‘No girls born’ for past three months in area of India covering 132 villages
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Suppose a village has a birth rate of 8 babies a year (2 babies every 3 months). There's (roughly) a 50% chance the babies will be male and female, 25% chance that they're both female and 25% chance that they're both male.
That means that if you're sampling from a district that has 1,000 villages (with the average birth rate of 2 babies / 3 months, roughly the birth rate indicated by the article), one quarter of the villages will have 2 male babies - that's 250 villages with 0 female babies born in the last 3 months.
Not making any claims regarding foeticide in India - just saying that the way they chose the villages matters a lot.
1,000 births (a random guess) with 50% chance of girl, never happening once?
yikes
If I flipped 216 coins, the exact sequence that I get back also has a probability of 9e-66.
If I flipped 532 coins, the probability that I get any specific subset that share the same side is the sum of all probability that gives that result.
What we know is that 132 out 694 villages, with the average number of born children for 3 months being 1.6, had zero girls. The other 562 villages with unknown average of children had girls. As such we can conclude that the probability must be the sum of all sequences of births that results in 132 out of 694 villages having exactly no girls born under the period of 3 months.
The probability of the 132 villages is thus undefined as we simply do not have enough data on the spectrum of sequences. Based on the global census of 943 females per 1,000 males we can suspect a bias and create a ball park guess, but there is simply not enough to say an exact number like 9e-66.
You don't have to guess, it's right there in the first sentence of the article. There have been 216 births, so about 1.6 per village, which makes having zero female birth statistically normal in each village individually, but possibly not over the whole area if these villages are all in the same area.
You can find the census for Uttarkashi district at https://cdn.s3waas.gov.in/s3ef575e8837d065a1683c022d2077d342...
Page 12 says there are 694 villages and 330,086 people in the district.
[0] https://numbersofindia.github.io/stories/population-06-2019/...
Simply put, there are not enough women to go around.
I suspect this leads to lots of overly fierce competition for women. Women treated more as precious commodities and less as human beings. Men lacking experience dealing with women. A certain percentage of men being unhappy much of the time because finding a mate is frustrating, or they've simply given up on it.
This is only conjecture but it's hard to imagine it being otherwise.
- sexual frustration, which is already booming in India, could increase tenfold. Sexually frustrated males can lead to being apathetic or aggressive, none of which is good for society.
- more competition means bigger delta between the winners and the losers. And they already have a large money gap. Making this difference wider can only build more social tensions.
- not a biologist, but I imagine this affects the gene pool, and overall (including social) diversity as well. -
I wouldn't worry about gene pool diversity in India (I agree with the first two statements though):
,,A 2005 study from Rutgers University theorized that the pre-1492 native populations of the Americas are the descendants of only 70 individuals who crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America.''
https://caravanmagazine.in/science-technology/what-genetics-...
There are nearly 700 villages in the district, and most of them are small enough to have <2 births in the given time frame.
Out of all those villages they just picked the ones which happened to have had no females. It is no coincidence, whoever did the study clearly knew what they were doing and cherry picked the data to sensationalize. You could do the same to any other similar sized district and get the same results.
There does seem to be something going on. According to Wikipedia only 43% of the population of the region are female.
If 63 million women are statistically missing from the Indian population, I think it's pretty clear possible outliers like this need investigating, not denigrating.
That's something we should be doing more.
Even non-expert should read the study and not comment on news articles.
Think about it. If there is no expert in the room, then nothing is lost by openly trying to reason out the truth of the matter and seeing what sticks to the fly paper of reality. This is how new experts form.
If there is an expert in the room, they will be more than happy to point out issues, and attempt to offer points to guide the intellectual endeavor within the bounds of their expertise. This is also how new experts take shape.
The knowledge wielded by an expert is what makes them an expert. We call it expertise.
It is not the fact they are an expert that makes their knowledge expertise. The knowledge needs no particular person to prove itself useful.
An appeal to personal credentials as the primary determined as to the veracity of an argument is known as an appeal to authority, which is a very common fallacy.
The info in the article isn't a study, it barely even summarises a study, and I'm willing to go out on a limb and say the commenter hasn't read the actual study. If so saying "this study isn't it" isn't simply an opinion, it's misrepresentation.
However it quotes local officials who did do the study and have the detailed analysis saying there's a serious problem that warrants further investigation. They may be right or they may be wrong. Saying on the basis of what's here that the study is definitively bad or good isn't warranted though. That's all I'm saying.
IAAS (Ignorance As A Service).
No thanks.
But yeah India is not a great place for girls and women. That's changing bit by bit in the more advanced places but it's such a vast country with so many backward regions that the laggards will come along very slowly.
https://caravanmagazine.in/science-technology/what-genetics-...
"People tend to think of India, with its more than 1.3 billion people, as having a tremendously large population"
and
"The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations"
(There is incredibly little marrying outside ones own group.)
Even if you cherry pick data, what even is probability of getting consecutive 216 heads on a coin toss? It is amazing that Indians here are acting as if female infanticide/foeticide is not a big menace in India.
I think the accusation here is that what happened is someone asked a couple hundred people to do two coin tosses, then grouped together those who got both heads and called it a statistical anomaly.
That is very different from the distribution of the sex of babies. Regions end up with skewed demographics for various reasons like distant factories, war, etc.
But if these villages represent a contiguous area, then it is alarming. The article doesn't really give enough information to say anything about this really.
> The 132 villages where no girls were born over three months have all been marked as part of a “red zone”, which means local data will be scrutinised more closely and health workers have been asked to be vigilant.
The "red zone" is not a single area, it's a black list.
They have 1.3 billions of people, living under an unbelievable social pressure (casts, diversity, religion, money...), on a land saturated by pollution with less and less water to drink.
Reading this article, it seems possible they are running toward a gender crisis as well. Sex frustration is already a terrible thing there, and a big source of trouble. If this proves right, I don't see a way for it to end well.
Now add on top of that they have very unstable borders and the nuclear weapon, and we got all the ingredients for something bad to happen.
If we assume girls are not preferred in the two most populous countries in the world (China, India) and their societies have a lower ratio of females to males, then the global trend of 1:1.08 female to male ratio must be skewed in a similar way somewhere else? right? Or does this account for that?
In other news, I thought we were headed for a different problem[0].
[0]: http://theconversation.com/the-y-chromosome-is-disappearing-...
It's skewed everywhere simply by the fact that women live to be older. When looking at people under 30, the male skew is even worse. Here's a population pyramid for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India#/media/File:Indien_Bev%C...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/cgvumc/we_need...
How applicable it will be in the modern context is another story as ancients didn't have the degree of interconnectedness, offense/defense asymmetry of weapon superiority, or the "play nice or else" of Pax Atomica which has kept Pakistan and India shockingly civil even with terrorist attacks, border skirmishes, and similiar incidents.
There are a lot of things horrible about christian missionaries but their internet propaganda division is killing it.
If you think a story is bad for the site, the thing to do is flag it, not post comments that only make things worse. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Would you mind reviewing them?
Edit: you've posted nationalistic flamebait in the past too, unfortunately. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't.
I didnt intend for religious flamewar. It is my position that these news are sponsored by christian missionaries. I thought reporting the same in comments is the best way to highlight it. How else do you suggest I claim my position ?
Not sure which of my posts constitute nationalistic flamebait. If you could highlight ill try to steer clear. Thx.
It's a sober reminder of the feel good cultural relativism propped up by some