Hey! I'm the author of this article. I apologise for that particular phrasing. I sincerely meant it as a pool of men, pool of women kinda way. I was trying to be dispassionate about it, which may have come across as insensitive. Apologies.
I was trying to base my tone on these articles that got me thinking
Economist's analysis of marriage in China :
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/11/23/a-distor...
I have a pet (non-scientific) theory/query.
Wouldn't such prolonged & sustained periods of female foeticide eventually cause the human body to mutate...and stop giving birth to the female sex entirely?
This is not how mutation work [1].
If over several generation we "selected" women/men that "yield" more man then women (if such a thing is even coded in some genes which, as far as i know, we have no clue), we would slowly make this trait more frequent, increasing the issue. But this looks more like a bad sci-fi novel setup than something possible.
[1] By that I mean: Mutation are not "created" by the environment. Evolution theory shows that we "select" mutation which will then become present in the majority of the population over several generation (provided that the mutation can be passed to offspring and yield a significant benefit that will last over several generation).
Mutation happens all the time in your body, although, if i remember my high school biology class, most of them get "fixed". And mutation are only one of the many "tools" that help create diversity (chromosome recombination for example).
> I have a pet (non-scientific) theory/query. Wouldn't such prolonged & sustained periods of female foeticide eventually cause the human body to mutate...and stop giving birth to the female sex entirely?
It's the opposite, actually.
It is evolutionarily favorable to give birth to the sex that is less numerous at sexual maturity. If female babies started dying, for whatever reason, the chance the average baby is female would gradually increase until the ratio of sexually mature females to males balanced out.
Incidentally, this is presumably why there are slightly more males born than females [1] - males tend to die more frequently than females during childhood.
> In humans, the natural ratio between males and females at birth is slightly biased towards the male sex, being estimated to be about 1.05[2] or 1.06[3] males/per female born.
>If female babies started dying, for whatever reason, the chance the average baby is female would gradually increase until the ratio of sexually mature females to males balanced out.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but how does the human body have internal knowledge of the current gender ratio in society such that it will attempt to fix the ratio to balance?
> Perhaps I'm missing something, but how does the human body have internal knowledge of the current gender ratio in society such that it will attempt to fix the ratio to balance?
It doesn't.
This process happens strictly through natural selection.
If average female fertility is F, the number of sexually mature females is f and the number of sexually mature males is m, then the average male fertility is F * f / m (each child is conceived by exactly one male and one female). This means that the less numerous sex has a higher fertility.
It is not true that each child is equally likely to be male or female. Some parents are more predisposed to have male children and some parents are more predisposed to have female children. The parents predisposed to have more reproductively successful children will have their genes flourish - pushing the sex balance of new babies slightly in the corrective direction.
AFAIR from "The Red Queen", that means female genome is the original one (two XX chromosomes). We men have an Y chromosome which is a "depleted" or a lame chromosome that's encoding barely anything more than gender information.
It's impossible to be a fully functional human with two YY chromosomes. And XXYY has their own set of problems.
Looking at farming the answer is a significant No. Female calves are worth much more than male, and male chickens have so low value that they tend to be grind down to dust as soon their sex can be identified. If it was possible to raise cows and chickens that only gave female offspring it would cause a major change in agriculture. That it has not happen is a good indication that you can't selective breed for female offspring.
In the case of cows we can selectively breed for sex, 97% of dairy calfs are females, the 3% males are mix of particularly good mothers that they want to pass genes on from, and cases where the sex selection failed. There is a large amount of data/science to select which mothers gets to pass their genes onto sons (which in turn pass their genes onto thousands of mothers). This works in part because most cows are bred with AI - bulls are dangerous and so nobody wants them if they can avoid it.
The above is numbers from one dairy farm I know of with ~3000 cows. I'm sure each farm is different.
I did not know that you could buy (patented) cow semen that is sorted to guarantee to produce only female cattle. I have family that operate a small-ish farm with several hundred cows and they certainly do not use such technology. It just a matter of fact for them that female calves are worth significant more and half the time you get females and the other half you get males. I will somehow try mention this in passing to them, through I suspect they do not do use artificial insemination which is a required step for this technology.
I also wonder if in the future chicken farms will apply this when the technology get more refined, the patents expires and the cost of artificial insemination is cheaper than wasting time and resources on eggs only to then kill half the offsprings.
The tone of this article makes my skin crawl. It reads as if the author believes women are possessions that every man is entitled to own. Can we all start treating female humans as humans please, that is the only way that the root cause of this kind of problem will ever be eliminated.
Generally I'm quite sensitive to that stuff but not really seeing that with this article (besides the phrase 'pool of women' maybe). Can you give some examples?
Hey!
I'm the author of this article. I completely understand this criticism. I was very afraid of how this might come across. My sincere apologies for this. My intention was to highlight the effect skewed sex-ratios have on the population, as an aggregate. I abhor the thought of men acting entitled to women, and being treated as possessions. But I also wanted to highlight the impact that is already being felt in countries such as china where 'family life' is taught to be a 'truth' that every human must go through. Sorry again!
i didn't read that tone at all. just numbers, lots of numbers. yup, china is the same. maybe less strong as the chinese are getting more and more affluent.
It has to be possible to talk about the effects of this phenomenon on all people, as well as the related changes in behavior people choose. We're all new to that, so I think we're all figuring out what language is appropriate. So we all have to be open to discussing that too. Thanks for that openness!
The root cause of the problem as describe by an other article recently submitted to HN is the case that male humans are treated as possessions. Males are expected to support their elders, making males walking pension funds in the possession of their parents. If they started to treat the male humans as humans then there would not be any economical incentive and the root cause resolved.
I for one would not like to have been born just to provide money to my family, and sadly money is in the center of the problem as the statistics shows.
I don't think that's the actual root cause. If it were 100% just the 'walking pension' distinction there's only a selection preference for male babies when there's a large difference between the earnings and status attainable by men. If there were no differences between what a man and a woman could make why would the desire for support as an elder lead to infanticide and preferential abortion of female fetuses?
The reason only male offspring are considered as a pension plan is that the female offspring is expected to support the family they marries into. Things would be more equal if both the male and female offspring was expected to stay at home and support their parents, and preferential abortion of female fetuses would stop, but marriages would then be a bit of an issue. For cultural reasons people do not flip a coin and have the male offspring being expected to be the pension plan 50% of the time and female offspring the other 50%. A married couple is also unlikely to be able to stay at the homes of both families and support both at the same time.
But the crux of the discussion is that we want humans to be treated like humans. Having both men and women being walking pension plans in the possession of their parents is not a big improvement all things considered. A better solution is to enable people to survive growing old without depending on offsprings to support them, and that require us to look at the money issue. A solid pension system and universal health care does wonders to a lot of issues in society, and looking at countries with both these I see a distinct decrease of problems that occur because parents uses their children as financial support systems.
when you are growing up like that, with this being your social responsibility, and everyone else does it, and you also love your parents, you'll feel it as totally normal.
you'll also get the full love of your parents. you are first, your sisters are second. your wife will be more important to your parents than your sisters are. the difference is noticeable. though you may not notice it as your sisters will be married and get the same treatment from their husbands family.
your parents will provide for you as long as they can, and then when they no longer can, it's your turn to provide for them, and for your children. but by then your parents will have done more for you than most western parents would have.
your parents don't have pensions they can live off. neither will you. so one day your children will take care of you...
Make all Indian women more independent and self-reliant.
- They often don't have a say in choosing a life-partner
- They're often don't have a say in pursuing higher studies
Public(free) health/education is utmost importance. Even most Govt. primary school teachers send their kids to private schools, others don't have private schools near by.
These issues are not black/white like most microbial diseases.
India is a democracy; democracies are flawed coz, like everywhere else power attracts corrupt people; and corrupt fight bloody.
Does health of NGOs in a country and their ability to influence Govt. policies within a term(4-5yrs) tells us more about a Country?
this is a hit piece. it is likely that they either manipulated the time period in which the data was taken or they cherry picked the towns the took the data from. most likely they did both. with a population of over a billion. it is easy to manipulate population numbers. what they did is find towns with only one or two births for a given time period and selected a time period that would push their narrative.
the other possibility is that these towns have some messed laws that encourages people to not register their daughter’s birth. this is an issue in many countries and people just ignore these rules and just register their kids in the most beneficial way. of course racist people will take this and claim misogyny.
there is a logical disconnect of people stereotyping countries with the largest population as mistreating females. the lack of critical thinking is appalling. it takes nearly a year to birth a child and requires that the female is a willing participant. they have done this more times in india than in most other countries.
manipulated numbers to what end? you think the gender disparity is not real? china has the same disparity. you can find it in official reports by the chinese government. so it's real, all right. why would india not have the same problem? do you have evidence for your claim?
It is in a strict definitional sense but there's definitely space to make a moral/ethical distinction between "family planning based" abortions like is most common in the US vs "child planning" (not sure I like the term but I can't think of a better one atm) abortion like we can clearly see happening in places like India and China where the birthrate is skewed so much.
Yes, though some other commenters have pointed out caveats (e.g. do they really have a free choice?).
IANA moral philosopher, but I think the gender of the baby being a primary consideration in abortion also makes this a more complicated issue. I feel this is more akin to the ethical dilemma of whether to abort foetuses with non-fatal disabilities.
It's just people reacting to market conditions. If your society provides incentives for abortion, abortion is going to happen.
I can't judge people living in other parts of the world. But I know that massive populations ruled by a single government don't work. There's no reason 1/6 of the world should be under the control of a single government. They need to decentralize and maybe create a federation of independent states.
I see some problems in India with the allocation of seats in the upper house of the parliament split unequally among the states, unlike the senate in the USA. That means states with more population have a bigger say, rather than having all states having an equal say.
“Fails to be as anti-democratic as the remaining remnant of the US Constitutional design to protect slavery” is an odd criticism of another government’s structure...but okay.
50 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadWhat a way to phrase things. I really wonder how this article is relevant to HN?
There was a quite active discussion on the topic of demographics in india yesterday [0], that also contains this link as a sub-thread.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20505952
FT's article on 'missing brides' : https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f...
[1] By that I mean: Mutation are not "created" by the environment. Evolution theory shows that we "select" mutation which will then become present in the majority of the population over several generation (provided that the mutation can be passed to offspring and yield a significant benefit that will last over several generation).
Mutation happens all the time in your body, although, if i remember my high school biology class, most of them get "fixed". And mutation are only one of the many "tools" that help create diversity (chromosome recombination for example).
Outside of fiction - no.
It's the opposite, actually.
It is evolutionarily favorable to give birth to the sex that is less numerous at sexual maturity. If female babies started dying, for whatever reason, the chance the average baby is female would gradually increase until the ratio of sexually mature females to males balanced out.
Incidentally, this is presumably why there are slightly more males born than females [1] - males tend to die more frequently than females during childhood.
___
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio
> In humans, the natural ratio between males and females at birth is slightly biased towards the male sex, being estimated to be about 1.05[2] or 1.06[3] males/per female born.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but how does the human body have internal knowledge of the current gender ratio in society such that it will attempt to fix the ratio to balance?
It doesn't.
This process happens strictly through natural selection.
If average female fertility is F, the number of sexually mature females is f and the number of sexually mature males is m, then the average male fertility is F * f / m (each child is conceived by exactly one male and one female). This means that the less numerous sex has a higher fertility.
It is not true that each child is equally likely to be male or female. Some parents are more predisposed to have male children and some parents are more predisposed to have female children. The parents predisposed to have more reproductively successful children will have their genes flourish - pushing the sex balance of new babies slightly in the corrective direction.
Somewhere in the past our ancestors evolved a male counterpart to enable sexual reproduction.
Weren't there no "gender" nor "female" before sexual reproduction evolved ?
The above is numbers from one dairy farm I know of with ~3000 cows. I'm sure each farm is different.
I also wonder if in the future chicken farms will apply this when the technology get more refined, the patents expires and the cost of artificial insemination is cheaper than wasting time and resources on eggs only to then kill half the offsprings.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's definitely not playing nicely with our modern sensitivity.
Some articles that got me thinking : https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f...
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/11/23/a-distor...
I for one would not like to have been born just to provide money to my family, and sadly money is in the center of the problem as the statistics shows.
But the crux of the discussion is that we want humans to be treated like humans. Having both men and women being walking pension plans in the possession of their parents is not a big improvement all things considered. A better solution is to enable people to survive growing old without depending on offsprings to support them, and that require us to look at the money issue. A solid pension system and universal health care does wonders to a lot of issues in society, and looking at countries with both these I see a distinct decrease of problems that occur because parents uses their children as financial support systems.
you'll also get the full love of your parents. you are first, your sisters are second. your wife will be more important to your parents than your sisters are. the difference is noticeable. though you may not notice it as your sisters will be married and get the same treatment from their husbands family.
your parents will provide for you as long as they can, and then when they no longer can, it's your turn to provide for them, and for your children. but by then your parents will have done more for you than most western parents would have.
your parents don't have pensions they can live off. neither will you. so one day your children will take care of you...
- They often don't have a say in choosing a life-partner - They're often don't have a say in pursuing higher studies
Public(free) health/education is utmost importance. Even most Govt. primary school teachers send their kids to private schools, others don't have private schools near by.
These issues are not black/white like most microbial diseases.
India is a democracy; democracies are flawed coz, like everywhere else power attracts corrupt people; and corrupt fight bloody.
Does health of NGOs in a country and their ability to influence Govt. policies within a term(4-5yrs) tells us more about a Country?
Do men have?
Two of my (male) Indian coworkers had their wives selected for them by their parents, even though they were working abroad.
the other possibility is that these towns have some messed laws that encourages people to not register their daughter’s birth. this is an issue in many countries and people just ignore these rules and just register their kids in the most beneficial way. of course racist people will take this and claim misogyny.
there is a logical disconnect of people stereotyping countries with the largest population as mistreating females. the lack of critical thinking is appalling. it takes nearly a year to birth a child and requires that the female is a willing participant. they have done this more times in india than in most other countries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=651028
Why does abortion get a special different word like foeticide in this case?
If the mother chooses to end the pregnancy, aren't we cherry picking if and when it becomes right or wrong if we ban special cases of abortion?
If not, then a heck of a lot of high-shcool and college age women in the west aren't choosing either.
fe·ti·cide (fē′tĭ-sīd′) n. Intentional destruction of a human fetus.
Isn't the intentional destruction of a human fetus what an abortion is?
IANA moral philosopher, but I think the gender of the baby being a primary consideration in abortion also makes this a more complicated issue. I feel this is more akin to the ethical dilemma of whether to abort foetuses with non-fatal disabilities.
I can't judge people living in other parts of the world. But I know that massive populations ruled by a single government don't work. There's no reason 1/6 of the world should be under the control of a single government. They need to decentralize and maybe create a federation of independent states.