gwern comments on Can the Chain Still Hold You? - Less Wrong
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...or it could just be that extremely complex systems like gender unavoidably go haywire during fetal development or a mutation hits, and this results in a normal background rate of around 1:3000?
Yes, that seems reasonable. There are four biologically possible scenarios I can think of to explain the numbers:
Four seems far and away the least likely; I'd be suspicious of an equilibrium that's so low, not only in our species but all our mammalian relatives. Perhaps there are answers in the literature; I don't have the time.