The Scientific Fundamentalist

Sexually promiscuous parents have more sons

The generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis suggests that any heritable trait of a parent which is disproportionately beneficial to either sons or daughters can bias the sex of the offspring in the direction that benefits the parent’s reproductive success. It has so far been shown that engineers and scientists are more likely to have sons while nurses and social workers are more likely to have daughters; big and tall parents are more likely to have sons; violent parents are more likely to have sons; and beautiful parents are more likely to have daughters.

Extending Trivers’s genius

In my previous post, I introduce the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, which predicts that, relative to the baseline offspring sex ratio of 105 boys for 100 girls, wealthy families are more likely to have sons while poor families are more likely to have daughters.  More recently, there has been a theoretical extension of the original Trivers-Willard hypothesis, called the generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis. Read More

In my previous post, I explain that men on average are slightly but significantly more intelligent than women, not because they are men, but because they are taller.  But why are taller people more intelligent than shorter people? Read More

Someone once asked me, right before we parted the very last time I ever saw her, who my hero was.  I had to think long and hard before answering.  I didn’t want to give obvious answers like “Darwin” or “Newton” or “Batman.”  I had in the past expressed my admiration for Leda Cosmides, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Robert L. Trivers, for their scientific work, but I wasn’t sure if they were well known enough in public to count as my “heroes.”  I racked my brain, as we walked across a foot bridge over the Thames.  The answer I finally came up with when we reached the end of the bridge was “Jim Watson.” Read More