Unnatural Selection

Unnatural Selection:

"The link to technology was alarming, for it meant that India’s skewed sex ratio at birth was an outgrowth of economic progress, not backward traditions. And India was hardly alone in recently developing a sex ratio imbalance. As he expanded his focus from fertility rates to sex ratio at birth, Guilmoto found that several other Asian countries exceeded the biological upper limit of 106 boys born for every 100 girls. In the 1980s, South Korea, Taiwan and parts of Singapore registered sex ratios at birth of above 109. China reported a sex ratio at birth of 117 in 2000. (Figures in both China and India later rose to 118 and 112, respectively.) Humans, Guilmoto realised, were engineering what he calls “rampant demographic masculinisation”—a change with potentially grave effects for future generations. “It was very difficult,” he recalled, “not to see it as a revolution.”"