Professor Luke O'Neill

speaker

1,535 appearances 7 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Professor Luke O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.

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Show Me the Science with Luke O'Neill · The Science of Sibling Rivalry · 7 May 2026 podcast

So for some reason the older one seems to do better in education and then has a slightly higher IQ.

the middle one and the younger one less, right?

And that was interesting anyway.

And in fact, that was the very question that these scientists wondered about.

Why would that be?

And they were scientists in Denmark and they examined this closely and they noticed that because of this sort of educational advantage is part of it, the eldest child or the older child is inclined to earn more money in their life than the next child.

And it's 1.9%.

Now, what that means is over your lifetime, if you're the older sibling, you will earn 1.9% more than the next child, the second child in the order.

Then you looked at the elder one and younger one.

And in Ireland, for example, the average industrial wage is €52,000 a year.

The eldest will earn about €1,000 more per year than the younger one.

And the Danish scientists had seen this, and they wondered why that was, and they came up with a hypothesis.

Now, if you're a scientist, you have to come up with what are called hypotheses, which means an idea.

And their idea was maybe it's to do with infections.

Now, you might wonder why they would have hypothesized that.

It had been known that the second child is more likely to end up in hospital with a respiratory disease than the older child.

And again, that's statistical, and this is a really robust piece of data.

So if you look at the rate of hospitalization,

from respiratory diseases like flu, RSV, infects infants and younger children, the younger child is more likely to end up in hospital than the older child.

And there are studies showing three times more likely.

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