Fertility Rates

The single lesson of George Floyd and all those people and businesses destroyed by the subsequent riots: The government has neither the will nor the ability to protect you.


                                      Fertility Rates

In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. That has changed.

Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 - and their study, published in the Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100.

As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.

Japan's population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century.
Italy is expected to see an equally dramatic population crash from 61 million to 28 million over the same timeframe.
They are two of 23 countries - which also include Spain, Portugal, Thailand and South Korea - expected to see their population more than halve.

The study projects:

The number of children under five will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100.
The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100.

Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?

Africa will be interesting. The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to treble in size to more than three billion people by 2100.
And the study says Nigeria will become the world's second biggest country, with a population of 791 million.

Prof Murray says: "We will have many more people of African descent in many more countries as we go through this.
Global recognition of the challenges around racism are going to be all the more critical if there are large numbers of people of African descent in many countries."

--from Gallagher on the Washington study

Fertility

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A pair of new studies unveiled this week at the Scientific Congress of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) in Denver suggest that American and European men’s sperm count and sperm motility—that is, the “swimming” ability of sperm cells—have declined in the past decade, which follows a similar, broader trend observed by many scientists over the past few decades.

Historically such studies have been “largely ignored or dismissed on the grounds that they have been subject to selection bias and/or the inclusion of data from men with fertility or testicular problems,” the author Richard M. Sharpe wrote in the Journal of Endocrinology. But then the British Medical Journal published its landmark, comprehensive 1992 study that indicated “a genuine decline in semen quality over the past 50 years,” and scientists began hypothesizing about potential causes.

As a story in GQ(!) noted earlier this year, a widely cited study published in 2017 by researchers from the Hebrew University and Mount Sinai’s medical school found that among nearly 43,000 men from North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, sperm counts per milliliter of semen had declined more than 50 percent from 1973 to 2011. And not only that, “but total sperm counts were down by almost 60 percent: We are producing less semen, and that semen has fewer sperm cells in it,” wrote the GQ contributor Daniel Noah Halpern. When Halpern asked several scientists why, they presented a united front: It was the unprecedented amount of chemicals now routinely entering the human body. “There has been a chemical revolution going on starting from the beginning of the 19th century, maybe even a bit before,” one biologist told Halpern, “and upwards and exploding after the Second World War, when hundreds of new chemicals came onto the market within a very short time frame.”

Does this sound familiar?

Halpern went on to explain that many chemical compounds that are used to make plastic hard (like Bisphenol A, or BPA) or soft (like phthalates) can mimic estrogen in the bloodstream—so men with lots of phthalates in their system are likely to produce less testosterone and fewer sperm (though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stated earlier this year, somewhat controversially, that its research continues to support its claim that the authorized amounts and uses of BPA are safe for consumers).

Fetters wrote in The Atlantic(!), " Studies like the new ones presented by ASRM, in other words, increasingly serve as bolstering evidence to what many scientists already believe. As scientists reach a consensus that something is happening to men’s sperm in the Western world, the next phase will be to figure out exactly what, and why."

So..is this question more important, or less important, than the question of global warming?

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A Million Monkeys with Typewriters and a Crib Sheet‏

Evolution is the product of mutation and selection. So genetics meets circumstance and the future is shaped by the adaptability, one to the other. This sounds passive and accidental; some think it is neither.
An interesting idea has emerged about factors influencing change. Are we, as humans, simply stalled out? Our control of the environment protects us from a lot of change. How will change occur--or be rewarded?
It turns out that mutation is not democratic; mutation occurs at a high degree in specific places of the genome. Not everything is in flux but some areas always are. One area of high mutation is the genetic site of immunology; the genome is always offering alternative immunological responses--just to see if there is a new threat a change might meet--like a chemist creating new combinations of antidotes to poisons not yet made. That makes sense as immunologic threats require a shifting immunologic response.
The same high mutation rate occurs among the genes for mating selection. There is a constant shift in how the mating system is programed, always offering new options.
So not only does mutation provide the coincidental advantage, mutation is actively occurring to provide an advantageous option.

Angels and Pinheads

Most conventions are seen in an economic framework anymore. So the question of legitimacy has been historically important for reasons of heredity: Only a legitimate child could inherit a parent's property. Even Henry VIII, desperate for a male heir, could not change this law--and he changed plenty--to favor FitzRoy. It was easier for him to kill his wives and create a religious schism than to advance a bastard.

Given the seriousness with which this question was viewed, one wonders what is afoot in contemporary society. Recent studies have shown the illegitimacy rate for children born in the United States is a bit over 40%; it is 33% in Ireland. Ireland! There are some generalities about childbearing that seem to be agreed upon--children should not have children, illegitimacy is bad for for the economic success of both the parents and the child, illegitimacy is a good predictor of high risk social and criminal behavior, single parent households are bad for child development--but despite the agreement on these subjects, there seems to be little effort to discourage the behavior. One could argue that an effort is underway to remove the "social stigma"--whatever residual persists--completely. Television shows now track the pregnancies of young girls--presumably to show the viewer that, while no one would dare impose a judgment, illegitimacy is not a good idea from a utilitarian view--yet these same girls end up on the covers of magazines and are known by their first names by everyone.

One could muse that legitimacy, more than a hereditary clarifying tool, was emphasized because it was learned by the societies over the years to be valuable. If that is the case, the culture is doing a huge, uncontrolled experiment. The effect might be liberating--but it might not be anything more than a revival of ancient and long-discarded errors. If that possibility exists, there is a lot at stake here and contemporary philosophical debates like the financial responsibilities of sperm donors are angels on pinheads.

A Modest Proposal

What is the culture's biggest problem? Not financial. Not military. Our biggest problem is the disintegration of the family, particularly the abnegation of parental leadership and responsibility. The one social structure commented on in the New Testament over and over again is divorce and this country, a professed christian nation, has a divorce rate over 50%. I once asked a basketball coach who coached a private grade school team and an inner city team what the difference between the two jobs was. He said in the private school he put the kids on the floor and watched them for quickness, vision, enthusiasm and coachability. With the inner city team he started each practice by asking who had eaten that day and first took the rest to lunch.
This is clearly a serious problem. The New Orleans disaster shows there are simply a lot of people out there who need help managing their lives. Should they be having children in this difficult life of theirs as well?
Too tough? Yet we are able to ask very hard questions of the elderly now; those end of life equations are serious, regardless of how they are diminished. Why not pair bonding and reproduction questions? Clearly a lot of people need help and we have a sacred private sector model: Harmony.com. Imagine how we could increase the information available with the government's huge reach. Why not a National Mating Service?