this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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You are citing a malnourished population.
This is a comparitively small study, and one which contradicts other bodies of research.
Given the increasing social atomisation of the west (see:average age of fatherhood, number of children had, divorce rates), the hypothesis proposed by this paper implies testosterone levels in the west should be increasing not decreasing.
Look, I get the desire to debunk redpillers, but when we're talking about a worldwide trendline in basic biology you're going to need more research than this to do so. The Male infertility crisis is a genuine problem field experts are extremely worried about, hence the need for research and coverage by the mainstream (to stop snake oil salesmen being the main point of contact for this issue).
i think male infertility is probably less of an issue when we consider that most people born now, do not want to have kids, based on the pure fact that it's too expensive, time consuming, and grueling in the modern era.
Unless that's what you mean by male infertility. But last i checked that's not what that means. Perhaps even male infertility is going up because people want less children? Sign of the times sort of a deal, who knows, science is fucked! Or actually, it might be a result of better medical services, allowing people with worse fertility to have children now, when they previously wouldn't have been as likely to have children. Perhaps a result of decreasing infant mortality. Though i frankly doubt that's a significant factor.
Most people born now do still want to have kids. Even in my famously childless country (UK) 50% of women will have a child by the age of 30 (and a great many more afterwards.). Antinatalism remains a fringe belief.
What people do want is fewer children later. This actually makes the fertility crisis (which is very much more than a behavioural phenominon, you can jizz onto a microscope slide to get hard empirical data) a more significant issue. Since fertility decreases with age, changes that might've gone unnoticed when people had kids at 25 become catastrophic when people instead chose 35.
Perhaps you don't want kids, that's fine, I respect your choice. Most people actually still do! If this health effect is the result of (as some experts suspect) micro-plastic leached EDC's (an environmental pollutant we have no suitable method of removing, which has a significant lag from production to release, and whose associated industry continues to expand) then saying "it's no big issue we don't need to worry about it" is (in essence) endorsing the forced sterilisation of many hundreds of millions, without their consent.
That is still a maybe, the evidence is far from conclusive, but do we really want another global-warming scale crisis on our hands just to dunk on Ben Shapiro?
i mean yeah, this is true, but one thing that you have to be careful of as a society, especially when you have a significant population, is keeping your general population swing balanced. If 80% of one generation has kids, and then 50% of those kids have kids, That original generation is going to be a significant burden on society, purely because they outnumber the working class of the society.
Fewer children would definitely have that knock on effect, but what i still see being a significant problem is the social incentive for people to have kids. And when you have a society that is generally not conducive to having children, people are going to be less likely to have children. That's not a bad thing i suppose, but i don't think it's safe to rely on people who do want to have children, regardless.
Just to be clear here, anti-natalism is the belief that humanity as a whole, should collectively stop having children, as the lack of suffering would outweigh gained positive experience. It has almost nothing to do with this conversation, other than being an extreme side, much like forcing women to get pregnant and have children, would also be an extreme.
And i also never said that infertility wasn't an issue, i just think it's probably less pressing than building a society that people want to have children in.
These people need to open a history book.
that's just what happens when you become a highly educated society. They have less children, and since they have less children, there is less productivity.