Interesting article from the BBC discussing factors that can affect the ratio of male to female babies. One of them is that high status men tend to give birth to more sons. Males and females must mathematically produce the same number of offspring, but male success is much more variable. Women can only birth one baby at a time and then must devote an immense amount of time and resources to its care, whereas a high status man could impregnate many women simultaneously and a low status male could be shut out. There is already ample evidence to support this such as historical genetic studies showing that many more females reproduced than males in prehistoric times but that those males that did reproduce had more babies.

The observed tendency of high status males to have more sons is further evidence. Evolution does not care about the variance of reproduction, it only seeks to maximize the mean. Somehow, the male’s body must “know” that he is high status and produces more Y chromosome sperm.

Think of having a boy as your genes swinging for a home run and having a girl as taking the sure base on balls. Because a father was likely to pass his status on to his son (the chief’s son probably got more pussy than the baker’s son), having additional sons, while generically risky, had a huge potential genetic payoff. Thus on average, high status men would have passed on more genes if they had sons than if they had daughters.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161014-why-billionaires-have-more-sons

Edit: this is by far the worst reaction I’ve ever seen to a good post. Bunch of morons responding who didn’t even read the article and obviously have very little understanding of evolutionary biology. This isn’t even a controversial finding. It’s well established that there are many factors which can effect birth ratios. The quality of TRP membership seems to be in free fall.