Among many species, males face stiff competition from other males for a mate - whereas females can

be more
choosy (Credit: iStock)

Why billionaires have more sons

By Zaria Gorvett 17 October 2016
bbc.com

Throughout history, couples have gone to extraordinary lengths to

choose the sex of their child. In the middle ages, women believed they
could swing the odds of having a son by asking their husbands to turn
their faces eastwards during sex. Others disagreed husbands should
be seduced over a cocktail prepared with red wine and fresh rabbits
womb.

If that didnt do the trick, the 18th Century French anatomist Procope-
Couteau had a rather extreme measure. Men whod give their left
testicle for a baby boy should do exactly that, he said. He claimed the
surgery was no more painful than extracting a tooth.

Even today, a quick search of the internet reveals an array of exotic

solutions from vitamins to cough syrup, to changing your under-
wear. The more rational among us may be sure that none of it makes
any difference. Each conception is a flip of the coin: theres always an
equal chance a baby will be a boy or a girl. Its purely a matter of
probability and you cant cheat lady luck.
Yet recent research shows parents may have been inadvertently rig-
ging the odds for thousands of years and the true factors which
make a difference are stranger than anything our superstitious ances-
tors could have imagined.

Male mortality

We now know that bad weather makes for more baby girls, as does
fasting for Ramadan or suffering from morning sickness. Meanwhile
mothers with dominant personalities, a taste for breakfast cereal or
billionaire husbands are more likely to have baby boys. Crucially, a
predisposition to having more sons or daughters is encoded in our
genetics men with more sisters tend to have girls while those with
more brothers tend to have boys. Whats going on?

I now see that the whole problem is so intricate that it is safer

to leave its solution for the future Charles Darwin

In fact, the odds of having a boy vs. having a girl have never been
exactly 50:50. Worldwide, there are around 109 boys born for every
100 girls. This might seem like a lot, but its necessary. Men have
weaker immune systems, higher cholesterol, more heart problems, a
greater susceptibility to diabetes, higher rates of cancer and lower
chances of surviving it. They make up over two-thirds of murder vic-
tims, three-quarters of traffic accident fatalities and are three times
more likely to commit suicide. Mothers have to have a higher propor-
tion of sons in order for an equal number to survive.

The relative odds of conceiving sons or daughters have been baffling

scientists for decades. The phenomenon was particularly mysterious
to Charles Darwin, who meticulously studied the proportion of male
and female offspring in a number of animals.

He was convinced that the elaborate features of many male animals,

such a peacocks tail, must be a consequence of a dire shortage of the
opposite sex. In these species, he figured, more competition had
favoured males which stood out from the crowd.

There was just one problem. In every species he studied, there were
almost (but not exactly) the same number of males and females; the
variation was not nearly as wide as he had expected. After failing to
find any convincing evidence, eventually he abandoned the whole
topic, remarking I now see that the whole problem is so intricate
that it is safer to leave its solution for the future.

So why is the sex ratio close to 50:50, but not exactly? It was a tricky
subject in need of a daring intellectual mind. Enter Robert Trivers, a
renegade scientist like no other. According to his own website, hes
spent time behind bars, formed an armed gang in Jamaica to protect
gay men from violence and driven a getaway car for notorious politi-
cal activist Huey Newton.

The Ivy League professor has been barred from university campuses,
suffered mental breakdowns and broken with tradition by changing
disciplines numerous times, from maths, to law, to history, to genet-
ics. Now hes an anthropologist at Rutgers University. Compared to
many other scientists Ive lived a wild life, he says.

Back in 1972, after tiring of history, he turned his attention to Dar-

wins problem. I said whoa now theres an idea worth devoting my
life to, says Trivers. Together with a colleague, Dan Willard, he
developed one of the most famous theories in evolutionary biology.
Its known as the Trivers-Willard hypothesis and it goes like this.

Lets assume you can choose the sex of your children and the game
is to leave as many descendants as possible. You have a gamble to
make. If your children are male, who knows, they might become the
next billionaire tycoon, or US President (or both), with plenty of girl-
friends to choose from.

If your son is a success, it could be a big evolutionary win

Its a scientific fact that high social status is attractive to women. Fer-
tile women prefer more dominant men and the lucky few who achieve
money or influence tend to marry younger, more often and have more
extra-marital affairs than their peers. If your son is a success, it could
be a big evolutionary win. But if he isnt, he may find himself unable
to find a partner at all.
Because women tend to marry up the socioeconomic scale its as
if women trade in their good looks to some degree if youre a man at
the bottom of the scale youre going to struggle to find someone to
marry, says Trivers. Females, by contrast, tend not to face such stiff
competition; they have a higher chance of securing a mate and pro-
ducing some offspring, even if they will never result in as many
descendants as a son.

That may sound a little bit sexist, but Trivers argues that it arises
from the fact that a female invests more in the young, compared to a
male who can just have sex and leave the childrearing to the mother.
Consider the fact that the most prolific mother in world history was
the nameless first wife of a peasant from Shuya, Russia, who lived
from 1707 to 1782. In total, local records reveal that she gave birth to
69 children, which is nothing compared to the warrior Genghis Khan,
who fathered between 1,000 and 2,000 children before he died in
1227. Today, hes thought to have around 16 million great, great, ...
great grandsons. And Khan is not the only one; a recent DNA analysis
revealed at least 10 men from history who have left a legacy compara-
ble with Khans, including a Chinese ruler who died in 1582, and the
originator of the medieval U Nill dynasty in Ireland.

In many animals red deer, elephant seals, gorillas the stakes are
even higher. Successful males may have harems of hundreds of
females, while low-ranking or weak males may never reproduce or
die trying.

Then theres the issue of resources. Because they tend to be larger,

sons require a lot more food than daughters and in many societies
theyll require more education and money. To produce a son capable
of becoming a dominant, high-status male, parents will need to make
a big investment.

With these factors in mind, Trivers proposed that in favourable condi-

tions, such as where the parents were high status or food was abun-
dant, it would make evolutionary sense for parents to produce more
sons. But in less favourable conditions, natural selection should
favour parents who produce more daughters, since females dont face
such fierce competition. Even if they arent particularly attractive or
socially successful, its likely theyll have at least some children.
At the time I gave the joke that this was the perfect theory because it
would take 20 years to prove me wrong. But 11 years later I was
proved right, says Trivers.

Back in the 80s, scientists discovered that in red deer at least, domi-
nant females have a 60% chance of giving birth to a son. But could
this also be true in humans? The first evidence came from an unlikely
source. In 1958, Chinas ruling party announced an ambitious new
project: the Great Leap Forward, which they hoped would propel the
nation of peasant farmers to industrial glory in the space of a few
years.

Families were ordered to abandon their farms as the country pre-

pared to step up steel production by 30%. Gardens were turned into
makeshift smelting yards as possessions from cooking pots to trac-
tors were melted to artificially inflate the total.

Before long, the country was transformed but not in the way the
government had hoped. Just a year after the project began, grain out-
put had dropped by 15%. A year after that, it dropped again. Within
four years of the famine setting in, 45 million people were dead.

Nearly four decades later, economist Douglas Almond found himself

poring over Chinese census records to find out what had happened
afterwards. But he wasnt looking at the records of the victims he
wanted to know what life was like for their middle-aged children.

Together with colleagues from Columbia University, he compared the

records of those born soon after the famine with information about
the province in which their parents were born. Some areas were
affected more than others, so the team were able to compare the pro-
spects of those whose mothers had gone hungry with those whose
mothers had not.

What they found was alarming. Though the children hadnt experi-
enced the famine themselves, those from famine-stricken regions
were less likely to be literate, employed, self-sufficient and tended to
live in smaller homes. Women tended to marry later and men were
lucky to marry at all. Finally, across the whole sample, those born to
affected mothers were significantly less likely to be born male in the
first place. The effect even seemed to carry over to their children,
who were also more likely to conceive daughters.

To estimate the size of the effect, remember that worldwide there are
around 109 boys born for every 100 girls. But between 1960 and 1963,
the number of male children born in China fell to just 104 boys for
every 100 girls, a difference of around 5% according to a later study
on the famine. The ratio didnt return to normal until 1965.

We now know that from smoking to war, to climate change, unfa-

vourable conditions predispose women to having more girls. On the
other end of the scale, women with more dominant personalities, a
diet rich in high calorie foods (such as breakfast cereal), or married
to U.S. Presidents tend to give birth to more sons. For billionaire
fathers, the odds of having a boy are 65%.

At this point you might be wondering why, with all these influences
at work, the ratio of men to women in the world isnt wildly unequal.
Surely a disaster on the scale of the Great Chinese Famine should
have produced a generation primarily of girls?

According to Keith Bowers, an ecologist at the University of Memphis,

there are good reasons why the population never veers too far from
the gender balance. Sons need more food than daughters, so consist-
ently over-producing males create a more competitive family environ-
ment, says Bowers. If all parents had sons when times were good,
they may struggle to find a mate or territory when they grew up.
Meanwhile, those with a genetic predisposition to over-produce
daughters while everyone else is having sons would have a big
advantage. Over time youd expect roughly equal numbers of males
and females to be born, says Bowers.

According to Corry Gellatly, an evolutionary biologist at Utrecht Uni-

versity, this natural rebalancing may already be happening. In China,
where there is a cultural preference for boys, the introduction of the
one-child policy led to a substantial spike in the number of girls being
aborted. As you would expect, between the 1980s and 2000s when
the policy was in full force the majority of babies born were boys.
But in families which had more than one child (this was allowed in
certain circumstances, such as if the parents were poor farmers from
the deep mountains, or if the parents themselves were only children),
the firstborn child was significantly more likely to be born a girl com-
pared to the average.

This may be because parents are more likely to leave the gender of
their first child up to chance theyd care more if the second child
was another girl and with an overpopulation of boys, the odds were
tipped in favour of the minority sex. Ironically, in trying so hard to
have only boys, the population may have made it more likely that they
would conceive a girl.

Alas, this will not be able to fully rebalance the ratio of boys and
girls . As of 2015, Chinese men outnumber women by 60 million. Its
been estimated that by 2030, one in four Chinese men will be unable
to marry. In societies with an over-abundance of males, there may be
unsavoury consequences from higher rates of domestic violence to
organised crime, to murder. Some have even suggested that this
growing pool of frustrated bachelors may be attracted to the military,
with the potential to trigger large-scale international conflicts.

Perhaps its time to put the cereal away, leave your testicles alone
and accept that, in the end, the chances of having a boy are and
should be roughly 50:50.

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