Rob Brooks does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. People often ask me whether natural selection continues to operate on modern humans in industrialised societies, even though technology has liberated so many from hunger and early death. A recently published paper illustrates a dramatic episode of selection that happened in China a mere 50 years ago, the effects of which continue to reverberate through Chinese society. A dramatic graph see below from the paper caught my attention. It shows the sex ratio of babies to women in China between and The data came from a massive retrospective survey of the fertility of , women.

Try out PMC Labs and tell us what you think. Learn More. Chinese demographers are warning that the nation's social fabric could unravel under pressure from an increasingly skewed sex ratio in newborns.

Her captor, a man surnamed Deng, fathered a boy now about four or five years old and has been charged with rape, the Shanghai-based news site Thepaper. Her family never let police know that she was missing, the report said. Her father had left the family years ago, according to the report. At the time, her mother, Li Ailing, had been serving a prison sentence for economic crimes. It was not until Li was released in July that she learned her daughter had been missing for four years.