The delay in childbearing is an important societal change contributing to an increasing incidence of subfertility. The prevailing concept of female reproductive ageing assumes that the decline of both quantity and quality of the oocyte/follicle pool determines an age-dependent loss of female fertility. There is an apparent discrepancy between the ability to maintain a regular ovulatory cycle pattern and the several years earlier cessation of female fertility. This latter is largely explained by an age-related increase of meiotic non-disjunction leading to chromosomal aneuploidy and early pregnancy loss, such that most embryos from women > or =40 years old are chromosomally abnormal and rarely develop further. The final stage of reproductive ageing-the occurrence of menopause-shows a huge variation between women. Age at last birth in natural fertility populations, which marks the end of female fertility, shows an identically wide variation as age at menopause, but occurs on average 10 years earlier. Given the high heritability for age at menopause, the variation in both age of menopause and last birth are probably under genetic control by the same set of genes. Some of those genes must carry heritable variants which modulate the rate of ovarian ageing and give rise to the wide age variations for the various phases of reproductive ageing.

The variability of female reproductive ageing

One of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification – the production and communication of numbers – as a general sociological phenomenon. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences in Europe and North America as well as humanistic inquiry, we articulate five sociological dimensions of quantification and call for an ethics of numbers.

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A Sociology of Quantification

Many champions of environmental accounting suggest that calculating and internalizing ‘externalities’ is the solution to environmental problems. Many critics of neoliberalism counter that the spread of market-like calculations into ‘non-market’ spheres, is, on the contrary, itself at the root of such problems. This article proposes setting aside this debate and instead closely examining the concrete conflicts, contradictions and resistances engendered by environmental accounting techniques and the perpetually incomplete efforts of accountants and their allies to overcome them. In particular, it explores how cost–benefit analysis and the carbon accounting techniques required by the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and other carbon trading mechanisms ‘frame’ new agents, spaces, relations and objects, and what the consequences have been and are likely to be.

Toward a different debate in environmental accounting: The cases of carbon and cost–benefit

The latter half of this century has seen an erosion in the perceived legitimacy of science as an impartial means of finding truth. Many research topics are the subject of highly politicized dispute; indeed, the objectivity of the entire discipline of psychology has been called into question. This essay examines attempts to use science to study science: specifically, bias in the interpretation and use of empirical research findings. I examine theory and research on a range of cognitive and motivational mechanisms for bias. Interestingly, not all biases are normatively proscribed; biased interpretations are defensible under some conditions, so long as those conditions are made explicit. I consider a variety of potentially corrective mechanisms, evaluate prospects for collective rationality, and compare inquisitorial and adversarial models of science.

Biases in the interpretation and use of research results.

QTL mapping in humans and rats has identified hundreds of blood-pressure-related phenotypes and genomic regions; the next daunting task is gene identification and validation. The development of novel rat model systems that mimic many elements of the human disease, coupled with advances in the genomic and informatic infrastructure for rats, promise to revolutionize the hunt for genes that determine susceptibility to hypertension. Furthermore, methods are evolving that should enable the identification of candidate genes in human populations. Together with the computational reconstruction of regulatory networks, these methods provide opportunities to significantly advance our understanding of the underlying aetiology of hypertension.

The genetic dissection of essential hypertension

This study undertaken for the National Committee for Research on the 1980 Census is one in a series of volumes concerned with analyses of the results of the 1980 U.S. census. The present volume differs from others in the series in that it focuses not on the data itself but on the governmental system of data collection and analysis. The focus here is on the social and political significance of decisions concerning data collection measurement interpretation and presentation. Part 1 on the politics of economic measurement contains chapters on the different views of economic statistics held by governmental political and academic professionals; the politics of income measurement; and the development of national income accounting. Part 2 is on the politics of population measurement; chapters are included on the 1980 census in historical perspective politics and the measurement of ethnicity and the social and political context of population forecasting. Part 3 focuses on the relationship between the functions of statistics and the characteristics of democratic politics. Part 4 deals with the connections between statistics and various levels of U.S. government. Part 5 contains chapters on technological developments and their consequences and on the rise of the statistical services industry.

The politics of numbers.

A very high prevalence (approximately 1/475 in 1985) of myotonic dystrophy (Steinert disease) is observed in the Saguenay region, which is located in the north-east part of the Province of Quebec. For various reasons, however, the literature on the subject generally associates a high degree of selective disadvantage with this gene, which seems to contradict the Saguenay data. Using a computerized regional population register, we have reconstituted patients' genealogies and family biographies. We have thus been able to study the origin of the gene and to compare the demographic behavior of patients and controls. On the whole, patients seem to be very little disadvantaged compared to controls, in terms of reproduction as well as of geographical and occupational mobility.

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Origin and diffusion of the myotonic dystrophy gene in the Saguenay region (Quebec).

The authors describe the BALSAC population register which includes the population of eastern Quebec from the beginning of French settlement in the seventeenth century up to the present time. They also describe two related systems INGRES which has been used to construct individual biographies genealogical pedigrees and cohorts; and INGRID which has been developed for more specialized purposes. (SUMMARY IN ENG) (ANNOTATION)

[Population files and database management: the BALSAC database and the INGRES/INGRID system].

La population du Saguenay se caracterise par une forte prevalence ou incidence de quelques maladies genetiques rares ou inexistantes ailleurs. Traditionnellement, ce phenomene a ete impute au fait que cette population regionale se serait developpee en vase clos, apres la mise en place d’une poignee de familles fondatrices aux environs de 1840. Les reconstitutions auxquelles se sont livres les auteurs ne corroborent pas cette representation. Entre 1838 et 1911, la region a accueilli plus de 28 000 immigrants, soit un rapport moyen d’un immigrant pour trois naissances. Toute explication de l’homogeneite (relative au demeurant) du bassin genetique saguenayen doit donc tenir compte du nombre eleve des entrees sur une longue periode, surtout lorsqu’on considere que ces immigrants provenaient tres majoritairement d’une seule region et etaient regroupes en familles, elles-memes tres apparentees.

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La première génération de Saguenayens : provenance, apparentement, enracinement

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Les leçons de linguistique de Gustave Guillaume, 1945-1946 (Série C) : grammaire particulière du français et grammaire générale (I). Publiées sous la direction de Roch Valin, Walter Hirtle et André Joly, 1985. Les Presses de l’Université Laval, Québec, Presses Universitaires de Lille, Lille.

Raymond Roy

Papers

The politics of numbers.

Origin and diffusion of the myotonic dystrophy gene in the Saguenay region (Quebec).

[Population files and database management: the BALSAC database and the INGRES/INGRID system].

La première génération de Saguenayens : provenance, apparentement, enracinement