Unnatural Selection and Predicting the Future

I met Isaac Asimov once.  The writer and scientist was speaking (along with Carl Sagan) at a National Science Teachers’ Convention in Washington, D.C.  By a stroke of luck, I ended up in conversation with both of them.  Wanting to say something other than the typical, “I love your books.”  I turned all of my attention to Isaac Asimov and said, “You have no idea how many hours of pleasure you’ve given me.”  Asimov looked me up and down with unabashed lasciviousness and said, “If only I could remember them.” 

            Besides being a quick wit, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) was a trained scientist, prolific writer, and prescient intellect.    Born in Russia to Orthodox Jewish parents, he immigrated to the United States at the age of three.  Here he became an American success story.  Raised on hard work and education, he became an author of hundreds of books; invented the word, “robot” for his works of fiction, and created a future that, eerily, seems to be coming true.  Asimov’s I, Robot series talks about people communicating almost exclusively through electronic social media, eschewing human contact.  The humans sport artificial knees, hips, wrists and other body parts.  Asimov’s talent for predicting the future through science-fiction is an uncanny ability of many great sci-fi writers.  Edgar Rice Burroughs was writing about John Carter on Mars even before he wrote about Tarzan.  In Burroughs first book he describes, in technical perfection, a laser decades before the first one was built.  These things and many more, come from the writers of science fiction.  They see the future.  They think about what might happen and write about it.  They take an idea and think it through to its imaginative end.

            Clearly, there are people in positions of authority now who lack the same ability.  They can’t (or won’t) see farther than their immediate prejudices or philosophies.  They can’t project a line to see where it leads.  They don’t think things through.  I point to the phenomenon of unnatural selection.

            Almost 40 years ago, China instituted a policy of, “one family/one child.”  Limited to only one child, the Chinese began systematically aborting female babies.  The natural ratio of male to female births is 105 to 100.  Nature produces slightly more males because they have a higher natural mortality.  In China the male to female ratio is now around 120 to 100.  In India, with similar preferences for males, the ratio is up to 113 to 100.  Even in this country, the birth of a girl as a first child increases the chances that subsequent females will be aborted in preference for a male.  This is unnatural selection.  It is sexist.  It will lead to a male dominated society where women are treated more and more like breeders and less like equals.  Oh, wait, Margaret Atwood wrote about that in here sci-fi book, The Handmaid’s Tale!

            What bothers me even more than the long range danger of aborting female fetuses but carrying male ones is that the same people and groups who are most adamant in their support of abortion as, “a woman’s right” are silent on the issue of terminating pregnancies on the basis of gender.  These people may say they are feminists, intent on empowering women, but that is just crap.  What they are really in favor of is men getting their way with compliant women, without having to bear any responsibility for their actions.  If what you really want is women’s rights, you have to start with the right to be born. 

            Think it through, and keep the faith.