New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | March 30, 2005

Oh my, walking by, who's the apple of the House of Commons' eye? Ron Bailey discovers it's their very own clonie.

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|3.30.05 @ 11:01AM|#

"no adequate justification for prohibiting the use of sex selection for family balancing."

Does your opinion change if the desired balance is all boys? Or all girls? Allowing sex-selection can lead to significant alterations in the sex-ratio of the population. It's illegal in China, but still very effective.

The simple practice of having children until you achieve the desired result (e.g. 1 boy after a string of girls, or no girls if the first is a boy) can have dramatic effects across the population, and you want to encourage a more efficient method? If you are going to endorse sex selection, you're going to have to argue that either this isn't a big problem, or that it's an unfortunate consequence of personal liberty.

|3.30.05 @ 1:34PM|#

bubba, sex selection is not a big problem in the West ... when people are polled, on average there is no bias towards selecting for a particular sex. Family balancing is mentioned b/c that's what most people want to use sex selection for.

|3.30.05 @ 1:44PM|#

China's current problem with an imbalance of young males in the population vs. young females is because of TOO MUCH social engineering, not the lack thereof.

nmg

|3.30.05 @ 2:41PM|#

Nellie McKay rules!

|3.30.05 @ 3:51PM|#

"'If ensuring that your child is less likely to face a debilitating disease in the course of their [sic] life can be termed eugenics, we have no problem with its use.'" (alteration in original)

The use of the word "their" as a gender neutral first-person pronoun is perfectly correct: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html

|3.30.05 @ 4:15PM|#

Heh, I just got back from London where this story got a lot of play, which isn't surprising considering there's an election coming up.

There was definitely a strong reaction somewhat against the initial report which limited sex selection to specific IVF cases, and now they come out with and even stronger report. It's nice to see that firmly reject the 100% safety crowd which have done nothing but impede progress and literally keep people starving. The slippery slope can be used to deny almost any action in any area, and it's been retarding biotech that could have a beneficial effect on millions for far too long.

That said, "family balancing"? What the fuck does that mean? Can I balance height, weight, eye color etc. as well as sex? Look, I'm all for proceeding with cloning research and this report is a good step in the direction of scientific sanity. While I'm not sold either way on the matter of choosing physical characteristics of children such as sex, eye color etc., it seems to me that this notion of "family balancing" ultimately has little to do with actual cloning research. Let's start making some progress before we go selling kids-made-to-order.

As for China and the abort-female-fetus syndrome, which is ultimately due to the child-cap, I say let them sex-select themselves out of existence if they want to. I mean, what harm could a billion angry, sexually frustrated, young men really do?

|3.30.05 @ 9:43PM|#

Man, 6 comments, does no one care about science? It almost makes me long for the days when I was in the biz. These reports are going to be a huge contributer to the UK election, and therefore the world. Quite literally, the fate of future scientific research will be decided by Europe, and the election in the UK is monumental for the entire world (depending on the various referendums on the EU constitution).

|3.30.05 @ 11:33PM|#

Bubba says
"""
The simple practice of having children until you achieve the desired result (e.g. 1 boy after a string of girls, or no girls if the first is a boy) can have dramatic effects across the population,
"""

I'm not sure what effects he had in mind. One effect this can *not* have is to change the gender balance within a population. If someone has told Bubba that this could cause a gender imbalance, he should correct them. I think a simulation is more motivating than a proof here so

#! /usr/bin/env python
"""
Tested on Python 2.4. Should work with 2.2+ (whenever False became a keyword).
"""
from random import randint as next

counts = [[0,0],[0,0]] # [[girlsRule0, boysRule0], [girlsRule1, boysRule1]]
population = 100000

for i in range(population):
done = [False, False]
donedone=False
while not donedone: # keep making babies till donedone
n = next(0,1)
if not done[0]: # keep counting till 1st boy
counts[0][n] += 1
done[0] = (n == 1) # Stop with 1st boy rule
if not done[1]: # keep counting till random stop
counts[1][n] += 1
done[1] = (next(0,1) == 0) # Stop on coin flip rule
donedone = done[0] and done[1]

print "Stop at 1st boy rule # girls %d" %(counts[0][0])
print "Stop at 1st boy rule # boys %d" %(counts[0][1])
print "Stop after random # girls %d" %(counts[1][0])
print "Stop after random # boys %d" %(counts[1][1])