Male extinction: is this good news for the planet?
By Harry Fuller
Believers in Gaia might say this is the Earth’s revenge. I can’t quote what my wife said. And my ex-wife, well, fergeddaboutit. Scientists say it’s simply biochemistry.
Men are becoming rarer, perhaps slipping slowly into extinction. Cryogenic sperm banks could become a huge growth industry. So could the export of male babies.
First, this note…one Greenland village now produces only girl babies. The blame goes to PCBs and other man-made pollutants that get concentrated in the blubber of the arctic mammals the Inuit eat. That’s not an isolatred case. From Alaska eastward around the North Pole to Siberia the trend is the same. And recent studies have shown a drop in male to female birth ratios in Japan and U.S. as well.
It’s not just water-borne pollution lowering the number of male babies. Modern life is loaded in favor of girl babies as well. Another study in Europe found stress during pregnancy increases the chance the mother will have a girl baby.
1 comment:
I wonder if this finding suggests that women simply handle stress with more competence. I like to think so. :-)
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