Sons and Lovers: a neo-Darwinian theory of the leisure class.

President George W. Bush has fathered two children, both of them daughters. Former president Bill Clinton has fathered a single child, also a daughter. That makes the forty-second and forty-third commanders in chief somewhat anomalous by historical standards. Of the 150 children sired by previous U.S. presidents, 90 were male and only 60 female. That’s three boys for every two girls. Now, this could be a statistical fluke, like flipping a coin 150 times and getting 90 or more heads. But such an outcome is observed very rarely, less than 1 percent of the time—unless, of course, the coin is biased.

American presidents are not the only elite group to produce

markedly more sons than daughters; the same goes for European

aristocracies and royal families. (Ditto, in the animal kingdom, for

socially dominant Peruvian spider monkeys and well-fed

opossums.) For oppressed groups, the situation is just the

opposite: In racist societies, the subject races tend to have slightly

more daughters than sons.

A fascinating hypothesis; that the needs of social dominance can find a way to be biologically expressed in the alteration of the sex ratio. It deserves to be pondered carefully with our dawning ability to exert much more deliberate, and potentially insidious, control over the sex of our offspring. Lingua Franca