Awesome students

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Student Research on War, Health, and Biology

With grades submitted earlier this week, the Spring 2011 semester is officially in the books. In my ANTH 324 class, “A Biocultural Approach to War,” students were required to write a literature review paper on the ways that war impacts human biology and health.

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In my opinion, research papers are valuable in upper level undergraduate classes because they give students the freedom to pick a topic of their choice, within the boundaries of class goals. While it seems self-evident that war’s effects on biology are negative, this relationship is not always straightforward for every possible outcome variable. Thus, it is necessary to explore the evidence thoroughly.   

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The Sex Ratio at Birth Following Periods of Conflict

Note: this paper was written by UMass Boston undergraduate student Johnny Xu for my Spring 2011 class ANTH 324: “A Biocultural Approach to War.” I asked his permission to post it here. 

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Birth Sex Ratio and Infant Mortality: Adaptations or By-products?

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1. Introduction

            The purpose of this paper is to provide manifold reasons attempting to explain why the birth sex ratio following war periods tend to rise in favor of males and what this implies in correlation with infant mortality; and, most of all, to answer the following question: is the combination of these findings proposing that this is an adaptive response of the parent to produce the sex with higher survival prospects in the given environment, or is this simply the by-product of environmental forces?

 

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