Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race | Hacker News Reader

Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race

axios.com

24 pointsjoubert28 comments

NYTimes article discussing this book was heavily discussed here a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26221925

> Total sperm count in the Western world had fallen 59% between 1973 and 2011.

It doesn't take a genius to see that the West is degenerating. We've never been so fat, unhealthy, lazy, complacent, &c. when our whole lifestyle revolves around producing chemical waste and consuming exhaust fume, micro plastics and leftover pesticides it really isn't a surprise our bodies are starting to fail, garbage in garbage out. But hey, we have netflix and the stock market is up so I guess all is good

The industrial complexes, duopoly in political party fed by the industrial complexes, suffocating people extracting as much value for themselves as possible will need to change soon if the US is to recover. I believe Andrew Yang's core policies will this by supporting individuals adequately and strengthening the democratic process - primarily by breaking apart the duopoly.

Fatter, yes. But I think it might surprise you how toxic basic life was in the 1950s.

There was a time that this was a normal day in London - https://i.imgur.com/8jRGvYf.jpeg

And this, a normal day in LA - https://i.imgur.com/YlimuGS.jpg

Big cities have always sucked and probably sucked more before yes (just have a look at industrial revolution London), but I'm not talking about air pollution only, it's our hole lifestyles, just walk in a supermarket, what's the ratio of fresh food to junk food ? 10/90 ? maybe even smaller. Kids obesity has never been so high, adult obesity is going up everywhere, not a month goes by without food related scandals, biodiversity is tanking mostly because of humans, fruits/veggies are less and less nutritious, infertility is going up, &c.

It's like every single meaningful metrics are going down

> It's like every single meaningful metrics are going down

Except somehow life expectancy is the highest ever (excluding a small spike down lately in USA).

Plus we took lead out of houses and gasoline, and smoking rates are down across the world... this should not be under-estimated.

The young generation right now is actually likely one of the healthiest comparatively (even with the increased obesity rates)

Yes we got better at artificially maintaining people alive that's for sure, I hardly count that as a meaningful metric. It's a bit like GDP, if all you look at are the two things on a positive trend you might miss the forest for the trees. We can also talk about depression, suicide (both attempted and successful), &c.

When 40%+ of your country's population is medically obese you have to start asking questions, this is nothing else than self sabotage and slow suicide. How do people come to the point of not caring about themselves to that extent, that alone should be a gigantic red flag, at least as big as climate change and dying biodiversity

I personally have no interest in living a long life in a dying world. Life expectancy discussions always make me think of: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...

When 40%+ of your country's population is medically obese - there's a saying for this: these are first-world problems, i.e. this is a good problem to have. I'm not denying obesity is a problem and it's having an impact on our health, but if I were a policymaker I would much prefer having the problem where 40%+ of my country's population is obese than 40%+ of my population is starving due to crop yield failure and failed infrastructure. In comparison obesity is a much better problem to have.

Textbook false dichotomy there my friend.

Because we all aspire to the ideals of living like in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E and/or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_Through_Joy <- Not Zexy! Or is it?

We would characterize life of practically all our ancestors from before 1900 as extreme poverty today [0].

Children and youth mortality <15 years old was at around 50%. [1]

It was norm back then to have kids with the assumption that you have to have twice as many kids as you need to help you with your work.

Child labor was norm, not exception. Ability to read was exception too.

Life expectancy at birth some hundreds years ago was around 30 to 40 years all across the world [0].

Currently, no country in the world has a lower life expectancy than the countries with the highest life expectancy in 1800 [0].

We eliminated basically all infectious diseases in the west and we are rapidly doing the same in the rest of the world.

COVID-19 during Smallpox would barely register to our ancestors (2% CFR vs. 30% CFR) [2].

Last decade extreme poverty was the lowest it ever was [3].

Around half of the world population lives today in democracy. [4]

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/smallpox

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

[4] https://ourworldindata.org/democracy

My all time 'favourite': http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/print_document.cfm?docum...

Instead of 'canary in the coal mine' dead crows near the oil plant.

edit: There isn't any heavy industry there, just cows, sheep, and grass, maybe some other agriculture, and peat. Has always been like that, and is almost unchanged now. Also no heavy traffic at all. Just the petrochemical plant. And a nuclear power plant. But that had no leaks.

Our governments seem pretty confident that they can import foreigners faster than the birth rates of natives collapse so there's nothing to worry about. The economy will survive.

There is no such thing as a foreigner. The elites have been worldwide for ages, and they're still able to divide-and-conquer by convincing you of the fake idea of separate countries.

Hrm. But... that isn't limited to the 'west'. For one the 'fatkins-diet' is popular in other areas than 'the west' too. For another being exposed to toxins in the environment is actually more likely elsewhere. At least nowadays.

Maybe one should call it 'reckless industrialisation', or something. But it is no 'western' phenomenon anymore.

In terms of literally ending the human race, this seems a bit of hyperbole. The statistic that matters is the percentage of women who want to have children but cannot. I didn't see that pointed to as a trend, and if it actually did become worrisome, those who have virile sperm can donate so those women can still become pregnant.

It’s not okay if you’re just scraping the bottom of the barrel for viable sperm. All of human evolution, there has been a wide variety of males to choose from, of whom only a small percentage reproduce. That’s how we evolve. If we are arbitrarily eliminating say half of all the males due to environmental reasons from the pool, that’s a big problem for our ability to evolve.

Environment pressure is a huge force in Natural Selection. If the changing environment makes it so that 50% of males can't sire offspring then Natural Selection is working, right? I'm not following how this is "bottom of the barrel", this appears to be simply how Nature works.

Yes, but historically the environmental limitations have likely been a bit more meaningful than, "this group of males unknowingly bought product X which unknowingly contained contaminants from a grocery store," or "this group of males live near an airport."

Natural Selection is going to select for who's best able to survive in a man-made world. We already see that happening with animals. I'm not entirely sure this is a bad thing but simply how the entire ecosystem is evolving.

Right, that's how things are, but it's not probably what should be. Man-made contraptions are hardly long-term stable or hospitable to life, including our own.

Additionally, IVF bypasses natural selection since it is artificial.

The problem with everywhere chemicals and the longer time period they potentially act on is that there is probably no way of designing a study to compare two cohorts that are exposed/not exposed to those chemicals. Best we can do is study isolated or tribal populations but that introduces a whole lot of other variables that modern life has that confound the data.

Nuclear annihilation is a much more likely threat to the human race. We just constantly shove it out of our minds because its too damn scary. I know I do. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night, or focus on my job if I thought about it too much.

Climate change is also scary. And could lead to conflicts that cause nuclear exchanges. That's also a more credible threat than falling sperm count.

Falling sperm count may be a big concern, but how scary it is really depends on the cause. If falling sperm count just means that our population slowly drops to sustainable levels, levels where just washing clothes made of nylon no longer causes damaging plastic pollution in the arctic, for example, then that might not be the worst outcome (relative to the counterfactual such as population-dependent climate-change-induced nuclear-exchanges over scarce resources).

And if plastic pollution is the cause of falling sperm count, it might just be self correcting...

Most (all?) Western populations are well below sustainable already, and falling sharply. It's a big reason for this unprecedented replacement migration from African and Asian countries, in particular, where women may average 7 or more children each.

Take it easy! Spontane Verdampfung führt zur Entkrampfung!

(Spontaneous vaporization leads to relaxation!)

Yeeeehaaaaw!

Similar piece in the times recently:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opinion/sunday/endocrine-...

Not to mention Covid-19, and of course the mumps virus.

https://physician-news.umiamihealth.org/covid-19-can-infect-...

Earth is overpopulated anyway, so this is sort of a good thing

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