Crackpot theories

I've never understood how some people get paid to do some of the idiotic studies or surveys they do. The other day this AP article on Yahoo caught my eye: Some Asian families in US choosing sons. According to the people who did the research, some Asian families with three kids were more likely to have a boy as the third kid if the two previous kids were girls. Which means that they are obviously aborting girls if they found out they were having one and kept trying until they had a boy. Obviously. I mean, how could you NOT come up with that conclusion?

Well, I paid the seriously overpriced 10 bucks to access (for two days only) the measly 1.2 page article from the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences", and I just have to say, how is it that there are people out there who have no jobs, but there are idiots like this that get paid to do frivolous research like this? I can see why it may be interesting to see that third children with two older girl siblings are more likely to be boys in certain Asian families, but it's unclear to me whether the sampling of data was accurate and actually yields results that you could call a trend. According to the graphs on the overpriced article, only 324 families out of 11,553 Asian families have kids that follow the girl-girl-boy trend. It doesn't sound like a lot to make it a generality. All this data was taken from the 2000 US Census, and chopped down until they came up with a sampling of families that matched their criteria (must be of Chinese, Korean, or Asian Indian descent, must have only children under 12 years old...) I wonder if they didn't narrow down their data pool, how different the results would have been.

What bothered me the most about this alleged study was the theory they came up with to support the high ratio of boy births as the second or third child after girls. They said that this was likely due to the use of pre-natal sex selection, like early ultrasounds or other tests to determine gender and subsequent abortion of a girl fetus in order to have a boy. Where did they come up with this crackpot theory? Do they actually have any evidence at all, maybe even an informal survey among Asian people in those groups to see if they would even consider it? As an Asian-American person myself, I am deeply offended that people would create this illusion that just because there have been things like China's "one child policy" and a fashionable trend of white people adopting babies from Korea and China, that you can immediately assume that people of those races living in the United States would have the same mentality and even think about aborting a kid just because it didn't turn out to be a boy? I mean if that WERE the case and Asians were doing this in the US, why would they have waited for the third kid? You think they would have put it in the hands of chance the first two times around, and the third time, they would say, "aw screw it, let's just abort it and start again." As a third female child after two older female siblings, I am highly offended that someone would even consider the possibility that my parents would have done that sort of thing (obviously they weren't successful, otherwise I would have been a boy).

Now I realize that there are disclaimers in the article mentioning that they had no hard evidence of this "sex selection" practice being done, and that they really weren't suggesting it, but it sounds like to them, it's the only natural explanation. Is it? Why wouldn't they have come up with the natural explanation that maybe these Asian families were highly evolutionarily superior and in order to maintain the normal evolutionary 1:1 sex ratio, their gametes decided after producing two girls, it was time to produce a male? Why would they immediately jump to the conclusion that the only way for this to possibly happen is if they killed off the girl fetuses and just kept trying over and over until they had a boy? It sickens me that people would even write something like that in a scientific journal without having ANY factual basis whatsoever. But it doesn't surprise me at all, the way this world is today.