by Patrick Appel
Doctor Science says that, evolutionarly speaking, there should be a social bias towards daughters, not sons, because "mammals, by definition, need milk to get through infancy, which makes the female's role exceptionally crucial." Her addition to the sex-selective abortion debate:
Unbalanced sex ratios IMO occur because, in many societies across time & space, children are social security more than they are offspring. Faced with a choice between having support in old age and grandchildren, people generally choose the support and ditch the grandchildren. From an evolutionary POV, human awareness of our impending old age makes us too smart for our own reproductive good.
There's an actual bright side to this view of sex-selection. It turns out to be much easier and faster to remove the pressure for an unbalanced sex ratio than I would have expected. If a society has a real, non-familial social security system, the sex ratio can snap back to 1:1 in only a generation.
The post is well worth reading in full. Earlier thoughts on this subject here, here, here, and here.
The Dish 