ABSTRACT
Consideration of the conditions prevailing in bisexual organisms shows that … the chance of an organism leaving at least one offspring of his own sex has a calculable value of about 5/8. Let the reader imagine this simple condition were true of his own species, and attempt to calculate the prior probability that a hundred generations of his ancestry in the direct male line should each have left at least one son. The odds against such a contingency as it would have appeared to his hundredth ancestor (about the time of King Solomon) would require for their expression forty-four figures of the decimal notation; yet this improbable event has certainly happened.
