My approach to posting is atypical

I like to throw things out and see what comes back. I knew that our mix in the breeding population cannot stray far from 50-50, and I knew that males have a tricky fetal pathway and a higher defect rate, but if I hadn't posted this I wouldn't have learned (from researching replies) that the male sperm cells have a big advantage and that we get to 50-50 in breeding age only by creating so many more males in anticipation n of so many males dying along the way. (Mostly in utero.)

I do think evolutionarily most of the time and often with surprisingly "normal" results... it's almost comical how our strongest cultural ideas happen to be supported by the math of genes with no minds whatsoever.

For instance, abortion in cases of rape. There's the victims's rights angle (a woman shouldn't have to bear a child conceived by rape... it's the ultimate non-choice) and the holy-life angle (it isn't the baby's fault so why kill him/her?)

And then there is the evolutionary angle. If women carry rape-conceived babies to term then rape is a winning evolutionary strategy. (Which it is, or it wouldn't be such a human theme, particularly in the context of war.) And I support winnowing rape from the human evolutionary tool-kit.

The evoluionary angle is not decisive, of course. I'm not a eugenicist. But it helps explain why so many people draw the line there, even though few would be so impolitic as saying "If the baby is born the rapist won." But on some level we know that.