In "Where Have All the Boys Gone?" [News and Analysis, July], Mark Alpert reports on a recent paper by Devra Lee Davis about the decline in the male-to-female birth ratio in the U.S. between 1970 and 1990. Davis suggests that the declining ratio is a "sentinel health event" that warns of some environmental hazard. In fact, environmental factors are an unlikely cause. By all measures, the environment is cleaner now than in 1970. Furthermore, the drop between 1970 and 1990 is not unprecedented: the ratio fell faster in the mid-1940s through the late 1950s before rebounding in the 1960s. More pointedly, however, the male-to-female ratio among blacks has actually increased from the mid-1950s to 1994. To suggest that environmental factors are the cause of changes in the sex ratio would require suppositions about racial differences in the effects of these factorsãand that surely runs into Occam's razor.
MICHAEL GOUGH
Cato Institute
Washington, D.C.
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