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Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#881

Post by Dig1t »

lisper wrote: post #876
Dig1t wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is dark. I will never understand how so many educated people have such an anti-humanist view of the world. Humans are awesome, intelligence is awesome. More humans means more amazing things. We are capable as a species of incredible things, and we have the ability to save our planet as well as continuing to grow. We cannot outgrow this planet and colonize other worlds, we cannot solve climate change, nuclear fus…

> Humans are awesome, Some humans are awesome. Other humans not so much. > intelligence is awesome. It is indeed, but intelligence is pretty unevenly distributed among humans. > More humans means more amazing things. It also means more stress on the planet's ecosystems. There are awesome things on earth besides humans, and one of the problems with humans is that too few of us seem to understand this. > we have the ab…

There's so much to unpack here, I'd love to have a longer form discussion in a place where we won't run out of thread depth, but I can't dig into all of the points in this format.

This all gets very philosophical, but seriously, optimism is much better than pessimism here.

> There are awesome things on earth besides humans

Like what? Nature is cool, we shouldn't destroy it, but nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us. Nothing else on this planet can ponder and understand the world like we can, this is a good thing that the universe should have more of. A meteor (like the one that killed the dinosaurs) could hit this planet at any time, in fact it's pretty likely that it will happen again. And on a long enough timeline, the sun will die and ALL life and ALL nature will die. In the interim what should we do? Should we just sit around on this planet and wait it out trying to preserve things the way they were when humans first evolved? What's the point?

I prefer to take the humanist approach, I like to think that humans and intelligence will make an incredibly cool, adventure-filled future for the universe and that we can and will do great things with more people.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#882

Post by derbOac »

dham wrote: post #769
DevX101 wrote: post #158

The thesis of the book 'Countdown' is that this is largely due to widespread plastic and other endocrine disrupting chemicals. I believe this is one of the most important risks to humanity, after climate change, and global war. So far, I've taken some lifestyle changes to combat this: 1) Threw out all of my teflon cooking pans 2) Refuse to consume food in heated plastics 3) Throw out teabags (they have plastics). Use…

Just use glass. I never understood plastic containers. Basically just use shit that existed 50 years ago for food. Iron pans, store in glass, butter, lard. If you spill stuff on a couch just live with it. Buy leather. Too many things are made because people are lazy. If you have kids don't have nice stuff, it's very easy.

I get where you're coming from but, just as example, leather has its own set of issues.

Trying to avoid this stuff is a bit like Night of the Living Dead -- it's everywhere.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#883

Post by SoftTalker »

dudul wrote: post #875
SoftTalker wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a lot of pressure on women to "have a career" which contributes to them waiting to marry and have kids. It's not really possible to optimize both being a mother and having a career, it's all tradeoffs and those who choose motherhood and a more domestic life are made to feel like they have sacrificed or lost out on something.

Do you have examples of how this pressure is implemented? AFAIK it has been shown many times that "career woman" is absolutely not a trait men find attractive.

Well I'm not a woman, so I don't have direct experience. But I think that young girls, for example, are frequently told in school and at home that they can be anything they want, doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc. and that is great, but I think very little is said about being a mother and their biological clock and the tradeoffs that entails, or if it is addressed it is sort of glossed over with a "you can have it all" message.

So girls grow up with a career-oriented mindset, and don't do any careful thinking about what they want, or think about kids/family as something they will do "later" or "when I'm ready" and before they know it they find themselves at 35 years old and unable to get pregnant.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#884

Post by sircastor »

Aeolun wrote: post #453
sircastor wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did IVF and have a wonderful little boy. Would do it again to have our kid, but my goodness, the expense was overwhelming. We had to go into a non-trivial amount of debt to do IVF and I don’t know how anyone makes it work (short of what we did) we tried for 8 years to conceive naturally. Tangentially, we spent some time looking at adoption and the total cost going through an agency I think would’ve been about the…

Adoption is crazy expensive, and a super hard process compared to, you know, just popping one out yourself. I sort of understand why, but I still think it’s a bit counterproductive.

Yes. Adoption is in this strange place of being something that everyone understands the pitfalls of government regulation (custody of a human) but by necessity it must be regulated. Services have filled the space by charging for everything and they have a captive market that has no other choice. The problem is exasperated by the presence of potential adopters who have biases related to age or race of children.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#885

Post by tjpnz »

zug_zug wrote: post #151

So this trend has been going on for a while now, I looked a bit into it about 5 years ago here's what I found: - Tons of popular and legal products/chemicals are "endocrine disruptors"[1] (fancy term for mess with hormones). - The FDA/EPA doesn't deny that, they don't themselves even really require tests for long-term health effects in humans (too difficult). Instead they give animals a 1000x+ dose and look for immed…

How can this be fixed given the vested interests involved?

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#886

Post by Dig1t »

wizofaus wrote: post #874
Dig1t wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is dark. I will never understand how so many educated people have such an anti-humanist view of the world. Humans are awesome, intelligence is awesome. More humans means more amazing things. We are capable as a species of incredible things, and we have the ability to save our planet as well as continuing to grow. We cannot outgrow this planet and colonize other worlds, we cannot solve climate change, nuclear fus…

Except you only need to look at a large number of countries with high populations (and often those with high fertility rates) and see little correlation with ability to achieve what you call "amazing things". A billion people with good access to necessary resources is going to achieve more than 10 billion living in poverty because we've largely trashed our planet's ability to support us.

A counterpoint: some of the biggest and best advances in the developed world occurred during or after a time of high fertility. The boomer generation is a good example. I'm not a boomer (I'm Examples of high fertility rates combined with poverty are often correlated with dictatorships and corruption, in my opinion they are cultural.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#887

Post by RunningDroid »

bigbillheck wrote: post #824
themagician wrote: post #566

Whenever I read about things like decreasing sperm counts or increases in cancer I always think of the same phrase, "Everything is chemicals." It just really doesn't surprise me knowing how little evaluation is done on chemicals and materials throughout the supply chain. I believe the period from 1900 to around 2100 will be looked at as this horrible era where we filled our own ecosystem with an almost unimaginable a…

> pay for the health and environmental damage you did, Or do some trickery with shell companies, like Johnson&Johnson did, and not have to pay a dime.

Or make the profits disappear then declare bankruptcy, like Purdue Pharma tried to do

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#888

Post by janef0421 »

scld wrote: post #782
victorbstan wrote: post #781

On the one hand we have an overpopulation problem, on the other we have a lowered fertility problem? What’s the issue?

Well, for one, we don't have an overpopulation problem.

That's true, but we do have an environmental and climate problem driven by human activity, and a reduction in human population would help in solving it.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#889

Post by faximile »

csomar wrote: post #858
TexanFeller wrote: post #855

One thing that I'm genuinely curious about that I've never heard addressed is whether the large increase of people identifying as trans(trans women in particular) could be related to the same factors that are causing lowered sperm counts and testosterone in men. There are massive amounts of compounds in our environment that are endocrine disrupters or mimic sex hormones like estrogen. Like maybe many persons assumed…

No. Trans people have existed for quite a long time. It just happens that the "West" has become more accepting of them, and since it is the "West" that gets most of the media attention it's looking like a new thing with them coming out.

Why is the "West" in quotes? Typically authors use that to refer to a phrase they're replying to, but parent comment doesn't mention that.

Alternatively, quotes are sometimes used in a dismissive manner, but it would be unusual for an author to be dismissive of a word and yet find value in introducing it into a conversation.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#890

Post by faximile »

janef0421 wrote: post #877
TexanFeller wrote: post #855

One thing that I'm genuinely curious about that I've never heard addressed is whether the large increase of people identifying as trans(trans women in particular) could be related to the same factors that are causing lowered sperm counts and testosterone in men. There are massive amounts of compounds in our environment that are endocrine disrupters or mimic sex hormones like estrogen. Like maybe many persons assumed…

It might be the case that endocrine disruptors may be increasing the likelihood a person is trans, but what you are proposing is almost certainly incorrect and would not work. Using sex-aligned hormones to cause a person to become cisgender is sometimes tried and does not appear to be effective, and I am not aware of any evidence that transgender people's pre-transition hormone levels are substantially lower than the…

> Also, this theory would suggest that eunuchs, self-identified men who voluntarily undergo gonad removal, would generally come to identify as women, but this is not the case; Similarly for men who have their testosterone suppressed as part of cancer treatment.

Could that be explained by the unfortunate lack of trans acceptance?

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