The 18 November 2017 leader in NewScientist was interesting more for what it didn’t say than what it did. But that first, of course:
THE plot of P.D.James’s dystopian novel The Children Of Men revolves around a provocative thought experiment: what would happen if humans stopped being able to reproduce? In the story, set in 2021, no child has been born in the past 25 years and Homo sapiens is heading for extinction. With no future to plan for, society is spiralling into the ultimate fin-de-siècle decadence.
By the time 2021 comes around for real, life may be starting to imitate art. In July, Israeli scientists reported that sperm counts in developed countries have declined by more than half in the past 40 years and continue to fall by about 1.6 per cent a year. “Shocking” and “a wake-up call” were two of the responses from other scientists.
The cause of the fertility crisis in The Children Of Men was a global disease. The cause of ours is not known (see “We’re heading for a male fertility crisis and we’re not prepared“). To say that we urgently need some research into it is not an exaggeration. We are almost certainly not heading for a total collapse of male fertility, but sperm counts are approaching dangerously low levels. Around one in 10 couples already experience fertility problems. And yet our scientific understanding of male infertility remains rudimentary, with some researchers complaining that they struggle to get funding to do the long-term, large-scale studies needed to get to the bottom of the problem.
For many women, the news that men are suddenly in the spotlight will feel like a welcome role reversal.
And so on and so forth. But what came immediately to my mind was to wonder whether this could be classified as a natural response to human overpopulation. From nature studies, we know that overpopulation by a species doesn’t end well – if they’re lucky, the predators rebound and the species returns to some sort of rhythmic stasis by having the old and infirm eaten; if they’re not lucky, famine, plague, ecological ruin are all cards in the deck awaiting overpopulated species. Even cannibalism has been observed, although that study was of imprisoned rats.
I believe those are very real possibilities in the next hundred years. But what if Nature has gentler ways? What if most of the men of the next few generations die off childless? To some small extent, polygamous men might make up for it. But we might see a sizable decline in total human population, which would relax both political and natural tensions.
It’s quite possible that systemic pollution is affecting men’s gonads. Or it might be the increasing CO2 in the air – remember the studies indicating our food is becoming less nutritious, in correlation with CO2 concentrations? Just as our food evolved in an environment with lower CO2 concentrations, so did we – it’s not hard seeing how that might make our current performance sub-optimal. Now, we may argue that this is man poisoning himself, but in reality, given the common definition of Nature, man is just another critter running around, and if his own waste acts as a natural brake on his reproduction, I’m cool with calling it natural.
But I think NewScientist really missed an interesting bet by not pursuing this question, but rather pointing out that women are not on the spot for once. It, too, is an interesting subject – but when we’re talking about mass deaths through war or famine, it seems quite secondary to me.
I see there’s also a major article, which I’m partway through. The claim of male fertility dropping is apparently limited to the developed world; the developing countries do not exhibit it. Maybe this is just the result of sedentarianism.
