The Decline in Male Fertility: An Existential Threat?

By 1960 it was obvious that something was killing birds and fish in startling numbers.  It would be Rachel Carson who would piece together the clues and unravel the science in order to indict pesticides, their manufacturers, and their users for these deaths.  Meehan Crist paid homage to Carson for her accomplishments and issued a warning that such threats continue in an article for the London Review of Books: A Strange Blight. 

Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962.  Crist provides this perspective.

“Following the scattered clues wherever they led, Carson painstakingly pieced together an unassailable case against chemical pesticides, then being indiscriminately dumped over field and stream in white clouds, and in smaller but more intimately toxic loads by American housewives cultivating their gardens and moth-proofing their babies blankets.”

“Silent Spring demonstrated, with scientific rigour and in heart-thumping prose, that chemical pesticides were not just poisoning their intended insect or weed targets, but accumulating in living cells, where they altered essential cellular machinery, interacted in unpredictable ways, and mutated genes in a heritable waterfall of damage that was warping the entire ‘web of life’.”

This was accomplished without assistance from the scientific infrastructure and the vast datasets that are available today.

“The scientific achievement of Silent Spring is less often heralded. By making connections across disciplines Carson inferred the way chemical pesticides disrupt endocrine function and lead to tumour formation before any of this was established science.”

It would be her book that would drive the development of environmental science for succeeding generations.

“Rarely has the work of a single author – or, indeed, a single book – had such an immediate and profound impact on society. Silent Spring was the first book to persuade a wide audience of the interconnectedness of all life, ushering in the idea that ‘nature’ refers to ecosystems that include humans. It spurred the passage in the United States of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972) and the Endangered Species Act (1973). Perhaps most significant, it showed how human health and well-being ties in with the health of our environment, leading to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. No wonder, then, that writers, activists and scientists concerned about the ongoing destruction of biodiversity and the catastrophic effects of climate change look to Carson with urgent nostalgia.”

Crist feels a need to remind us of what Carson, one person, had accomplished, perhaps wishing that a new champion might appear.  The environmental threat from continued use and misuse of ever more new chemicals is now accompanied by the environmental threats presented by a warming Earth.  Animal die-offs continue and while the mechanisms are not always well understood, it is clear the cause is human activity.  While considering the lack of progress in countering carbon buildup in the atmosphere, she casually lets this thought drop.

“But maybe humans won’t be around to see the effects of the changes we have wrought on the biosphere. The postwar chemical revolution that produced pesticides has also led to a dramatic drop in male fertility. Because we are all ingesting chemicals that mess with human hormones, sperm counts in men around the world have dropped by 50 per cent in the last four decades – men today are half as fertile as their grandfathers were. If this downward trend continues, as it seems to be doing, humanity may be incapable of unassisted reproduction within decades. The social consequences stagger the imagination. This trend towards male sterility is being driven by endocrine disruption at the cellular level, which Carson linked to toxic chemicals in Silent Spring. ‘Not all robins receive a lethal dose,’ she writes, ‘but another consequence may lead to the extinction of their kind as surely as fatal poisoning. The shadow of sterility lies over all the bird studies and indeed lengthens to include all living things within its potential range’.”

The notion that male sperm counts were falling in the wealthy societies of Europe and North America was well established.  More recently, data has emerged indicating the phenomenon is worldwide and it is continuing.  And it is not just the sperm count that is affected, it is also the motility of the sperm, its ability to move around, that has also been diminished.  Something is changing the very nature of the sperm, not just its concentration. 

Crist’s suggestion that this trend could be an existential threat is startling, but not unreasonable.  Humans and other mammals have the same organs and biochemistry.  If animal species are dying off and becoming extinct, there is no reason why humans wouldn’t be subject to the same threats.

Rachal Carson’s work did produce changes in behavior with chemicals that were beneficial at the time.  However, since that period many more new chemicals have come into use than can possibly be studied and evaluated, let alone try to understand how they might behave in concert.  And every chemical we use eventually ends up in our water systems.  Every shower we take washes chemicals that we have applied to our bodies or have just settled on us, into our waterways.  Every flush of the toilet sends residue from every pill, lozenge, liquid, and food item we have consumed into that same system.  Every rainstorm sweeps up the chemicals we dripped, poured, or sprayed onto the landscape into our water supply.  Our treatment systems are not designed to remove those chemicals, so they continue to build up and become more dangerous. 

There are plenty of indications that the chemicals that mess with or mimic hormones, endocrine disrupters, exist at a level that can harm fish.  This source provides this definition of endocrine disrupting chemicals (ECBs).

“Found in many household and industrial products, endocrine disruptors are substances that ‘interfere with the synthesis, secretion, transport, binding, action, or elimination of natural hormones in the body that are responsible for development, behavior, fertility, and maintenance of homeostasis (normal cell metabolism)’.”

We are not allowed to experiment on humans, but data on other animals tells us that this complex chemical stew we now find in our environment is dangerous.

“Studies in cells and laboratory animals have shown that EDCs can cause adverse biological effects in animals, and low-level exposures may also cause similar effects in human beings.  EDCs in the environment may also be related to reproductive and infertility problems in wildlife and bans and restrictions on their use has been associated with a reduction in health problems and the recovery of some wildlife populations.”

Not all the problems with EDCs are reproductive in nature.

“In 2015 the Endocrine Society released a statement on endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) specifically listing obesity, diabetes, female reproduction, male reproduction, hormone-sensitive cancers in females, prostate cancer in males, thyroid, and neurodevelopment and neuroendocrine systems as being affected biological aspects of being exposed to EDCs.”

And this is the most frightening aspect of EDCs.

“The critical period of development for most organisms is between the transition from a fertilized egg into a fully formed infant. As the cells begin to grow and differentiate, there are critical balances of hormones and protein changes that must occur. Therefore, a dose of disrupting chemicals may do substantial damage to a developing fetus. The same dose may not significantly affect adult mothers.”

Fish inhabit our water sources.  Since they are generally smaller than us but have the same biochemistry, one might expect their fate to be a harbinger of the fate of humans as the chemicals continue to build up in our waters.  The existence of “intersex” has become common in fish species.  This source provides a definition of that term.

“Intersex people are individuals born with any of several variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals that, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, ‘do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies’.”

If intersex is becoming more common in fish, might one expect the same to be occurring in humans?  This study, The Increasing Prevalence in Intersex Variation from Toxicological Dysregulation in Fetal Reproductive Tissue Differentiation and Development by Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals, provided by the National Institutes of Health seems to believe that is the case.

“An increasing number of children are born with intersex variation (IV; ambiguous genitalia/hermaphrodite, pseudohermaphroditism, etc.). Evidence shows that endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in the environment can cause reproductive variation through dysregulation of normal reproductive tissue differentiation, growth, and maturation if the fetus is exposed to EDCs during critical developmental times in utero. Animal studies support fish and reptile embryos exhibited IV and sex reversal when exposed to EDCs. Occupational studies verified higher prevalence of offspring with IV in chemically exposed workers (male and female).”

This paper also suggests that EDC exposure of males can affect the development of a fetus, presumably by altering the quality of sperm produced.

It turns out that Canada has a lake it reserves for environmental experiments.  One of its recent studies involved exposing a species of fish to a level of EDCs found in our now polluted waterways to determine the effect on the evolution of that species.  The results are found in Collapse of a fish population after exposure to a synthetic estrogen.

“We conducted a 7-year, whole-lake experiment at the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) in northwestern Ontario, Canada, and showed that chronic exposure of fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) to low concentrations (5–6 ng·L−1) of the potent 17α-ethynylestradiol led to feminization of males through the production of vitellogenin mRNA and protein, impacts on gonadal development as evidenced by intersex in males and altered oogenesis in females, and, ultimately, a near extinction of this species from the lake. Our observations demonstrate that the concentrations of estrogens and their mimics observed in freshwaters can impact the sustainability of wild fish populations.”

If the fish are beginning to go, can humans be far behind? 

Yes, we do face existential threats, and there is no Rachel Carson out there worrying about us.

On the Origin of the Handshake—and Other Gestures

Humans have been developing their bodies and minds for millions of years.  Natural selection has carried along characteristics that date back to our earliest origins as well as some that have developed along the way.  Unfortunately, there is little record of this long history.  We only attained the ability to leave lasting descriptions of our activities a few thousand years ago.  Historians often make the mistake of assuming our behavior in that short, hectic, and chaotic period defines who we fundamentally are.  Since the recorded history available to us was filled with war, violence, and male domination, it is assumed that those represent the core of our character.  Given that background it is not to surprising that experts generally conclude that the origin of the humble handshake was as a mechanism of defense against a potential assailant.  This source provides this explanation.

“The history of the handshake dates back to the 5th century B.C. in Greece. It was a symbol of peace, showing that neither person was carrying a weapon. ... Some say that the shaking gesture of the handshake started in Medieval Europe. Knights would shake the hand of others in an attempt to shake loose any hidden weapons.”

This hypothesis paints a rather depressing view of humans and their tendencies.  It is just as likely that humans spent most of their existence learning how to become a cooperative, social species where collaboration for the common good was the necessary rule.  In this view, our past few thousand years were an aberration which we are relying on our intrinsic pro-social nature to overcome.  A recent study suggests that we humans are born into this world inheriting traits that are millions of years old.  Who we are depends on those hidden eons of evolution—probably more so than the horrible past few thousand years.  An article by George Dvorsky, Toddlers and Chimpanzees Share a Surprising Unspoken Language, reports on a research paper that observed human children before they acquired the ability to speak with speechless chimps of all ages.  The chimps were observed in the wild, and the human children in their natural habitats.  Both species were required to communicate with gestures in order to accomplish what they wished.  The result was that young children and chimpanzees shared the majority of the gestures that were utilized.

“Results show that toddlers between 12 to 24 months use nearly 90 percent of the same gestures employed by juvenile and adult chimps, including hugging, jumping, stomping, and throwing objects. The presence of this shared gestural repertoire, the researchers say, suggests these behaviors are innate—a legacy of our shared evolutionary history.”

Some may be uncomfortable with this type of approach.

“’Wild chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans all use gestures to communicate their day-to-day requests, but until now there was always one ape missing from the picture—us,’ explained Catherine Hobaiter, a senior author of the paper and a scientist at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews. ‘We used exactly the same approach to study young chimpanzees and children, which makes sense—children are just tiny apes’.”

This sharing of characteristics with other animals, particularly the other apes, is on a firm scientific footing.  For example, our emotional makeup has an ancient origin tied to our physical bodies and is shared with many other animals.

Getting back to the humble handshake, one of the gestures we share with the chimp is the outstretched, palm-up hand.

This gesture has several meanings for both humans and chimps.  It can be begging, it can be demanding, or it can be an expression of submission.  It is the latter instance that is of interest here.  Consider a person struggling to explain to an audience how something bad happened.  He is likely to stand with both arms stretched and palms up submitting to whatever fate befell him.  The palms-up expression of submission means something different in chimps.  They develop a well-defined hierarchy with a dominant alpha male.  Unless a chimp wishes to challenge the dominant male for his position, it is best to keep a low profile.  Should a chimp arouse the suspicion of the alpha, he has several options for expressing that he is no threat and is satisfied with the leadership of the alpha.  One such gesture is the outstretched hand with palm up.  The alpha, if he so chooses can respond with touching the outstretched hand—palm down of course.

One of humanity’s greatest accomplishments was to shed this alpha male concept.  While we still have leaders and subordinates, the terms of engagement have changed, and such explicit acts of submission are no longer mandatory.  Instead of today’s handshake as an indication of our violent recent heritage, why not look at it as a result of our past improvement in social behavior.  Consider the handshake to be a transition from the palms-up/palms-down fealty of the chimp to an expression of mutual respect with the palms turned sideways, essentially saying let’s assume we are equals and let’s proceed as such.

We are a better species than our recent history would suggest.  Let’s embrace that knowledge and see where that takes us.

The interested reader might find the following articles informative.

The Human Animal: Emotions Are Critical in Animal Evolution

What if Ancient Humans Designed Themselves to Be Lovers—Not Warriors?

Increasing the Federal Minimum Wage: Should Decreasing Inequality be National or Regional?

History tells us that the fundamental law of economics is that owners of land and other capital have immense power over workers.  Unless some mechanism created by society intervenes, capitalism will drive wages for workers down to a subsistence level.  Society has fought back in two ways.  The first is to provide a means for workers to unify and bargain with capital for higher wage levels.  In some countries, and at some times, this process has worked.  However, for countries without national unions covering essentially all workers, the best and only way to provide a wage floor that keeps workers out of poverty is by establishing a national minimum wage.  In many cases this wage is indexed to be some fraction of the national median wage. 

The United States established a minimum wage beginning in 1938.  It has been increased occasionally as inflation has eroded its value, but since the 1960s, it has not kept up with inflation.  An article by David Cooper for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would lift pay for nearly 40 million workers, provides background on the topic.

“Yet since the late 1960s, lawmakers have let the value of the minimum wage erode, allowing inflation to gradually reduce the buying power of a minimum wage income. When the minimum wage has been raised, the increases have been too small to counter the decline in value that has occurred since 1968, when the minimum wage hit its peak in inflation-adjusted terms. In 2018, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 was worth 14.8 percent less than when it was last raised in 2009, after adjusting for inflation, and 28.6 percent below its peak value in 1968, when the minimum wage was the equivalent of $10.15 in 2018 dollars.”

A bill has been proposed that would gradually raise the national minimum wage to $15 in 2024.  Thereafter its value would be indexed to the national median wage.

“On January 16, 2019, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) announced that they would introduce the Raise the Wage Act of 2019, a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage in six steps to $15 per hour by 2024. Beginning in 2025, the minimum wage would be “indexed” to median wages so that each year, the minimum wage would automatically be adjusted based on growth in the median wage. The bill would also gradually increase the subminimum wage for tipped workers (or “tipped minimum wage”), which has been fixed at $2.13 per hour since 1991, until it reaches parity with the regular minimum wage.”

Raising the minimum wage will affect more than just the workers currently earning less than the new value.  There will be a ripple effect as workers just above the new minimum will demand higher wages to avoid the poor optics of earning little more than the minimum wage.

“All told, raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would directly or indirectly lift wages for 39.7 million workers, 26.6 percent of the wage-earning workforce.”

A significant redistribution between capital and labor would occur.

“Over the phase-in period of the increases, the rising wage floor would generate $118 billion in additional wages, which would ripple out to the families of these workers and their communities. Because lower-paid workers spend much of their extra earnings, this injection of wages would help stimulate the economy and spur greater business activity and job growth.”

EPI projects that when the $15 level is reached in 2024, a single worker with a family of four would have risen in income above the poverty index for such a family.

One of the issues that had to be considered in formulating this proposed legislation is whether the climb to a level of $15 made sense for states in which prevailing wages were much lower than national averages.  EPI concluded that regional variations were inappropriate, and a firm national minimum was the correct approach.  Its reasoning can be found in The federal minimum wage should be a robust national wage floor, not adjusted region by region.  This is the EPI logic.

“Regional minimum wages bake in low wages to already low-wage places. Rural counties and Southern cities—where wages have been depressed for a variety of social, racial, political, and economic reasons—would effectively have their low-wage status locked in by a regionally adjusted federal minimum wage. For example, in many low-wage areas, the predominant employers of low-wage workers are big national businesses, such as Walmart and McDonald’s, who can afford to pay far better wages than they do. Their position as the predominant employer in many rural or small-town areas gives them monopsony power and allows them to essentially set wages not just for themselves, but for all low-wage jobs in the region.”

The low-wage southern states have long played a role analogous to that of China in using a cheap labor supply, lax environmental regulations, and anti-union actions to lure companies and jobs from higher-wage regions within the United States.  This would be a good thing if economic benefits from such transfers had led to equilibration of wages and policies between the various regions.  Instead, southern politicians have strived successfully to maintain the South as a permanent low-wage, anti-regulation region.  This situation is not healthy for the nation and it is not healthy for southerners.  Gradually forcing southern and rural low-wage regions to change via a national minimum wage is one way to address this issue.