Trivers and Willard predict that evolution will build in an unconscious mechanism for altering the sex ratio of an individual 's progeny. But we like to think we are rational, conscious decision makers, and a reasoning person can arrive at the same conclusions as evolution. Some of the strongest data to support Trivers and Willard comes not from animals but from the human cultural rediscovery of the same logic:
Many cultures bias their legacies, parental care, sustenance, and favoritism toward sons at the expense of daughters. Until recently this was seen as just another example of irrational sexism or the cruel fact that sons have more economic value than daughters. But by explicitly using the logic of Trivers-Willard, anthropologists have now begun to notice that male favoritism is far from universal and that female favoritism occurs exactly where you would most expect it.
Contrary to popular belief a preference for boys over girls is not universal. Indeed, there is a close relationship between social status and the degree to which sons are preferred. Laura Betzig of the University of Michigan noticed that, in feudal times, lords favored their sons, but peasants were more likely to leave possessions to daughters. While their feudal superiors killed or neglected daughters or banished them to convents, peasants left them more possessions: Sexism was more a feature of elites than of the unchronicled masses.'
As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the University of California at
Davis has concluded, wherever you look in the historical record, the elites favored sons more than other classes: farmers in eighteenth-century Germany, castes in nineteenth-century India, genealogies in medieval Portugal, wills in modern Canada, and pastoralists in modern Africa: This favoritism took the form of inheritance of land and wealth, but it also took the form of simple care. In India even today, girls are often given less milk and less medical attention than boys.'
Lower down the social scale, daughters are preferred even today: A poor son is often forced to remain single, but a poor daughter can marry a rich man. In modern Kenya, Mukogodo people are more likely to take daughters than sons to clinics for treatment when they are sick, and therefore more daughters than sons survive to the age of four. This is rational of the Mukogodo parents because their daughters can marry into the harems of rich Samburu and Maasai men and thrive, whereas their sons inherit Mukogodo poverty. In the calculus of Trivers-Willard, daughters are better grandchildren-production devices than sons.'
Of course, this assumes that societies are stratified: As Mildred Dickemann of California State University has postulated, the channeling of resources to sons represents the best investment rich people can make when society is class-ridden. The clearest patterns come from Dickemann 's own studies of traditional Indian marriage practices: She found that extreme habits of female infanticide, which the British tried and failed to stamp out, coincided with relatively high social rank in the distinctly stratified society of nineteenth-century India. High-caste Indians killed daughters more than low-caste ones. One clan of wealthy Sikhs used to kill all daughters and live off their wives ' dowries:'
There are rival theories to explain these patterns, of which the strongest is that economic, not reproductive, currency determines a sexual preference: Boys can earn a living and marry without a dowry: But this fails to explain the correlation with rank. It predicts, instead, that lower social classes would favor sons, not higher ones, for they can least afford daughters. If instead grandchildren production was the currency that mattered, Indian marriage prac-GENETIC MUTINY AND GENDER
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tices make more sense. Throughout India it has always been the case that women more than men can 'marry up, ' into a higher social and economic caste, so daughters of poor people are more likely to do well than sons. In Dickemann 's analysis, dowries are merely a distorted echo of the Trivers-Willard effect in a female-exogamous species: Sons inherit the status necessary for successful breeding; daughters have to buy it. If you have no wealth to pass on, use what you have to buy your daughter a good husband. 79
Trivers and Willard predict that male favoritism in one part of society will be balanced by female favoritism elsewhere if only because it takes one of each to have a baby—the Fisher logic again.
In rodents the division seems to be based on maternal condition. In primates it seems to be based on social rank. But baboons and spider monkeys take for granted the fact that their societies are strictly stratified. Human beings do not. What happens in a modern, relatively egalitarian society?
In that uniform middle-class Eden known as California, Hrdy and her colleague Debra Judge have so far been unable to detect any wealth-related sex bias in the wills people leave when they die. Perhaps the old elite habit of preferring boys to girls has at last been vanquished by the rhetoric of equality. 8o But there is another, more sinister consequence of modern egalitarianism. In some societies the boy-preferring habit seems to have spread from elites to the society at large. China and India are the best examples of this: In China a one-child policy may have led to the deaths of 17 percent of girls. Im one Indian hospital 96 percent of women who were told they were carrying daughters aborted them, while nearly 100 percent of women carrying sons carried them to term. 81 This implies that a cheap technology allowing people to choose the gender of their children would indeed unbalance the population sex ratio.
Choosing the gender of your baby is an individual decision of no consequence to anybody else. Why, then, is the idea inherently unpopular? It is a tragedy of the commons—a collective harm that results from the rational pursuit of self-interest by individuals.
One person choosing to have only sons does nobody else any harm,
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but if everybody does it, everybody suffers. The dire predictions range from a male-dominated society in which rape, lawlessness, and a general frontier mentality would hold sway to further increases in male domination of positions of power and influence.
At the very least, sexual frustration would be the lot of many men: Laws are passed to enforce the collective interest at the expense of the individual, just as crossing over was invented to foil outlaw genes. If gender selection were cheap, a fifty-fifty sex ratio would be imposed by parliaments of people as surely as equitable meiosis was imposed by the parliament of the genes.
THE PEACOCK ' S TALE
