ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
A method yielding comparable estimates of the fraternal birth order and female fecundity effects in male homosexuality.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Meta-Analyses of Fraternal and Sororal Birth Order Effects in Homosexual Pedophiles, Hebephiles, and Teleiophiles.Archives of sexual behavior · 2021Pooled it
- A Current Approach to Logistic Regression Analysis of Birth Order and Sexual Orientation.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Crusaders, monks and family fortunes: evolutionary models of male homosexuality and related phenomena.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Examining the Fraternal Birth Order Effect and Sexual Orientation: Insights from an East European Population.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Fertility of Czech Gay and Straight Men, Women, and Their Relatives: Testing the Sexually Antagonistic Gene Hypothesis.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Does the Fraternal Birth Order Effect Influence Handedness?Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Male androphilia, fraternal birth order, and female fecundity in Samoa: A 10-y retrospective.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Understanding the Biodevelopment of Sexual Orientation Requires a Multilevel Evolutionary Analysis.Archives of sexual behavior · 2023Article
- New Data on Birth Order in Homosexual Men and Women and a Reply to Vilsmeier et al. (2021a, 2021b).Archives of sexual behavior · 2022Article
- Estimation of the Fraternal Birth Order Effect in the UK Biobank Data Reported by Abé et al. (2021).Archives of sexual behavior · 2021Article
- Reassessing the Effect of Older Sisters on Sexual Orientation in Men.Archives of sexual behavior · 2021Article
- Handedness and Birth Order Among Heterosexual Men, Gay Men, and Sao Praphet Song in Northern Thailand.Archives of sexual behavior · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The fraternal birth order effect (FBOE) is the finding that older brothers increase the probability of homosexuality in later-born males, and the female fecundity effect (FFE) is the finding that the mothers of homosexual males produce more offspring than the mothers of heterosexual males. In a recent paper, Khovanova proposed a novel method for computing independent estimates of these effects on the same samples and expressing the magnitude and direction of the effects in the same metric. In her procedure, only families with one or two sons are examined, and daughters are ignored. The present study investigated the performance of Khovanova's method using archived data from 10 studies, comprising 14 samples totalling 5390 homosexual and heterosexual subjects. The effect estimate for the FBOE showed that an increase from zero older brothers to one older brother is associated with a 38% increase in the odds of homosexuality. By contrast, the effect estimate for the FFE showed that the increase from zero younger brothers to one younger brother is not associated with any increase in the odds of homosexuality. The former result supports the maternal immune hypothesis of male homosexuality; the latter result does not support the balancing selection hypothesis.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.