This is just a quick post, and it’s mainly to draw your attention to a couple of other posts worth reading elsewhere.
A little background: there’s been a minor fuss* in the media over the last few days concerning sex-specific abortion**, after The Independent reported that
[t]he practice of sex-selective abortion is now so commonplace that it has affected the natural 50:50 balance of boys to girls within some immigrant groups and has led to the “disappearance” of between 1,400 and 4,700 females from the national census records of England and Wales, we can reveal.
Now, there’s something a bit fishy about the article even on its own terms: alarm bells should be got ringing by this:
[O]ur deeper statistical analysis of data from the 2011 National Census has shown widespread discrepancies in the sex ratio of children in some immigrant families, which can only be easily explained by women choosing to abort female foetuses in the hope of becoming quickly pregnant again with a boy.
After all, it does seem to reduce to a claim along the lines that “I can’t think of a better explanation than e for phenomenon p, therefore e obtains” – but that tells us far more about the limits of the speaker’s imagination than about the state of the world. Besides, while there are good reasons to favour the most simple explanation of p, one ought to keep a distinction between the simple and the simplistic. Bluntly, an easy explanation isn’t any more likely to be true by dint of being easy. E=mc2 is simple once you’ve derived it, but its derivation isn’t easy.
But how reliable is the Indy‘s analysis anyway? I’ve not gone through the data myself, but Unity has, and has a couple of really good posts: the first is here, and the followup is here.
They’re very worth the read – but I recommend that you make yourself a good cup of tea before starting them. They’re looooooong. I’d be interested to know what others think, though.
UPDATE: There’s even more. I think Unity’s enjoying himself with this.
* Minor in the sense that it’s been eclipsed by things like Oscar nominations.
** Here’s Christina Odone, for example, blaming it all on feminism. Surprised? You could knock me down with a bulldozer.