Scientists warn of sperm count crisis • Hacker News Board

Re: Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

#51

Post by return0 » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 8:32 PM UTC

Mz wrote: post #45

yason wrote: post #34

Male energy is in crisis. In the modern world boys aren't allowed to be boys to make sure they will become men grown tame. Boys are grown by women—and these days also men who have adopted the women's way of growing kids. We think that male energy is aggressive and offensive, and it must be suppressed and tainted, while simultaneously we have lost our icons of what real manhood entails. We don't have rites of manhood…

My two kickass adult sons would find this paragraph laughable. -- Their Mom Though, in all fairness, I am kind of a ballbusting bitch and did not raise my sons "normally". My ex was career military, so I could afford to be a ballbusting bitch since my anachronistic family of origin and the federal government both had my back. But I imagine that a) you wouldn't be up for a meaty discussion of that sort and b) hn is pr…

The parent thread was probably trolling, or not aware of some details about these rituals of passage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambia_people)

Gender role development is a touchy but very important subject (although i m not sure it's related to sperm count). Related: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/you-can-giv...

Re: Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

#52

Post by icebraining » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 8:33 PM UTC

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #42

yason wrote: post #34

Male energy is in crisis. In the modern world boys aren't allowed to be boys to make sure they will become men grown tame. Boys are grown by women—and these days also men who have adopted the women's way of growing kids. We think that male energy is aggressive and offensive, and it must be suppressed and tainted, while simultaneously we have lost our icons of what real manhood entails. We don't have rites of manhood…

Oh, Lord. HN is turning into Reddit more and more by the minute.

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

#53

Post by eliasmacpherson » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 8:43 PM UTC

bcoates wrote: post #26

lutusp wrote: post #2

What? This is being described as a "crisis"? It's the best news I've heard all year. We should celebrate! The world's population is completely out of control, all estimates of future environmental catastrophe turn out to be overly optimistic, we're drifting into a state of perpetual war because of population pressures, and someone laments a decline in sperm count without the slightest grasp of how funny that is? Read…

Wow, that Wikipedia article is awful, and a fantastic demonstration of how hobbyhorse subjects on Wikipedia tend to get filled with crap. Contra that shitty graph at the top of the article, population diverged from the historical trend of exponential growth in the 1950s. Worldwide birth rates have peaked. The largest cohort of babies the world has ever seen was in the 80s. The population is now growing solely due to…

If Malthus' warning was heeded, the Irish Famine that occurred less than ten years after his death may have been avoided. Ireland's population of 8 million, to Britain's 14 million, dropped by estimates of 25% through disease, emigration and starvation. This was on the doorstep of the dominant British Empire. Saying the Malthusian crisis will not ever happen is hubris.

Re: Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

#54

Post by sabraham » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 9:15 PM UTC

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #53

bcoates wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that Wikipedia article is awful, and a fantastic demonstration of how hobbyhorse subjects on Wikipedia tend to get filled with crap. Contra that shitty graph at the top of the article, population diverged from the historical trend of exponential growth in the 1950s. Worldwide birth rates have peaked. The largest cohort of babies the world has ever seen was in the 80s. The population is now growing solely due to…

If Malthus' warning was heeded, the Irish Famine that occurred less than ten years after his death may have been avoided. Ireland's population of 8 million, to Britain's 14 million, dropped by estimates of 25% through disease, emigration and starvation. This was on the doorstep of the dominant British Empire. Saying the Malthusian crisis will not ever happen is hubris.

Poor example-- the Famine should be known as the Starvation. There was plenty of food to ration to the Irish, even on Irish land; the British instead shipped it home, or fed it to cattle and then shipped that home, and let the Irish starve instead.

Re: Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

#55

Post by bcoates » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 9:27 PM UTC

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #53

bcoates wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that Wikipedia article is awful, and a fantastic demonstration of how hobbyhorse subjects on Wikipedia tend to get filled with crap. Contra that shitty graph at the top of the article, population diverged from the historical trend of exponential growth in the 1950s. Worldwide birth rates have peaked. The largest cohort of babies the world has ever seen was in the 80s. The population is now growing solely due to…

If Malthus' warning was heeded, the Irish Famine that occurred less than ten years after his death may have been avoided. Ireland's population of 8 million, to Britain's 14 million, dropped by estimates of 25% through disease, emigration and starvation. This was on the doorstep of the dominant British Empire. Saying the Malthusian crisis will not ever happen is hubris.

The Irish Famine was caused by a mixture of a routine crop failure and awful policies both leading up to and during the blight. Ireland's population was not extraordinarily large compared to its production capacity at the time.

Crop failures haven't stopped happening, populations have risen quite a bit since the 19th century, but mass starvation still happens or doesn't happen entirely due to policy not a literal shortage of food.

Re: Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

#56

Post by droithomme » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 10:15 PM UTC

Great movie about this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men

Seriously though what is the problem, we have large complex societies and fertility drops dramatically. There's a natural limit and Malthusian ethics of genocide and eugenics are unnecessary. Good news all around.

Re: Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

#57

Post by lukifer » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 10:21 PM UTC

rohansingh wrote: post #23

lukifer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget educating women, which tends to result in fewer children per household. I am concerned, though, that the temporary lull in overpopulation will be broken by belief systems that encourage large families; by definition, those with a genetic or memetic instinct to have many children will out-populate those without that instinct. (I have a soft spot for the Mormons, but they come to mind here.)

Memes aren't strictly inheritable in the same way that genes are. For example, it is completely plausible to advance the argument that children in large families decide to have fewer offspring due to their own childhood experiences. I'm not saying that this is definitively the case or that I have any evidence for it, but it is just as plausible as the conjecture that a propensity for a large number of offspring is pe…

Even if memes are not genetically heritable, they are still transmissible, and therefore still subject to selection pressures. And the more children these families have, the broader the attack surface for large-family beliefs to infect the next generation.

Moreover, I would suggest that genetics do influence tendencies for adopting some memes over others, especially as regarding the instinct to spread genetic material, which is very ancient. I can't cite any scientific support for this idea, but the likelihood seems very strong.

Re: Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

#58

Post by nazgulnarsil » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 10:22 PM UTC

droithomme wrote: post #56

Great movie about this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men Seriously though what is the problem, we have large complex societies and fertility drops dramatically. There's a natural limit and Malthusian ethics of genocide and eugenics are unnecessary. Good news all around.

Malthusianism has been debunked since before any of us were born. Humans are on average wealth producing.

Re: Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

#59

Post by Mz » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 10:26 PM UTC

return0 wrote: post #51

Mz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two kickass adult sons would find this paragraph laughable. -- Their Mom Though, in all fairness, I am kind of a ballbusting bitch and did not raise my sons "normally". My ex was career military, so I could afford to be a ballbusting bitch since my anachronistic family of origin and the federal government both had my back. But I imagine that a) you wouldn't be up for a meaty discussion of that sort and b) hn is pr…

The parent thread was probably trolling, or not aware of some details about these rituals of passage ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambia_people ) Gender role development is a touchy but very important subject (although i m not sure it's related to sperm count). Related: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/you-can-giv...

I have been called a troll (or treated like one). I am not. For that and other reasons, I am very reluctant to hang that on this person. HN is an actively hostile environment for some topics. Regardless, most people do not want to have a real serious discussion about a touchy topic like this, under any circumstance. That is the only piece I really take issue with. As someone who believes in a lot of things that would not be respected here, I would happily defend the OP's right to free speech and to have a different mental model. The problem I have is that they are highly unlikely to be willing to engage in serious discussion, therefore they probably should have not bothered to post it here.

Re: Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

#60

Post by m0th87 » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 11:11 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #52

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, Lord. HN is turning into Reddit more and more by the minute.

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.) http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's sort of a dated rule. I've been here even longer than my account suggests, and the quality has most certainly degraded - both from comments like OP's, and from people defending it under the umbrella of free speech (kind of an absurd stance given every community enforces quality standards.)

PG himself has acknowledged the degrading quality. Thankfully some work has been done to curb this trend, but it does seem somewhat unavoidable as a community grows.