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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

I was concerned about this, so I actually went to a fertility clinic myself and got a semen analysis. My sperm count came out low but "within range" and the motility was low and "out of range". I am a healthy normal guy, I exercise 6/7 days a week, am not obese, don't drink much, and eat pretty healthy generally. My low "in range" count would have been considered extremely low and out of range a generation ago. So anecdotally, I think that something is not right here.

Read the book "Countdown". The author goes into great detail all of the reasons that modern life is putting downward pressure on sperm quality and quantity. The author, Dr. Swan, is a leading expert in the field. The book is really good, and pretty scary.

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I’m surprised by the eagerness to dismiss this trend, both in the above article and the discussion here. A lot of saying it’s not happening, and even if it is, it doesn’t matter. Like the saying goes, “It was a long time ago and it didn’t happen.”

In reality, even if it’s possible to have kids with 50% lower sperm counts, that’s not really the point. That is a huge drop, and likely indicates other changes as well. Testosterone levels are way down over the last few generations. Is that related? What about rising rates of depression among young men [1]?

Clearly something is going on here.

[1] https://i.insider.com/5c927ddd4f07ae5d161a603f?width=1000&fo...

Per the article, there is really very little evidence that anything is happening at all with sperm counts. There is a good chance that there is no effect, that it's all measurement artifacts and/or localized changes.

>>Clearly something is going on here.

That's the entire point of the article - that it's less clear than you might think. There are several reasons why the average sperm counts might be reported as lower than they were in the past, and it's not necessarily an indication of a society-wide problem.

Can't help put make a comparison between that denial and denial of increasing temperature measurements on the planet....

It’s definitely a massive change, but it’s worth noting we don’t exactly have long term numbers on this. The first studies on sperm count are from 1929, and we started to see this issue in the 1970s. It could be that we’re seeing a drop down from a period where sperm counts were unnaturally high for some reason, as opposed to a lowering below baseline human levels.

(Do I think that’s likely? No, probably we’re seeing the affect of one of the many chemicals that have been introduced over the last 100 years. But it’s always worth thinking through all possibilities)

I completely agree, it's deeply concerning that a huge number of opinions on this topic in educated circles seem to think that increased difficulty in having kids and lower testosterone levels are a good thing. You can see it in the responses to this article in these comments, but also I have heard the same opinions after working with my friends in Silicon Valley for many years.

They legitimately seem to regard humans as a kind of virus (literally have had multiple people use that word exactly to me in conversation), and cheer on the reduction in the number of people. This is problematic for many reasons, but just on the surface, cheering on the sexual dysfunction of your fellow man, this is just immoral and unethical on so many levels to me.

> Testosterone levels are way down over the last few generations. Is that related?

Might that also have to do with declining crime rates?

Might be TMI, but I get my sperm tested frequently (partly because of this problem), and will say there is a lot of variability in my samples.

A standard deviation of 48.29 for total motile, and a very low positive correlation with abstinence period (R^2 of 0.082). There isn’t a discernible pattern over time yet (I’m expecting as I age for my average to decrease but I haven’t seen that yet), and I haven’t made any significant diet changes. I think my hydration level is important but I haven’t tracked that in conjunction with my tests. Also because it takes 74 days [1] for spermatogenesis, any change you make in lifestyle has to be performed for a while before it potentially can affect your sperm.

Alls that to say, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about one test being low. I’ve had some lows that initially worried me when I was first testing, and now it feels within expected variation. Though, the broader macro trend (or potential of a trend) is still concerning, so its worth it to me to keep an eye on it individually

Reference: [1] https://www.givelegacy.com/what-is-sperm/

> Read the book "Countdown". The author goes into great detail all of the reasons that modern life is putting downward pressure on sperm quality and quantity.

What reasons would apply to you?

Endocrine disrupting chemicals (mostly phthalates), they are present in most food and bathroom packaging. Any plastic that is flexible.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/the-big-3-why-pht...

"They’ve been shown to be anti-androgenic—in other words, they decrease testosterone. In studies with rats, it’s been shown that if you dose the pregnant mother, the offspring have defects of the male reproductive tract. There have also been studies in humans that have found anti-androgenic effects on development of the male reproductive tract."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/common-chemicals-...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/10/phthala...

There is a mountain of research on these chemicals.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2873014/

"There was also a dose–response relationship between MBzP (the primary hydrolytic metabolite of BBzP) and below WHO reference value sperm concentration. In a recent follow-up study including these 168 men, plus an additional 295 men newly recruited into the study, Hauser et al. (2006) confirmed the associations between MBP and increased odds of below-reference sperm concentration and motility. "

One big problem with this whole thing is that the country that has the most possible factors for sperm-count decline, the US (obesity, pollution, circadian cycles disruptions, etc.) is also the country with the smallest measured drop.

That also happens to be the country where the EPA said water and air were clean after the Ohio train derailment [0]. The same EPA that falsifies new chemicals risk assessments as a matter of course [1].

Where the FCC said millions of dead people, many with the same name, wanted net neutrality overturned. And when caught, went ahead and overturned it anyway.

Where the CDC said that masks don't help against an airborne virus, before exaggerating their effectiveness to justify ineffective mandates and lockdowns in schools.

Where whistleblowers are smeared, jailed, and tortured.

Where environmental lawyers are disbarred and jailed by the justice system itself as recrimination for exposing corporate atrocities [3].

Where the military leaves dangerous chemicals around as a matter of routine with absolutely no consequences (other than the organ failures and cancer).

Where the tapwater around the country is hazardous to human health [4].

Where reliable numbers on something as crucial as vaccine effectiveness vs a dangerous pandemic are impossible to obtain.

Where estimates of civilian casualties in its illegal wars are off by 7 figures.

My point: You might want to take official America's numbers on anything and everything with some salt. Including sperm counts.

[0] - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailm...

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/27/epa-whis...

[2] - https://www.npr.org/2017/12/14/570262688/as-fcc-prepares-net...

[3] - https://www.tbsnews.net/features/panorama/curious-case-steve...

[4] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/americas-tap...

If you have any evidence that sperm count figures in the US are being deliberately falsified, you should post it.

I don't.

Didn't claim to.

What is beyond doubt is that US chemical and agri corps have made concerted efforts over decades to infiltrate regulatory agencies, and have a long history of covering up their atrocities.

So, cast a skeptic eye on anything from them, the agencies they're in, and the scientists they fund. If there's any other reasonable take, you should post it.

The united states are not so united that they'd be repeating the same lie from multiple studies/measurements. Also, to the benefit of whom?

The data is very noisy, and the studies often don't match - as pointed out in the article. So I don't know where you get the idea that the data is "united".

As for who benefits: The polluters - big chemical, defense, agri etc; the people who we pay to regulate them (usually people from those industries); the corporate media who takes huge advertising money from those companies; the shareholders of all the above companies; and the politicans responsible for keeping the status quo going.

Take, for example, the Deepwater Horizon spill. The company paid out what, 1 billion in fines? Less than 5% of last years profits. The Obama administration helped minimize reputation damage and accountability. The media - all media - were barred from filming or investigating; not that many in corporate media tried. If shareholders had a problem with the lack of action, or the horrific decision to cover up the spill with Corexit, they were quiet as church-mice about it.

And that's one high profile example, out of hundreds, of just oil spills alone. Then there's the agricultural runoff, the pesticides, the insecticides, the food additives, the chemicals in cosmetics that are banned in other countries, the military waste, the toxins from cars and tire, the industrial accidents, the train derailments...

So... Yeah. There's some vested interests going on there, with no shortage of historical examples to draw from.

>Take, for example, the Deepwater Horizon spill. The company paid out what, 1 billion in fines? Less than 5% of last years profits.

How much should they pay? 100% of profits? Whatever percent you think it should be, do you think that if you spilled a bunch of used oil on the ground should you be fined the equivalent amount of your disposable income?

>The media - all media - were barred from filming or investigating

The wikipedia article[1] for that disaster doesn't seem to have a shortage of media on that topic. There's even photos from the government itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

> The data is very noisy, and the studies often don't match - as pointed out in the article. So I don't know where you get the idea that the data is "united".

Well the comment you replied to said:

> the US (obesity, pollution, circadian cycles disruptions, etc.) is also the country with the smallest measured drop

and you said that the US is known to lie (with so many examples). So for that above to be a lie, many people across different states need to work in unison, delivering false results.

Also nobody really knows if this effect is really there to begin with, let alone knowing what causes it. People lobbying so organized across the states against an unknown is very unlikely.

This is all one big ad hominem

Sure, it is.

My point stands though. If you're swallowing any US agencies information without salt, you have an incomplete information diet.

Dow, Monsanto, DuPont etc have a long track record of getting their people into agencies via the old US politics revolving door system, and they have every reason to downplay the environmental factors that they have inflicted on the planet, especially American soil (and air and water).

Welcome to Trump’s dysfunction. Source of 7 figure discrepancies in civilian casualties?

What about your balls being too warm? A lot of people spend all their day inside in heated rooms or in a car with a heated seat.

But then is the heat also increasing in this linear fashion as the sperm count decrease?

It doesn't explain an individual's sperm count declining over time. But more people spending more time indoors with warm balls could explain the average sperm count decreasing.

This TED talk warned us about local warming years ago. https://youtu.be/waO8KKtVgaQ

> Endocrine disrupting chemicals (mostly phthalates), they are present in most food and bathroom packaging. Any plastic that is flexible.

Citation, please. As I understand it, polyethylene (especially LDPE) and polypropylene are flexible all by themselves and generally contain no plasticizers at all. And they are quite common.

Nice of you to ignore the article which explains all the reasons why data indicating sperm counts are decreasing are flawed and likely not significant.

I don't think it's super scary. Our population can't continue growing at this rate forever so a natural stabilization would be very welcome.

> I don't think it's super scary. Our population can't continue growing at this rate forever so a natural stabilization would be very welcome.

It can be quite scary - what's the minimum population count needed to sustain colony species?

We depend on so much infrastructure to stay alive, and have so few survival skills I would guess that even quite a large population (few million) would die out if they were scattered throughout the world.

Look at how the passenger pigeon went from the most numerous bird in North America to extinct in 10 years, purely because the minimum number to keep the colony alive was breached.

We were doing fine as a species at 1.6bln in 1900.

What happened next can only be described as explosive growth.

> We were doing fine as a species at 1.6bln in 1900.

Maybe, but we were, as a species, a lot less specialised, and so individuals could succeed with smaller numbers.

The other part you are missing is that we no longer have access to the low-hanging fruit in terms of natural resources.

In 1900 we could subsist because we had a lot more natural resources simply lying around, or close to the surface. We used those up. We razed down countrysides, replaced with non-fertile concrete.

We have almost nothing right now that cannot run on electricity, which requires experts in multiple fields to harvest and distribute.

The majority of humans in 1900 were mostly self-sufficient, those who weren't starved to death. The majority of humans now are clearly nowhere near to self-sufficient if infrastructure starts to decay due to insufficient experts.

Remember, I did not say it will be scary, I said it can be a scary thought.

Whatever that number is, our current population is far above it. It doesn't need to keep growing indefinitely.

jfc go look at a population chart that's broken down by country. If you think the idea of overpopulation is scary just wait until you're living in a world where you can't get your basic needs met because there aren't enough people to do all the specialized and non-specialized jobs that keep society running. Oh and by the way, you'll be in the most vulnerable group by then too so enjoy being forgotten about in the scramble.

Who knows, maybe the general AI and the robotics to enable it can't come sooner (This is sarcasm and I do not think we should worry, to be clear).

> Oh and by the way, you'll be in the most vulnerable group by then too so enjoy being forgotten about in the scramble

This thought keeps me up at night sometimes. I’m nearly 40 with no kids, nieces/nephews, and even my cousins are mostly childless.

Our eldercare models are already beginning to buckle under the strain of the retiring Boomers - and they still overwhelmingly have family/church/pensions as primary non-govt support structures.

You can’t paper over this with immigration either. There will be absolutely no political will power to saddle millions of productive first/second gen immigrants with the sort of crippling tax burden the state would need to “replace” a total loss of the family/church/pension support triad. Expecting a huge push towards “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) seems to be a safe bet.

Tl;dr: the current elder care system prioritizes “old maids” but the future system will undoubtedly be “the Olds get MAID”

I'm holding out hope for a grassroots educational campaign to tell young people that if they want families they need to have them early. Oddly enough it isn't that the last few generations have wanted kids any less, that percentage of people has stayed relatively constant. What happened is a lot of people decided to delay having a family in favour of a career or just enjoying their 20s and then found out the hard way what no one bothered to tell them; how difficult it is to conceive after 30. That means a good percentage of people that wanted to have children simply can't.

Even if we successfully turn the trend around there'll still be a generational gap that will cause a series of smaller generations going forward.

How much of that financial anxiety is caused by would-be grandparents taking a "you're on your own, kid" attitude to their children and then wondering why they choose to focus on career instead of reproduction?

Are you saying that parents should be funding their kids families?

If grandchildren are the desired outcome, monetary incentives would increase the likelihood of them coming along.

Far be it from me to cover for the Boomers’ greedy shortsightedness, but iirc we’re now at 52% of 18-29 year olds living at home and a large percentage of young married couples being DINKs (dual income, no kids). And current day Boomers poll fairly solidly against stuff like NAFTA and offshoring.

So imo, it’s not 2020s grandkid-wanting Boomers/GenX going “you’re on your own, kid” so much as it’s their greedy younger selves getting manipulated into mortgaging their eventual children’s future away in the 80s and 90s.

A distinction without a difference I guess, but the root of this problem stems from the Reagan/Clinton eras and not many people seem interested in discussing how we can successfully roll back some of the more egregious anti-worker legal/regulatory changes from those days.

Sort of agree with this, I feel that way about the hippies of the 60's though. Watching videos of them sitting around in Golden Gate Park narcissistically talking about how they are disillusioned with their parents' work ethic and they don't align with traditional values (like hard work). It's like watching a group of people throw away their generational inheritance and complaining about having too much free time and easy money.

There's a lot to admire in the boomers I think, they had a great culture, and they contributed a massive amount of technological and scientific progress as well. But agree they never had the competition these newer generations are facing and so did not do enough to prepare their kids for a more competitive world (I mean, some did, but not enough).

My understanding of the disillusionment with the hard work ethic stems from the question of "toward which goal?" Hard work for the sake of having worked hard is how your boss gets rich, from that view.

I like your analysis. It passes the gut check, unlike the garbage that assumes that it's all personal responsibility that can magically be solved today through better choices. It doesn't matter much what choices the Boomers/X make today, as the damage was done long before the general public recognized there would be problems.

> I'm holding out hope for a grassroots educational campaign to tell young people that if they want families they need to have them early.

Yeah it’s still not too late for this sort of thing in the West. Though the cynic in me thinks it’s very unlikely the political class travels the idealogical axis from today’s mostly explicit anti-natalism to having the political willpower necessary for implementing pro-family policies.

At least we have a chance. Places like South Korea/Japan might as well change their national mottos to “omae wa mou shindeiru”

I never wanted kids anyway. Especially not in my 20s. I'm 47 now and never had them. Life is for fun, not raising kids :P

We shouldn't turn the trend around though. Most of our environmental problems including most likely this one, are caused by our overpopulation and increased welfare. We just need too many resources, this can't continue.

So if people organically decide (or due to this sperm count thing are forced) to have fewer kids, this is really a brilliant thing for the planet.

Anti-human garbage take IMO. The planet is not more important than humanity. Vast swathes of this planet are uninhabited by humans, people have been predicting for generations that too many people would destroy civilization and the planet and none of it has come true (see the Population Bomb "predictions" section on Wikipedia for a laugh)

This narrative has been popular, especially among wealthy, educated, people for a long long time. But most of it is hogwash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Prediction...

We can overcome problems like climate change without considering ourselves to be a virus that needs to be controlled like that.

Is "church support" still a thing? It's not here in Europe. Perhaps in rural USA?

However it's ok, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs due to automation anyway, leaving more people free for healthcare. It will not be easy but we'll cope. And we have to in order not to burn up this planet.

> Is "church support" still a thing? It's not here in Europe. Perhaps in rural USA?

Not just rural or even conservative USA: my mom lives in a city that would be in the top 5 of everyone’s “Name the most liberal city in America” list.

She had major surgery right before Covid and her church had people bringing her flowers and keeping her company nearly every day while she was an inpatient - and then had a coordinated rotating list of church members bringing home cooked dinners and visiting her every day for several weeks while she recuperated at home.

I expect this sort of thing will largely die with the Boomers and we’ll join our Euro-brethren in the bubbling soup of cynicism and lowered expectations

It'll be difficult but we will have to stop our rate of population growth at some point, obviously.

That it'll work out badly for me, that's true but overall it's necessary.

I agree - but reproductive capacity aside, this indicates some very concerning trends in men's health which we shouldn't brush off.

Would you find it more scary if you realized it applied to almost all mammals, not just humans? Species which are already facing severe pressure from habitat loss and fragmentation?

I share your view that human populations need a natural stabilization (and we've found it, by combining urban living with available birth control).

It's been too long since I looked into this issue, and I'm at work so don't have time to do the research now, but I remember studies showing that declining sperm count is a problem across multiple species.

> eat pretty healthy generally

Im always suspicious when i see someone is eating clean/healthy etc.

> I am a healthy normal guy,

But you are using nalgene BPA-free water bottles (7 in triangle), have PEX pipes at home, eat meals cooked in non-sticky pans and have soy added to your food... Out of your control...

It is almost impossible to outrun our civilisation bent on self-destruction...

Non-stick pans are coated in Teflon, the same material used for many implants thanks to its inertness in the body. Soybeans have been cultivated since as early as 7000 BCE and been a staple crop for many civilizations for millennia. These are unlikely to have any unexpected or negative effects.

Yes, Teflon is completely harmless, especially in non-stick cookware. To prove this, I routinely heat up my hernia-repair implants to several hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and I've suffered no ill effects whatsoever.

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