Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 31 posts

Re: Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race

#2

Post by AntiImperialist »

Meh! You only need a few men who don't have this problem and we'll be able to keep the human population unaffected.

So, don't worry, you can as much soy, vegetable oils and vegan food that you want. The human race is not going away because of this.

I'd be much worried if it was the female reproductive capacity that was at risk.

Re: Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race

#4

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

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.

Re: Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race

#5

Post by lm28469 »

> 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

Re: Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race

#6

Post by belltaco »

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.

Re: Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race

#9

Post by ironmagma »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #4

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.
Post reply on HN