Status Anxiety | 23 February 2008

It’s a boy! This was the news following my wife’s 20-week scan last week. I know it is infra dig to find out the sex of your baby in advance, but Caroline said she needed to be psychologically prepared just in case it was a boy. She wanted another girl, obviously, and she didn’t want to risk bursting into tears in the delivery suite when the midwife held up the little tyke for her inspection.

I take the opposite view. I like girls as much as the next man, but what my wife has failed to grasp is that the entire point of having children is to enhance your social standing. In this regard, boys are preferable. One of the most famous principles in evolutionary bio-logy is the Trivers-Willard hypothesis which states that wealthy, high-status parents are more likely to have male children. The evolutionary explanation for this is that children generally inherit the status of their parents and sons from wealthy backgrounds are likely to have a large number of sexual partners and, therefore, produce lots of children.