Phthalates Threaten Humanity’s Ability to Reproduce | Hacker News Reader

Phthalates Threaten Humanity’s Ability to Reproduce

theintercept.com

98 pointsmustafa_pasi29 comments

A counterpoint thread to the part about sperm count: https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1372178337016201224

Some points are that it's going back up again and is largely caused by poor sleep health. Beyond that, I haven't looked this up but what is the actual relationship between lower sperm count and fewer children? I mean, you have maybe 2-3 children and millions of sperm, surely they are not linearly related.

Effects on mothers could matter a lot more, but also maybe they just don't want to do it.

> what is the actual relationship between lower sperm count and fewer children? I mean, you have maybe 2-3 children and millions of sperm, surely they are not linearly related.

Indeed they are far from it. If you "only" ejaculate a few million, you are practically infertile. Even with reproductive assistance like IUI, the chance of conception is something like 1% at a level of 2 million sperm post wash (i.e. when they've selected the most viable sperm).

Interestingly, the guy who presents the counterpoints starts by saying he didn't read the book.

> And I have not read Count Down yet, though it's on my to-do list.

Did she really replace AGD or anogenital distance, with Taint and Gooch? My goodness, I laughed like a 12 year old when I read that!

"gooch"? Am I a square for never having heard that?

Depends? Playing baseball and getting hit in the gooch with a bad bounce is common occurrence. If you never played baseball or a sport where you are not gratuitously hit by object or person the gooch isn't really in the popular vernacular. Come to think of it, I wonder what Cricket players call it... lol.

Surprising but welcome: Some of us are fine with technical terms, others have their eyes glaze over. Using common slang makes the polysyllabic immediately apprehensible.

(I laughed too. Especially considering taint t'aint been a word all that long, eh?)

At least this article doesn’t make the absurd claim a recent Guardian article did. That reproduction could go to zero.

That is why I chose this one. The news is making the rounds again under the title, "Human penises are shrinking because of pollution", but unfortunately all articles from the major news sites are of very poor quality.

Well, at the current rate of decline, it could.

I actually find it quite funny that humans have planned their own obsolescence.

What's funnier is that whatever "safe" substitute humans will devise will prove to be more harmful a couple of generations hence.

>biological factors don’t necessarily affect people’s genders

then what gender is if not biology? Does it mean it is nurture instead of or as a significant addition to nature?

As I understand it, Gender is the socio-cultural aspect, and Sex is the biological term.

But they aren’t, at least in our present culture decoupled, so people have a sense of whether the feel aligned in form and physiology with their gender identity. We’re going to find out in future decades as people experiment with gender identity and physical transformation how much this can be deconstructed, how much of what we think of as gender is an association of things that often went together in the past, how much is about social perception, how much is about your own feeling of inhabiting your body, and how much is a free space for you to author

They aren't completely decoupled, no. But historically gender has varied wildly while sex hasn't, so it's intrinsically significantly decoupled from sex itself. Since the extent of that coupling is currently unknown the scientists provide an answer that reflects the uncertainty.

What we know for sure is that it's at least significantly decoupled, and almost certainly not completely decoupled.

That's one way to cash out the distinction, but "gender" can also mean sex. This usage (at least in English) dates back to the 13th century.

At best, it's ambiguous. You can't really know what someone means by "gender" without context, such as the mentioning of the sex/gender distinction. "Gender" has become somewhat of an auto-acronym.

If gender is social/cultural and there are infinite genders and it is a spectrum, what makes gender different from personality? How is that term useful in a way different from personality, and why should pronouns be altered for it?

This if often claimed but there seems to be no evidence for it. If anything, all efforts to change humans using social techniques have failed. Take gay conversion therapy, for instance. It just doesn't work. There is no evidence for it. We just can't mold ourselves using social pressure -- because it's really down to biology.

Presumably it’s about the fact that the gender one identifies with can differ from their biological sex (e.g., a person born as male may identify as female).

On one hand, an argument can be made that the freedom to identify with a gender different from one’s biological sex enables individuals to live more fulfilled lives that are not defined by gender stereotypes they’d otherwise be forced to live within.

On the other hand, an argument can be made that the distinction between gender identity and biological sex actually strengthens gender stereotypes and potentially hurts equality (e.g., women were historically supposed to be soft and pretty and under-achieving, so a female who doesn’t want to fit that stereotype would feel pressured to identify as a male rather than be her own unique person), and that there’s no clear consensus regarding a self-sufficient definition of what a gender is that doesn’t recursively involve biological sex.

Biology affects biological sex. For most people this means XX or XY chromosomes. There are probably some nuances of expression and phenotype in there too, and obviously some people's chromosomal situation does not fall into either of those buckets.

It's likely not possible to find widespread agreement on this, but I think the modern concept of gender is more or less about how you align with the traditional male and female roles in society (doesn't have to be in the binary sense). I don't think there's a known right answer for how much of this alignment comes down to "nature", and how much to "nurture". What's clear is that some people do not mentally identify with the sex and/or gender labels and/or roles that their chromosomes would traditionally assign to them.

The "biology doesn't care about your feelings" arguments are stupid because they don't amount to any more than excuses for ignorance—biology obviously can't fully explain gender as in gender roles. In fact, pretty much all the arguments I've seen against accepting transgender folks' identities rely on being obtuse about definitions to some degree.

>accepting transgender folks' identities

that is the issue of social policy (i'm for accepting of whatever identities people have, whether it has scientific basis or not) while the article is supposedly about scientific findings

>obtuse about definitions to some degree

that is my point. It is an science related article and thus it is the context where significant degree of precision and obtuseness with definitions is kind of expected. Slipping in such a blanket imprecise statement is what i tried to point to.

I don't really think it's inappropriately imprecise, though. It's just an acknowledgement that the link between biological sex and gender self-identification is not well understood at this time.

Gender is an issue of social policy, psychology, neuropsychology, and biology. Sex is an issue of science.

That's why science on gender always has small degrees of precision and is obtuse. It's moreso a question of soft science than hard science.

The modern definition of gender reinforces gender stereotypes which are largely arbitrary and obsolete.

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