Swan says that this reduction in global birth rates will lead to a “demographic crisis”, and she’s probably right: having lots of old people and fewer young, working people will make it harder to support pension schemes, raise taxes, and so on. But unless you want to keep growing the population forever, you’re going to have to go through it at some point.
Yes. Thank you. That’s a point that keeps getting missed by people panicking over how we’re not pushing out as many babies anymore. Yes, there will be some aches and pains as we readjust from having an ever-growing population, but those are aches and pains that we cannot possibly avoid in the long term. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to get used to each generation no longer being larger than the last, and it might as well be now when we still have some living space left.
it remains a subject of great fascination that those who complain about ever-dwindling space are here, taking advantage of it, with no plans to leave. It’s almost as interesting as the people who don’t want kids but tend to believe in “free” this or that, as if those services fund themselves.
Equally it is a subject of great fascination how people can fail to understand the basic biology of carrying capacity, the well attested Malthusian selective pressure (oh I already here the chattering of ‘but Malthus was wrong because he didn’t predict Fritz-Haber inventing a way to artificially increase the human population for a century of two’) throughout evolution and the basic chemical inputs/outputs to resources that feed agriculture.
As William Hamilton pointed out, the religious morality about this is far crueller than a clear-eyed understanding of the biology of life and evolution. The Christian attitude that ‘all life is equal and valuable’ causes great cruelty in the long run, and modern medicine permitting women to have many children with caesarians meaning that there is no evolution pressure towards successful natural births. It is the attitude that doesn’t permit editing our genes or even passively selecting against harmful genes but just letting rampant bad mutations and recessive genes become an uncontrollable problem. He was quite clear it was just a matter of time until civilisation collapses, one way or another, and allowing so much of the population spread these deleterious genes (both obvious and not so obviously) with no plans to *ethically* reduce their scope and impact so as to reduce human suffering both now and in the future. The moral turpitude of the Nazis and what they did is used as an excuse to ignore basic biology, and whilst the right complain (correctly) about the left ignoring the science of gender, on this issue much of the conservative right deliberately turns a blind eye. And for what it is worth, despite religious slandering the Nazi’s terrible actions were not based principally on modern scientific understanding (which they had little time for outside engineering) but a salmagundi of simplistic Spencerian social Darwinism, nonsense racialist science and Nordic mythology about PIE etc. and which didn’t seek solutions compatible with modern society’s concept of the dignity of human consciousness which *is* possible with modern technology. The equation of compassionate long term reduction in the suffering caused by chronic inherited diseases and ailments with some kind of brutal Nazi T4 extermination program is one of the most sickening lies of the religious mindset. Yet if we let things go on we will end up in a situation where all such pieties will be tossed aside in a brutal struggle for existence. But we seem to prefer blindly trusting in the good will of bronze age mythical deities, storing up a great bottle of horror that is going to explode in our faces.
As a consequence I am actually not sure controlling fertility either way is going to work, as humans have too many mental biases to let humane and scientific solutions play out. I am resigned to the fact that with time nature will take its course and reducing the human population back to a sensible size catastrophically.
But never mind, I am sure the magic man in the sky will rescue us all before this happens.
Last edited 3 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
Aaron Kevali
3 years ago
At our church (traditional Catholic, Latin Mass, children are seen as a blessing from God) we have no such fertility problems at all. Children are everywhere and families routinely have 3-6 children. And most of our couples, including myself, married in the late twenties, so it’s not just a matter of starting earlier. I think the phthalates might just play a role in the bigger picture, but the main reason fertility is declining is that people don’t want more children. People use contraception, simple.
Yes, religiosity is excellent for fertility. Belief in God gives sperm the power to reinvigorate themselves. It is only atheist liberals, whose children are always vile anyway, if they manage to produce any, whose sperm suffer from environmental pollution.
Keep up the good work, even though you’re a Catholic, and make sure you teach your children to sing ‘every sperm is sacred’.
It is true that the religious breed fast, but I’m not sure why they should be so proud of that. So do rats. High breeding weaker animals to be exploited as prey by the slower breeding but more powerful carnivorous apex predators.
So Tom Chivers has realised we may have a problem with EDCs – yet he will still use Tupperware in the microwave and toxic cooking pans. For a science writer, I’m surprised he isn’t also aware of EDCs impact on hormonal cancers [e.g. breast and prostate]. Let’s live passionately whilst we have this glorious life, which is inherently full of risk. But why expose yourself to the risk of a known carcinogen when there are simple alternatives? From an environmental perspective, using less plastic is a positive thing too.
Yes – what we really need is a guide to which things have the biggest effect. That way we can make some balanced choices.
matti.h.virtanen
3 years ago
Thanks for a fair review. Concerning sperm counts, there is one variable that seldom even gets a mention: the average frequency of ejaculations in the population donating sperm for these studies. Since masturbation has not been a “sin” for several decades and pornograpy is ridiculously easily available, one would presume that the number of sperm cells in an average “shot” is lower than before, even if the sperm production over a week or a month has not changed. How is this behavioural revolution controlled for in the studies?
Not quite. Onan was, at God’s instruction, shtupping his recently-deceased brother’s widow so she’d have a kid that could be passed off as the brother’s.
God wanted this so as to diddle the inheritance tax laws. Provided he got after it promptly enough, Onan’s child by his sister-in-law would be taken for his brother’s issue, and thus would inherit his brother’s wedge. Onan worked out, however, that no issue = Onan would get the wedge.
Faced with the obvious conflict of interest, Onan solved it in a really ingenious way. He did literally what God commanded, i.e. he lay with his sister-in-law, but to thwart God’s attempted inheritance fiddle, he whipped it out at the vinegar strokes and cast his seed upon the ground.
As a result, God didn’t get His way. An outwitted and annoyed God duly killed Onan.
At no point did Onan arrange a date with Mrs Thumb and her four lovely daughters. He practised withdrawal. It is far from clear whether God killed Onan for whipping it out at the last minute or, more likely, in a general way for having thwarted His will. Presumably, if Onan had declined to do the dirty deed unto his brother’s wife eg because he didn’t fancy her enough, God would have killed him just the same.
The supposition that God disapproves of recreational orgasms that cannot lead to pregnancy is based on nothing in the Bible, and entirely on mediaeval clerics claiming that He did. The claim relies on nobody reading the actual text closely enough to cop on to this which, when it was written in Latin, was easily arranged.
As a result Onan has achieved immortality, like Caesar, Hoover and Boycott, in having his name enter the language, but on mistaken grounds.
Had Onan lived today, he’d no doubt have cast his seed all over his sister-in-law’s face rather than the ground, and then uploaded the footage to xHamster. God would have killed him just the same, but the Church would surely have struggled to misrepresent that as jerking off, faced with the iPhone evidence to the contrary.
I am not sure it is as late as medieval clerics, it goes back to St. Augustine and his theories of concupiscence at the very least, if not earlier.
Also the modern obsession with masturbation isn’t really related to abstruse theology like this and far more because of 19th century medical theories which had a tint of religious opprobrium for sure, but passed themselves off as good medical science. (See Kellogg’s, yes he of cereal fame special spas with treatments to prevent self abuse),
Perhaps the biggest factor in increased infertility in males and females is the contraceptive pill.No female was ever meant to have fertility prevented by synthetic hormones for most of her menstrual life and no male was ever meant to be subjected to the massive levels of such synthetic hormones finding their way into the environment and food chain.
Doctors have long known the contraceptive pill predisposed females to Cancer, and yes, they have tweaked things but still remain largely ignorant about reproductive and biological function in humans in general and females in particular.
Yes, plastics and chemicals are a problem, but perhaps the biggest source of poison for the planet and its people is the ever-increasing and massive level of waste from medications, processed by human bodies and then released into the environment. And worse because so much of it is completely unnecessary.
We drown in drugs and antibiotics, prescribed in the name of maybe medicine for diseases and infections people do not have and may never get. With many people taking a couple of drugs for something or another every day from the age of forty, if not younger, and billions of women taking the contraceptive pill, not to mention the antibiotics doled out like lollies by doctors, dentists and the agricultural industry, we can only be in awe of the remarkable resilience of the human organism and this planet. So far anyway.
Last edited 3 years ago by Athena Jones
David Morley
3 years ago
In 2017, Swan, along with other scientists, published a meta-analysis, an aggregation of existing research. It said that since 1973, the average sperm count among men in Western countries had fallen by 59%, and by somewhat less in the developing world.
There’s an awful lot in this article that drifts away from the above. For example, shifting the main focus from sperm counts to fertility – where the facts are less clear.
But if something is really going on that can have that big an effect on sperm then we really need to know about it. We know that men with low sperm counts struggle to produce children, so there will be some point at which fertility is affected.
If the above research finding is accurate then there is already enough to worry about.
rickytick66
3 years ago
200,000 abortions a year in the UK, easy access to birth control.
Good point. There is a real reluctance to factor in abortion to any discussion of declining birthrates and corresponding declining support ratios. But surely culling upwards of 20% of conceptions before birth has had a severe effect on population levels and demographics.
Hardee Hodges
3 years ago
No idea about sperm counts, what is obvious is that rich people avoid children. As societies get richer then tend not to have children. That started before plastics. And many in repressive nations avoid children as well; again a trend before plastics. But the world population continues to grow anyway, alas for those that constantly worry about feeding them. Maybe climate change will stop these births.
Mike H
3 years ago
A brilliant takedown and very useful review. It’s so good to see clear-eyed skepticism of the latest ‘expert’ research in Unherd. It’s rare for journalists to really read scientific claims carefully and think them through but I’d happily pay an entire second subscription for a magazine that just filtered through hyped research findings to get at the truth.
This paragraph jumped out:
This hyperventilating about human extinction … makes no sense if you think Swan (a respected epidemiologist) is trying to give a dispassionate assessment …. But she’s not.
Respected by who, I wonder? Are any epidemiologists respected by anyone by this point? Hyperventilating about human extinction in what looks superficially like science but is actually a mess of invalid assumptions and deceptive definitions is exactly what I’d expect from an epidemiologist. Defining fertility as raw number of babies is especially egregious, that’s not at all what the word means in English, but this is the profession that has no difficulty with defining a COVID death as “any death for any reason whatsoever within 28 days of a positive test”, so who’s really surprised.
Yes. Thank you. That’s a point that keeps getting missed by people panicking over how we’re not pushing out as many babies anymore. Yes, there will be some aches and pains as we readjust from having an ever-growing population, but those are aches and pains that we cannot possibly avoid in the long term. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to get used to each generation no longer being larger than the last, and it might as well be now when we still have some living space left.
it remains a subject of great fascination that those who complain about ever-dwindling space are here, taking advantage of it, with no plans to leave. It’s almost as interesting as the people who don’t want kids but tend to believe in “free” this or that, as if those services fund themselves.
Equally it is a subject of great fascination how people can fail to understand the basic biology of carrying capacity, the well attested Malthusian selective pressure (oh I already here the chattering of ‘but Malthus was wrong because he didn’t predict Fritz-Haber inventing a way to artificially increase the human population for a century of two’) throughout evolution and the basic chemical inputs/outputs to resources that feed agriculture.
As William Hamilton pointed out, the religious morality about this is far crueller than a clear-eyed understanding of the biology of life and evolution. The Christian attitude that ‘all life is equal and valuable’ causes great cruelty in the long run, and modern medicine permitting women to have many children with caesarians meaning that there is no evolution pressure towards successful natural births. It is the attitude that doesn’t permit editing our genes or even passively selecting against harmful genes but just letting rampant bad mutations and recessive genes become an uncontrollable problem. He was quite clear it was just a matter of time until civilisation collapses, one way or another, and allowing so much of the population spread these deleterious genes (both obvious and not so obviously) with no plans to *ethically* reduce their scope and impact so as to reduce human suffering both now and in the future. The moral turpitude of the Nazis and what they did is used as an excuse to ignore basic biology, and whilst the right complain (correctly) about the left ignoring the science of gender, on this issue much of the conservative right deliberately turns a blind eye. And for what it is worth, despite religious slandering the Nazi’s terrible actions were not based principally on modern scientific understanding (which they had little time for outside engineering) but a salmagundi of simplistic Spencerian social Darwinism, nonsense racialist science and Nordic mythology about PIE etc. and which didn’t seek solutions compatible with modern society’s concept of the dignity of human consciousness which *is* possible with modern technology. The equation of compassionate long term reduction in the suffering caused by chronic inherited diseases and ailments with some kind of brutal Nazi T4 extermination program is one of the most sickening lies of the religious mindset. Yet if we let things go on we will end up in a situation where all such pieties will be tossed aside in a brutal struggle for existence. But we seem to prefer blindly trusting in the good will of bronze age mythical deities, storing up a great bottle of horror that is going to explode in our faces.
As a consequence I am actually not sure controlling fertility either way is going to work, as humans have too many mental biases to let humane and scientific solutions play out. I am resigned to the fact that with time nature will take its course and reducing the human population back to a sensible size catastrophically.
But never mind, I am sure the magic man in the sky will rescue us all before this happens.
At our church (traditional Catholic, Latin Mass, children are seen as a blessing from God) we have no such fertility problems at all. Children are everywhere and families routinely have 3-6 children. And most of our couples, including myself, married in the late twenties, so it’s not just a matter of starting earlier. I think the phthalates might just play a role in the bigger picture, but the main reason fertility is declining is that people don’t want more children. People use contraception, simple.
Yes, religiosity is excellent for fertility. Belief in God gives sperm the power to reinvigorate themselves. It is only atheist liberals, whose children are always vile anyway, if they manage to produce any, whose sperm suffer from environmental pollution.
Keep up the good work, even though you’re a Catholic, and make sure you teach your children to sing ‘every sperm is sacred’.
Who would have thought that Northern Ireland’s downfall was predicted by Monty Python.
That’s a pretty cheap shot at a sincere and well-meaning comment by Aaron. I’m sure it made your day.
I thought it was the meek who were supposed to inherit the Earth, not the religiously virile.
It is true that the religious breed fast, but I’m not sure why they should be so proud of that. So do rats. High breeding weaker animals to be exploited as prey by the slower breeding but more powerful carnivorous apex predators.
Latin Mass! Where is your church
So Tom Chivers has realised we may have a problem with EDCs – yet he will still use Tupperware in the microwave and toxic cooking pans. For a science writer, I’m surprised he isn’t also aware of EDCs impact on hormonal cancers [e.g. breast and prostate]. Let’s live passionately whilst we have this glorious life, which is inherently full of risk. But why expose yourself to the risk of a known carcinogen when there are simple alternatives? From an environmental perspective, using less plastic is a positive thing too.
Yes – what we really need is a guide to which things have the biggest effect. That way we can make some balanced choices.
Thanks for a fair review. Concerning sperm counts, there is one variable that seldom even gets a mention: the average frequency of ejaculations in the population donating sperm for these studies. Since masturbation has not been a “sin” for several decades and pornograpy is ridiculously easily available, one would presume that the number of sperm cells in an average “shot” is lower than before, even if the sperm production over a week or a month has not changed. How is this behavioural revolution controlled for in the studies?
When they are recruiting subjects they specify ‘w*nkers need not apply’.
Surely those are the only people who would apply. I mean how else are they going to come* up with a sample?
* see what I did there?
Ha ha. But in case you were serious: all men are w*…
Probably a good point. Unless, of course, frequency of use stimulates greater production. Does anybody know?
Masturbation increases sperm turnover and keeps the ejaculate fresher and more efficacious. Evolutionary selection pressure.
Onanism features in the Bible.
Not quite. Onan was, at God’s instruction, shtupping his recently-deceased brother’s widow so she’d have a kid that could be passed off as the brother’s.
God wanted this so as to diddle the inheritance tax laws. Provided he got after it promptly enough, Onan’s child by his sister-in-law would be taken for his brother’s issue, and thus would inherit his brother’s wedge. Onan worked out, however, that no issue = Onan would get the wedge.
Faced with the obvious conflict of interest, Onan solved it in a really ingenious way. He did literally what God commanded, i.e. he lay with his sister-in-law, but to thwart God’s attempted inheritance fiddle, he whipped it out at the vinegar strokes and cast his seed upon the ground.
As a result, God didn’t get His way. An outwitted and annoyed God duly killed Onan.
At no point did Onan arrange a date with Mrs Thumb and her four lovely daughters. He practised withdrawal. It is far from clear whether God killed Onan for whipping it out at the last minute or, more likely, in a general way for having thwarted His will. Presumably, if Onan had declined to do the dirty deed unto his brother’s wife eg because he didn’t fancy her enough, God would have killed him just the same.
The supposition that God disapproves of recreational orgasms that cannot lead to pregnancy is based on nothing in the Bible, and entirely on mediaeval clerics claiming that He did. The claim relies on nobody reading the actual text closely enough to cop on to this which, when it was written in Latin, was easily arranged.
As a result Onan has achieved immortality, like Caesar, Hoover and Boycott, in having his name enter the language, but on mistaken grounds.
Had Onan lived today, he’d no doubt have cast his seed all over his sister-in-law’s face rather than the ground, and then uploaded the footage to xHamster. God would have killed him just the same, but the Church would surely have struggled to misrepresent that as jerking off, faced with the iPhone evidence to the contrary.
Wonderful
It gets better. Onan’s brother’s name was Er. So presumably, he and his wife each referred to the other as “Er indoors”.
I am not sure it is as late as medieval clerics, it goes back to St. Augustine and his theories of concupiscence at the very least, if not earlier.
Also the modern obsession with masturbation isn’t really related to abstruse theology like this and far more because of 19th century medical theories which had a tint of religious opprobrium for sure, but passed themselves off as good medical science. (See Kellogg’s, yes he of cereal fame special spas with treatments to prevent self abuse),
More tea, Vicar?
Perhaps the biggest factor in increased infertility in males and females is the contraceptive pill.No female was ever meant to have fertility prevented by synthetic hormones for most of her menstrual life and no male was ever meant to be subjected to the massive levels of such synthetic hormones finding their way into the environment and food chain.
Doctors have long known the contraceptive pill predisposed females to Cancer, and yes, they have tweaked things but still remain largely ignorant about reproductive and biological function in humans in general and females in particular.
Yes, plastics and chemicals are a problem, but perhaps the biggest source of poison for the planet and its people is the ever-increasing and massive level of waste from medications, processed by human bodies and then released into the environment. And worse because so much of it is completely unnecessary.
We drown in drugs and antibiotics, prescribed in the name of maybe medicine for diseases and infections people do not have and may never get. With many people taking a couple of drugs for something or another every day from the age of forty, if not younger, and billions of women taking the contraceptive pill, not to mention the antibiotics doled out like lollies by doctors, dentists and the agricultural industry, we can only be in awe of the remarkable resilience of the human organism and this planet. So far anyway.
There’s an awful lot in this article that drifts away from the above. For example, shifting the main focus from sperm counts to fertility – where the facts are less clear.
But if something is really going on that can have that big an effect on sperm then we really need to know about it. We know that men with low sperm counts struggle to produce children, so there will be some point at which fertility is affected.
If the above research finding is accurate then there is already enough to worry about.
200,000 abortions a year in the UK, easy access to birth control.
Good point. There is a real reluctance to factor in abortion to any discussion of declining birthrates and corresponding declining support ratios. But surely culling upwards of 20% of conceptions before birth has had a severe effect on population levels and demographics.
No idea about sperm counts, what is obvious is that rich people avoid children. As societies get richer then tend not to have children. That started before plastics. And many in repressive nations avoid children as well; again a trend before plastics. But the world population continues to grow anyway, alas for those that constantly worry about feeding them. Maybe climate change will stop these births.
A brilliant takedown and very useful review. It’s so good to see clear-eyed skepticism of the latest ‘expert’ research in Unherd. It’s rare for journalists to really read scientific claims carefully and think them through but I’d happily pay an entire second subscription for a magazine that just filtered through hyped research findings to get at the truth.
This paragraph jumped out:
Respected by who, I wonder? Are any epidemiologists respected by anyone by this point? Hyperventilating about human extinction in what looks superficially like science but is actually a mess of invalid assumptions and deceptive definitions is exactly what I’d expect from an epidemiologist. Defining fertility as raw number of babies is especially egregious, that’s not at all what the word means in English, but this is the profession that has no difficulty with defining a COVID death as “any death for any reason whatsoever within 28 days of a positive test”, so who’s really surprised.