Sex Wars: Genes, bacteria and biased sex ratios by Michael Majerus, Princeton University Press, £29.95, ISBN 0691009813
WANTING a male child to carry on the family name (and inherit all the property) is a common enough ambition in many male-dominated human societies. Yet few people have taken as bizarre a step to achieve that goal as the French aristocrats described in Majerus’s book, Sex Wars.
They believed the theory of Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher in the 5th century BC, who claimed that male babies were produced by sperm generated only in the right testicle. So, to increase their chances of…
