Overview
- A systematic account about human sex-ratio at birth : facts and theories since the 18th century
- An attempt to deal with randomness from a foundational perspective in social sciences
- An analysis of the variability of the proportion of the sexes at birth, one of the main current demographic phenomena, in similar terms for Asian or western countries, for nowadays and for the three past centuries
- History of mathematics, history of biology and history of social sciences in a concrete interplay
Part of the book series: Methodos Series (METH, volume 4)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Since the 18th century, one phenomenon, the proportion of the sexes at birth among human beings, has contributed to various developments such as the calculus of probabilities, administrative statistics, the moral and social sciences, the statistics of variability, post-Darwinian biology and Durkheimian sociology. This fact is brought to the critical attention of readers who rarely work together -- mathematicians, biologists, historians, social scientists and historians of the sciences -- along a three centuries European journey, meeting Süssmilch, Condorcet, Laplace, Fourier, Girou de Buzareingues, Poisson, Quetelet, Darwin, Düsing, Gini, Halbwachs or Fisher.
After a deconstruction of the past and present conditions of scientific understanding of human sex-ratio at birth, the authors are proposing a reconstruction of the dynamics of the phenomenon based on stochastics. This is an attempt in renewing our links with the oldest traditions of scholarly thinking, but too a kind of "well-tempered" reflexivity in today’s work of objectivization.
Appendixes get to the reader the first expression of a trend of the sex ratio at birth to adjust towards balance between the sexes by Condorcet in 1793-1794 ; a comparison of passages that Darwin devoted in 1871 and 1874 to similar issues ; and a sociological attempt of Halbwachs published in 1933.
Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Descent of Human Sex Ratio at Birth
Book Subtitle: A Dialogue between Mathematics, Biology and Sociology
Authors: Éric Brian, Marie Jaisson
Series Title: Methodos Series
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6036-6
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-6035-9Published: 26 July 2007
Softcover ISBN: 978-90-481-7511-6Published: 18 November 2010
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4020-6036-6Published: 24 July 2007
Series ISSN: 1572-7750
Series E-ISSN: 2542-9892
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 258
Topics: Social Sciences, general, Sociology, general, Gender Studies, History of Science, Probability Theory and Stochastic Processes, Methodology of the Social Sciences