The most important bit is hidden several paragraphs in:
Anderson asked villagers about selective abortions and found them open about the fact that they use ultrasound to determine the baby's gender and help them decide whether or not to keep it.
I'm pro-life. I realize that not everyone is. I think that everyone, though, can be concerned that large segments of humanity are testing unborn children for "undesirable" traits and aborting them. We're facing a demographic timebomb.
Societies with more men than women are violent, and start wars.
I've heard that in China the situation is changing. Women are relatively scarce, so the groom's family often has to pony up a substantial "bride price" (reverse dowry?). This is helping to balance out the "value" of boys and girls.
I know this is weird but I want to try and model this effect mathematically. The new gender ratio driven by a function of the current gender ratio for 20-somethings. Too many boys, would lead to girls and vice versa. There would likely be a damping effect of cultural inertia that would prevent rapid oscillations. I suppose one would also have to take in to account intergenerational marriages, death rates .etc.
This is how the sex ratio got to 50% in the first place, evolutionarily. If there's an excess of women, men will find it relatively easier to find a mate, and so women whose genes cause them to bear an excess of sons will pass more of those genes down into the third generation. If there's an excess of men, men will find it relatively hard to find a mate, and so women whose genes cause them to bear an excess of daughters will pass more genes onto the third generation. It balances out at a 50/50 steady-state.
Curiously, the sex ratio can get skewed by environmental conditions, in a manner similar to what you describe. Men have more reproductive variability than women - the number of children a woman can bear is largely limited by her uterus, while the number of children a man can bear is limited by the number of women he can convince to sleep with him. So when times are good, or if a mother is high-status within her particular group, she tends to bear more sons to take advantage of their reproductive success. While when times are lean, mothers tend to bear more daughters.
A similar effect occurs on the level of individual traits. Couple who carry genes that disproportionately affect the reproductive success of one sex tend to have more children of that sex. For example, someone did a study of Hollywood actors, and found out that 60% of their children are daughters - presumably because Hollywood actors are better-looking than average, and beauty benefits girls more than boys. Taller and more muscular parents tend to have more sons, etc.
And what's the mechanism for this, since everyone knows sex is carried on the male's Y-chromosome, and women shouldn't be able to influence it? Sex-selective abortion. Apparently, females of most mammalian species will absorb the blastocyst into the womb (or otherwise abort very-early-stage fetuses) if environmental conditions aren't right for a child of that sex. So China and India are just using technology to do what biology has done for tens of millions of years.
I'm having trouble finding the source (it was in the NYTimes a few months ago), but China has also undertaken a pretty sizable PR campaign encouraging people to have daughters to try and address the ridiculously skewed gender ratios, especially in rural areas (sometimes as high as 2:1 for males).
It's worth noting that the practice of the groom's family paying the bride's family is nothing new in China - at least according to my flatmates from Hong Kong. The rationale is that the parents invested time and money into their daughter's upbringing, but since she's leaving their family to join the groom's, she won't be supporting them in their old years. There's still no pension system in HK - there's one in mainland China though.
I don't want to start a war with you. But in the interest of calm, reasoned discussion...
Can't we agree that the most important bit is actually after the first part of the article, where it states that:
* Once she and Ray broke down the numbers by age group, they found that the majority of excess female deaths came later in life: 66 per cent in India, 55 per cent in China and 83 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.*
They are dying after childbirth, after toddlerhood, because of unequal access to food, medical care and other social services. In China, not only have they tended to undervalue potential daughters, but women kill themselves at a higher rate than men. And in India, full-grown women are being tortured to death because their families have not paid the dowry.
It's interesting how the article implied all the things you write - but without actually saying any of them, since they are not supported by their own research.
The number of suicides and kitchen fires is in the 10s of thousands, but the number of missing is in the 10s of millions. That is less than a 1/10 of a percent.
Notice they did not once actually say how the vast majority died. My personal belief is they died in childbirth, since before modern medical care that is unfortunately a common thing (and in those counties that care is not available to either gender).
Of course that belies their argument about discrimination causing it. This is one of those articles where they go in with the conclusion they want: "discrimination" and then look for facts to support it.
Notice at the end how they ask:
"How often are men given mosquito nets to protect themselves from malaria, but not women? How many women die because they are not taken to the hospital when they are sick?"
They ask that, and thus imply it - but never actually show that it's actually the case.
It's a masterful job over all. Not too many people can write like that, implying so many things, and leaving such a picture in peoples minds, without ever actually saying any of those things.
Societies with more men than women are violent, and start wars.
True. Then again, higher numbers of women make a greater contribution to overpopulation. Decreasing the number of women might screw the next generation and sort out the one after that. That's probably an outrageous view, but so's your point.
The resources of the solar system are infinite, in any sense that matters.
The resources of our planet, however, are not. Do you see a significant number of humans moving off our planet within a couple generations? I admit it's possible, but are you willing to gamble on that?
Oddly enough the resources of the planet have never been greater. Measure available resources per person over history and the graph only points up. Somehow we seem to find what we need when we need it.
Keep in mind that the earth is a closed system - none of the resources are ever lost. You just have to find where they went, and get them again. And the more we need, the better we are at finding them.
The only real input is energy, and that too is infinite. Nuclear power (with reprocessing) can last us for centuries, and I'm sure we'll figure out fusion before that runs out.
I'm an optimist too, but there are a few statistics less pleasant. The average person in developed countries consumes over 10 times what somebody in poorer countries consumes (I won't look up the exact number right now... I remember 30 from the last source but I think 10 is reasonable). I'm talking about resources available with our current technology. We still have to grow crops for calories and forests for wood.
Anyways, if more countries are to reach developed status then no matter how you look at it we have a problem. It's not the apocalypse, but we'll feel it.
Some resources are not very scalable, with our technology at least. Oil is much discussed, but wood is probably less easy to replace. And by far the most important is arable surface. Every food (except fish, which is already not doing so well) depends ultimately on cultivated land. Eating bread and cheese takes a lot less space then eating beef or pork - but the final currency is still surface. And that is not unlimited.
There are other resources too. Every technology consumes some amount of hard-to-replace materials. There are a lot of rare metals in a computer or a monitor. So far the market absorbed any shortages, but imagine a 10x increase and suddenly high prices due to lack of basic materials don't seem impossible.
Even iron is not unlimited. Wikipedia says we have 800 million cars on the roads. Make that 3 billion and you start scraping for steel. Aluminium too. Pretty much everything we mine will see sharp increases in price sooner or later - and it would be very unlikely _not_ to run out of something with a 2x or 3x increase in consumption.
You are assuming we will only use the iron once. But actually iron is reused multiple times, the same can be true for rare metals - especially once energy becomes cheap enough that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_waste_disposal becomes economical.
What made you think I assume we will use the iron only once? We already reuse it pretty well, that's not the problem. It's simply that 3 billion cars is a lot more then 800 million, and 10 billion computers is a lot more then 1 billion. No matter how well you reuse, you still have greater numbers _at the same time_.
No offence, but at this point I suspect you are not very intellectually honest. I said at the beginning I do not believe this to be a huge problem - solutions will come. But I do not understand your insistence that there is no problem at all.
I don't think you realize just how big the planet is.
And iron is a bad example anyway: the entire planet is made of metal (rock is a metal oxide, usually silicon but plenty of others also).
There are things that we don't have enough of, but if there is a shortage of one element a substitute will be found (for example graphite in pencils, it was available in just one mine which ran out, and a substitute was found).
I did some napkin calculations once. Try it too. Take available land surface (wikipedia or somewhere else) and divide it by population. Then compute the side of the square this surface represents. Take out living space and roads and rivers and lakes and mountains waste land and garbage land and... well, just do the division and you'll see what i mean.
There seems to be limited space, though, not for agriculture, but for actual living. Granted, if we could put all humans into little boxes of 2m^2 and somehow attach life support systems to them and stack those boxes, a lot of them might fit on the planet. Forgive me if I don't consider that a desirable scenario (unless virtual reality makes up for it).
I guess one reason for the success of The Matrix was that it was essentially true ;-)
Edit: to explain, we DO live in a simulated reality, in reality we are stuck in a tiny space with some wires to the outside world. The difference to the Matrix scenario is that we carry the computers doing the simulation around with us (our brains) - or at least so we think.
Hm, thinking again - what about those messages about "fishing grounds becoming depleted" and stuff? Maybe "available resources" can be defined in lots of different ways, and pure energy/person is not the only relevant measurement?
>"Overpopulation" is a phrase used by folks who see humanity as a problem.
We're not talking about overpopulation of the planet; we're talking about a limited geographic area with finite amount of resources. Who cares that Jupiter has valuable hyrdocarbons when your village is starving?
I don't like the idea of abortions based on gender either, but changing societal beliefs of gender differences/inferiority/discrimination in the long term will be more helpful than the knee-jerk "no abortions!"/"no abortions by gender!" reaction. The latter just hurts the women that do need abortions for a medically necessary reason, whatever it happens to be. The former will be longer-term and may not be appealing to someone who is pro-life (uh, whatever that label is supposed to mean), but will also help with the far greater issues involving violence and death of adult women as mentioned in the article linked.
Isn't it more concerning that people have to resort to abortion? I doubt anybody actually likes to do it. Therefore I doubt that morals will help much - there is probably an upper limit of the price that morals can induce on abortion. Just as there seems to be an upper limit to the deterrent to crime that the death penalty can provide.
Contrary to what you might expect, Anderson says, dowry prices have not dropped off with improvements in education in India. Instead, they have gotten worse, with educated brides and their families willing to pay even more for high-quality grooms.
Wasn't there a story here from a couple of days ago, on how expensive it is for the groom's family to get a bride in China these days?
I find it appalling that they dare present this as news. This has been known for at least two decades. If they want to draw attention to it, they should at least be honest about their own failure to do so earlier and not try to pat themselves on the back for reporting it. Bah.
38 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 95.3 ms ] threadAnderson asked villagers about selective abortions and found them open about the fact that they use ultrasound to determine the baby's gender and help them decide whether or not to keep it.
I'm pro-life. I realize that not everyone is. I think that everyone, though, can be concerned that large segments of humanity are testing unborn children for "undesirable" traits and aborting them. We're facing a demographic timebomb.
Societies with more men than women are violent, and start wars.
Curiously, the sex ratio can get skewed by environmental conditions, in a manner similar to what you describe. Men have more reproductive variability than women - the number of children a woman can bear is largely limited by her uterus, while the number of children a man can bear is limited by the number of women he can convince to sleep with him. So when times are good, or if a mother is high-status within her particular group, she tends to bear more sons to take advantage of their reproductive success. While when times are lean, mothers tend to bear more daughters.
A similar effect occurs on the level of individual traits. Couple who carry genes that disproportionately affect the reproductive success of one sex tend to have more children of that sex. For example, someone did a study of Hollywood actors, and found out that 60% of their children are daughters - presumably because Hollywood actors are better-looking than average, and beauty benefits girls more than boys. Taller and more muscular parents tend to have more sons, etc.
And what's the mechanism for this, since everyone knows sex is carried on the male's Y-chromosome, and women shouldn't be able to influence it? Sex-selective abortion. Apparently, females of most mammalian species will absorb the blastocyst into the womb (or otherwise abort very-early-stage fetuses) if environmental conditions aren't right for a child of that sex. So China and India are just using technology to do what biology has done for tens of millions of years.
Can't we agree that the most important bit is actually after the first part of the article, where it states that:
* Once she and Ray broke down the numbers by age group, they found that the majority of excess female deaths came later in life: 66 per cent in India, 55 per cent in China and 83 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.*
They are dying after childbirth, after toddlerhood, because of unequal access to food, medical care and other social services. In China, not only have they tended to undervalue potential daughters, but women kill themselves at a higher rate than men. And in India, full-grown women are being tortured to death because their families have not paid the dowry.
That sounds a lot worse to me.
The number of suicides and kitchen fires is in the 10s of thousands, but the number of missing is in the 10s of millions. That is less than a 1/10 of a percent.
Notice they did not once actually say how the vast majority died. My personal belief is they died in childbirth, since before modern medical care that is unfortunately a common thing (and in those counties that care is not available to either gender).
Of course that belies their argument about discrimination causing it. This is one of those articles where they go in with the conclusion they want: "discrimination" and then look for facts to support it.
Notice at the end how they ask:
"How often are men given mosquito nets to protect themselves from malaria, but not women? How many women die because they are not taken to the hospital when they are sick?"
They ask that, and thus imply it - but never actually show that it's actually the case.
It's a masterful job over all. Not too many people can write like that, implying so many things, and leaving such a picture in peoples minds, without ever actually saying any of those things.
True. Then again, higher numbers of women make a greater contribution to overpopulation. Decreasing the number of women might screw the next generation and sort out the one after that. That's probably an outrageous view, but so's your point.
"Overpopulation" is a phrase used by folks who see humanity as a problem.
The more people we have, the more minds we have.
The resources of the solar system are infinite, in any sense that matters.
The more minds we have working on our problems, the better.
The resources of our planet, however, are not. Do you see a significant number of humans moving off our planet within a couple generations? I admit it's possible, but are you willing to gamble on that?
Keep in mind that the earth is a closed system - none of the resources are ever lost. You just have to find where they went, and get them again. And the more we need, the better we are at finding them.
The only real input is energy, and that too is infinite. Nuclear power (with reprocessing) can last us for centuries, and I'm sure we'll figure out fusion before that runs out.
Anyways, if more countries are to reach developed status then no matter how you look at it we have a problem. It's not the apocalypse, but we'll feel it.
There is not a fixed amount that can be produced. More counties developing will mean more consumption, but also more production.
There are other resources too. Every technology consumes some amount of hard-to-replace materials. There are a lot of rare metals in a computer or a monitor. So far the market absorbed any shortages, but imagine a 10x increase and suddenly high prices due to lack of basic materials don't seem impossible.
Even iron is not unlimited. Wikipedia says we have 800 million cars on the roads. Make that 3 billion and you start scraping for steel. Aluminium too. Pretty much everything we mine will see sharp increases in price sooner or later - and it would be very unlikely _not_ to run out of something with a 2x or 3x increase in consumption.
No offence, but at this point I suspect you are not very intellectually honest. I said at the beginning I do not believe this to be a huge problem - solutions will come. But I do not understand your insistence that there is no problem at all.
And iron is a bad example anyway: the entire planet is made of metal (rock is a metal oxide, usually silicon but plenty of others also).
There are things that we don't have enough of, but if there is a shortage of one element a substitute will be found (for example graphite in pencils, it was available in just one mine which ran out, and a substitute was found).
Edit: to explain, we DO live in a simulated reality, in reality we are stuck in a tiny space with some wires to the outside world. The difference to the Matrix scenario is that we carry the computers doing the simulation around with us (our brains) - or at least so we think.
No, no, no. The rest of humanity is a problem. I'm perfectly fine.
We're not talking about overpopulation of the planet; we're talking about a limited geographic area with finite amount of resources. Who cares that Jupiter has valuable hyrdocarbons when your village is starving?
Historically humans did massive migrations, and animals still do.
Wasn't there a story here from a couple of days ago, on how expensive it is for the groom's family to get a bride in China these days?