An Alarming Decline in Sperm Quality Could Threaten the Future of the Human Race

https://www.gq.com/story/shanna-swan-interview

by fortran77 • 5 years ago

47 54 5 years ago

giardini• 5 years ago

We'll just have to try harder! As usual, all us males are willing to do the hard work. Imagine making love to the "Song of the Volga Boatmen":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfsWoNpHg2s

"Heave Ho, Boys!"

thaumasiotes2• 5 years ago

As usual, all us males are willing to do the hard work.

You reminded me of an article about the major high-altitude adaptations of the world. There are three; one set occurring in Ethiopia, one in the Himalayas, and one in the Andes. The Andean suite of adaptations is much more evolutionarily recent, and, as you might expect, is of lower quality.

So the article covered that basic framework and then opined that, if you were the government of Peru, one obvious way to improve local health and productivity would be to introduce Tibetan DNA into the local gene pool.

"Some young Tibetan men could probably even be persuaded to volunteer for this important work."

alephu5• 5 years ago

I saw the Netflix seaspiracy documentary last night, and it made me think there's really no way to sustain such a huge human population. Every single method of food production seems unsustainable to me, it either uses too much water or land, or produces too much greenhouse gas.

Personally I'd much prefer us to lower the population through infertility rather than famine and war.

Santosh83• 5 years ago

Quite possible to sustain present levels of population on vegan diet. This is NOT counting other sources of consumption we routinely indulge in.

SilverRed2• 5 years ago

I wonder what the resource usage of giving everyone a diet of something like soylent for most meals. I have found the Australian clone of it to be perfectly tolerable and cheaper. Especially if you think about it as saving money so you can go get something nicer at a restaurant later.

tastyfreeze• 5 years ago

Not much we can do about land use. Regenerative agriculture practices use less water and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Im not sure about long term but switching from traditional to regenerative practices is carbon negative as soil organic matter and soil life is built up.

carlmr3• 5 years ago

I saw that Netflix documentary "Kiss the Ground" which kind of claimed the same.

I hope it's true, I didn't do much further research on it, but it gives me some hope that we can fight climate change and be more robust against crop failure at the same time.

FreedomToCreate• 5 years ago

The social implications of this would not be pretty. Without young people in society, the purpose of tomorrow would slowly fade. No point trying to build a future if there isn’t someone to take helm of it. Children of men did an excellent dramatization of this

ramblerman• 5 years ago

children of men is about no more children.

It's a bit of a jump from less children.

closeparen• 5 years ago

seems unsustainable to me

Do you have a particularly well-developed or reliable intuition for the sustainability of food production? How did you come by it?

CyberRabbi• 5 years ago

Personally I'd much prefer us to lower the population through infertility rather than famine and war.

There is no reason to assume there is binary choice there.

Also the infertility crisis only affects developed countries, whose birth rates were already low. Under developed countries , whose populations have been booming and already outnumber developed countries are not affected by this crisis.

dukeofdoom2• 5 years ago

You can feed yourself off of one acre, with primitive tools and basic agricultural practices. There are 1.9 Billion acres in the USA alone. With modern agricultural technology and power of scale, the resources in the ocean, you can feed a lot of people. This site has statistics showing that despite the population increase, the total amount of acres of farmed farm land has decreased in the last 20 years in the USA. Its about 900 million.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-lan...

uncledave2• 5 years ago

Worth considering redundancy in that as well. It’s very easy to end up with serious problems if we have even a single failed crop in one season.

dheera• 5 years ago

A big part of the problem honestly is that a lot of the arable land is being used to raise crops for meat production rather than direct human consumption. If the population shifted to a vegetable-heavy, meat-light diet it would be much easier to feed people with less land.

yellowapple2• 5 years ago

There are 1.9 Billion acres in the USA alone.

Not all acres are equal. Not even within the same state; an acre in California's Central Valley is very different from an acre in California's Mojave Desert.

And further, this presupposes that there is adequate water for all those acres, which - as Californian farmers have learned over the last couple decades - ain't quite true. Some acres therefore have to remain unused in order for the other acres to remain usable.

DC1350• 5 years ago

That’s why humans of the future will eat those weird bacteria that you find in places like volcanoes, the bottom of the ocean, or acidic caves. Gruel will be a wet, raw clump of it, and we’ll call it “Beyond Bugs”, because bug eating is an unsustainable luxury.

inglor_cz3• 5 years ago

These days, the last remaining rulers of the world would be able to engage in a war with robots only - from their bunkers.

In 2050 the robotization of the military will likely be even more pronounced.

For the first time in history, the capacity to wage war does not directly depend on having a large count of young men at your disposal. This is likely to change the entire balance.

tashbarg2• 5 years ago

„No weapon has ever been frightful enough to put a stop to war —perhaps because we never before had any that fought for themselves!“

Philip K. Dick. „The Defenders.“

tralarpa• 5 years ago

Every single method of food production seems unsustainable to me

I don't agree. Look at the statistics on food waste, resource consumption of meat production, energy consumption in developed countries in general,... We are using farmland to produce fuel...

Food production could be much more sustainable if we wanted. We are very far away from an efficient usage of the available resources. Current methods of food production look unsustainable because we are not even trying.

Edit: Just to give you a number: In 2010, the postharvest food loss was estimated to be 1250 kcal per capita per day in the US.

Bancakes• 5 years ago

Everyone can have one child and the population will still decline from premature deaths.

987yghj3• 5 years ago

The article also includes fertility problem with women. These may actually be even larger because women have a shorter window of opportunity to have children. Get a careers and start having kids in your 30s? For many, it's too late. For some reason we never tell women that.

thisarticle• 5 years ago

The US makes it very difficult on women who choose to have children. Maybe if we provided more support (financially, logistically, hell emotionally) they’d be more apt to have kids earlier. For my wife and I, we weighed the pros and cons and it was clear it was a bad move for us, so we passed.

thaumasiotes2• 5 years ago

Maybe if we provided more support (financially, logistically, hell emotionally) they’d be more apt to have kids earlier.

The opposite seems to be true; the more support is available, the longer people try to put off childbearing.

987yghj3• 5 years ago

This is the case in all of the western world. We push women in the direction of careers and never mention the consequences.

At the same time, while in some ways people are rich these days, we can't seem to find the time or money to have kids. That's not much of a choice. It's more that people react their to circumstances. If anything it's a form of "ethical" birth control.

watwut3• 5 years ago

For some reason we never tell women that.

This is just not true. If you are a woman, it is told to you over and over and over and over again. And women do occasionally talk about it when they talk with each other. Women even know that with age the risks are higher! Shocking, I know.

Also, average age of first birth in united states is 26.9 years old.

Yet also, those who have kids soon suffer lifetime consequences.

987yghj3• 5 years ago

People may mention this, depending on your location, but as a society, no.

keenreed• 5 years ago

》There was a pesticide used in the harvesting of pineapple; it’s called dibromochloropropane. [Better known as DBCP, it was banned from use in the U.S. in 1979.] That pesticide actually totally wiped out men’s sperm. Women were comparing notes, and they were saying that they couldn't get pregnant—the wives of these men. They tested the men, and they had zero sperm. And you can’t get more dramatic than that. But what they found was that when they stopped using the product, in a couple of months, their sperm count returned.

Maybe it could be used as a contraceptive.

Also many men now have vasectomy in their 20ties. It is recommended to keep it a secret, not sure how studies correct for that.

bruce511• 5 years ago

> Also many men now have vasectomy in their 20ties. It is recommended to keep it a secret,

Anecdotes are not data, but I had a vasectomy in my early 30's. We didn't want more kids, and the wife informed me she wasn't planning on taking the pill for the next 25 years.

I wasn't told to "keep it a secret" but equally it wasn't something other men spoke about, so there was some reluctance (on my part) to do it. I, and some others in my cohort of a similar age, though decided to not hide it, but be honest - yes I'm going to be out of work on Tuesday, going for a vasectomy. It did encourage a few folk to come talk about it when it was topical for them.

Men (naturally) have a fear of anything that interferes with their privates. But we do need to be more honest about it - vasectomies are ultimately cheaper, less invasive, and have fewer side effects than other forms of contraception. Yes it is permanent - but if you're ready for that then I encourage you to ask around - you may find others around you have done it, and that it's really not a big deal.

And if you have had it, well, perhaps it's not really something that needs to be a secret. (Especially if you are the first in your social circle to do it.)

achow2• 5 years ago

Yes it is permanent

Vasectomy are reversible.

SilverRed2• 5 years ago

Sounds like the worst offender is plastics. There was another post recently about this same chemical affecting other biological processes. Perhaps a controversial thing to say, but maybe plastics could be some amount responsible for gender dysphoria.

It sounds like heated up plastics are the most dangerous, so those plastic takeaway tubs for food would be a prime target to remove. On the plus side, the local government where I am has been cracking down on single use plastics for environmental reasons which has majorly limited the amount of plastic that comes in contact with my food

jimmygrapes• 5 years ago

Alex Jones was (perhaps unintentionally) correct.

carlmr3• 5 years ago

It sounds like heated up plastics are the most dangerous, so those plastic takeaway tubs for food would be a prime target to remove.

Cue the pandemic and everybody ordering takeout, because restaurants are closed.

My parents always taught me to be careful with plastic packaging and especially heating up things in the microwave in plastic containers.

I was at a friend's place and I saw them reheating rice in a plastic tub, which for me was appalling. I lost appetite right then and there.

I only buy glass tupperware for home use (the lid is plastic, but i just leave it out).

Also I avoid using plastic bottles. Glass is usually an alternative.

Thinking with new evidence that my parents had the right intuition here. With food we really should move to guilty until proven innocent.

moistly• 5 years ago

And, hmmm, everyone (by which I mean I) thought there’d be a baby boom nine months after covid kicked in.

Instead, there have been a lot fewer babies being made.

It’s the things that make you go hmmm.

nadspoly• 5 years ago

... in the Western countries.

poochdog• 5 years ago

It's the unsaturated fat, but I can already hear the triggering from pointing this fact out.

dukeofdoom2• 5 years ago

If you visit sites like 4chan, you'll see posts about it all the time. Apparently its a popular conspiracy theory to get rid the world of white people. It called the great replacement or something like it. Apparently white people have low birth rates. Hence the conspiracy theory. Though I think Japanese people have lower birth rates. So not sure if the theory really holds under any scrutiny. Unless, I suppose maybe you think the conspirators also hate Sushi. In which case, it makes total sense.

carlmr3• 5 years ago

A good conspiracy theory always contains a grain of truth. Confirmation bias will do the rest for you.

Lower birthrates are happening across the board, so if somebody told you you were targeted they would see enough evidence to confirm this. You have to ignore that this affects the whole world, but that's easy.

reactspa• 5 years ago

file under: feature, not bug.

snidane• 5 years ago

You need only one man with healthy sperm and 1000 women to repopulate the world.

The infertility crisis is certainly not due to sperm quality as the title suggests.

Postponing pregnancy to later age on female side seems more like the culprit.

But I guess it is modern to blame everything on men these days, so current culture will like the sperm quality hypothesis more.

inglor_cz3• 5 years ago

Hello Czech breakfast (snídaně).

"You need only one man with healthy sperm and 1000 women to repopulate the world."

While true, our societies are based on long-term pairs having children, not a set of elite sperm knights who go around and impregnate wives of everybody.

Both effects can happen at the same time. Yes, female fertility goes down with age. But male reproductive health isn't what it used to be either, and provably so. Taken together, those effects cause a significant problem.

We must care more about phthalates and other hormone mimicking stuff in our food chain. Humans aren't even the only species that has the same problems.

snaily• 5 years ago

The article is not about general infertility in couples.

It is specifically about male infertility, based on an objective measure of fertility (sperm count), which has indeed dropped over the past few decades - no one is trying to "blame everything on men".

yellowapple2• 5 years ago

You need only one man with healthy sperm and 1000 women to repopulate the world.

Seems like a surefire way to end up with genetic bottlenecks galore.

disgruntled101• 5 years ago

I live in Germany and have 4 children at 29, which seems to be about the average amongst my peer group. My brothers each have 2,5,3 children. We are not from Europe originally however so who knows maybe we haven't been exposed to plastics yet or it might be the fact that we're decently fit physically speaking.

tashbarg2• 5 years ago

Your peer group is far from average, though: https://www.statista.com/statistics/295397/fertility-rate-in...

dang• 5 years ago

Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26221925 - Feb 2021 (601 comments)

Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26275527 - Feb 2021 (28 comments)

Male genitals are shrinking because of phthalates, warns Dr Shanna Swan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26584347 - March 2021 (27 comments)

akvadrako• 5 years ago

The evidence behind the decline is still controversial. Even if their is a decline in some groups, the WHO suggests levels of sperm are still in the normal range.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article/info%3Adoi%2F...

Although there were no statistically significant changes in the prevalence of infertility in most regions amongst women who were exposed to the risk of pregnancy, reduced child-seeking behavior resulted in a reduction of primary infertility among all women.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3253726/

Since 1980, the fertility rate for men in their 30s has increased by 21% and for men aged 40 years and older, the rate has increased nearly 30%. In contrast, the fertility rate in men younger than age 30 years has decreased by 15%.

https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/33/6/998/4967751?log...

Exposure to maternal smoking was associated with lower sperm counts but no overall increase in sperm counts was observed during the study period despite a decrease in this exposure.

Meta-analyses suggest a continuous decline in semen quality but few studies have investigated temporal trends in unselected populations recruited and analysed with the same protocol over a long period and none have studied simultaneous trends in lifestyle factors.

An Alarming Decline in Sperm Quality Could Threaten the Future of the Human Race

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