Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumThe Reproductive Panic That Wasn't; Globally, Sperm Counts Still On Avg 3X WHO Baseline
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These were just the foreshocks, though. In the summer of 2017, when Levine put out his own study of the problem a grand and global survey of the state of human semen, the biggest ever done news of Spermageddon would propagate into the U.S. media. That September, Newsweek ran a cover story on the research, Whos Killing Americas Sperm? More recently, the New York Times reported on The Dawning of Sperm Awareness, GQ followed up with a nerve-racking résumé of what it calls the truth behind the shocking drop in sperm counts, and Vox responded with Seven Questions About Declining Sperm Counts You Were Too Afraid to Ask.
This was just the sort of coverage Levine had hoped to get. While on a fellowship at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, working under professor Shanna Swan, hed built a database of published research on average sperm counts, including numbers drawn from nearly 43,000 samples of ejaculate collected over 40 years in 50 different countries. When he plotted all these figures on a graph, the data formed a broad and speckled band that tilted downward to the right. It was a noisy signal, sure, but the trend was unambiguous: The quality of semen had been dropping over time, with average sperm counts in the West falling off by more than half in 40 years. Human sperm was drying up.
But if this was evidence of a mass unmanning, one could also find some reasons not to flinch. Sperm counts (and concentrations) have at best a weak relationship to male fertility, and even as things stand for Western men today, according to the research with an average and deflated concentration of 47 million sperm per milliliter of ejaculate were not yet in the ballpark of a Children of Men scenario or a reproductive crash. The level is still three times higher than the World Health Organizations lower bound for normal semen, and the no-more-natural-babies nightmare remains, at the very worst, many years away.
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Heres a sad and scary spoiler for this article: The trend that Levine and Swan identified isnt really new its been known about, or at least suspected, for at least a quarter-century, and still we havent figured out its cause: technology or climate change; pesticides or plastics (this was the GQ theory); overeating or overmedication; too much masturbation or insufficient exercise. It may be that all these factors have caused sperm counts to drop, or some of them, or none. The resulting danger to humanity could be cataclysmic, or it could be a trifle. But for certain people certain men ambiguity about the sperm decline has only amplified its terror and underscored its implications: The world is changing, and we dont know how; masculinity is under threat from forces we cant explain. This is something that Alex Jones and InfoWars have been talking about for years, YouTube personality Joe Biggs has said, responding to the sperm-count research. Weve seen this feminization really kicking it up a notch over the last ten or so years, where weve seen men going from being alpha males to essentially being cucked-out, skinny-jeanswearing, man-bunhaving, feminized little girls
Men are dying, and with that, women dont want to hook up with feminized men, which means were not procreating and the death of Western civilization is at hand.
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https://www.thecut.com/2018/10/why-is-everybody-freaking-out-about-declining-sperm-counts.html
defacto7
(13,485 posts)according to forensic studies of male cadavers from as far back as the 18th century. The average 18 year old today has half the testosterone of his grandfather at 18 and his testosterone is half that of his grandfather's. It all sounds genetic to me.
DavidDvorkin
(19,479 posts)Showing this as a response to overcrowding. It could be how a species responds to becoming too numerous.