How’s your sperm count doin’, guys?

Humans are going to go extinct, says the BBC. “Spermageddon!”, says the Daily Mail. Mankind, specifically, faces doom. If it’s not for disappearing Y chromosomes, it’s our plummeting sperm counts. I don’t know, can women do it all alone?

I had to dig through all this garbage last weekend, as I was preparing to spend another week plowing through the endocrine disruption literature, and considering the effects of things like BPA and pesticides on male developmental biology. In particular, the average sperm count has been declining for the past 50 years. The newspapers were all revved up a while ago over this one paper by Levine et al. (2017), “Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis”. It really was one paper that triggered it all, despite all the other papers on the subject, because the author was fond of saying things like, “Eventually we may have a problem, and with reproduction in general, and it may be the extinction of the human species.” It is a serious concern, but hyperbole doesn’t help.

Part of the problem was that all of the secondary sources were using the same or similar over-simplified graph from the paper. This one:

(a) Meta-regression model for mean sperm concentration by fertility and geographic groups, adjusted for potential confounders. (b) Meta-regression model for mean total sperm count by fertility and geographic groups, adjusted for potential confounders. Meta-regression model weighted by sperm concentration (SC) SE, adjusted for fertility group, time × fertility group interaction, geographic group, time × geographic group interaction, age, abstinence time, semen collection method reported, counting method reported, having more than one sample per men, indicators for study selection of population and exclusion criteria (some vasectomy candidates, some semen donor candidates, exclusion of men with chronic diseases, exclusion by other reasons not related to fertility, selection by occupation not related to fertility), whether year of collection was estimated, whether arithmetic mean of SC was estimated, whether SE of SC was estimated and indicator variable to denote studies with more than one estimate. Total sperm count (TSC) meta-regression models weighted by TSC SE, adjusted for similar covariates and method used to assess semen volume.

It’s terrible. Here we have a single parameter, sperm count, that can be easily modified by a host of variables: subject age, whether they smoke, time of last ejaculate, disease state, etc., etc., all in many different observations with different protocols, and they’ve crunched it all down to a straight line. I did not believe it. Where are the error bars, for Onan’s sake?

It’s particularly annoying, because when I worked my way back to the original paper, it included this better figure:

(a) Mean sperm concentration by year of sample collection in 244 estimates collected in 1973–2011 and simple linear regression. (b) Mean total sperm count by year of sample collection in 244 estimates collected in 1973–2011 and simple linear regression.

You could make the valid point that this version is more complicated and doesn’t include all the corrections and adjustments made in the first one, but I’d argue that this one is stripped of the biases of the authors’ interpretations. It still makes the point that sperm counts are going down, but now I can see how noisy the data are.

I also went looking for other articles that assessed the phenomenon, too. For instance, here’s a different 2017 meta-analysis by Sengupta et al. that does a better job of visualizing the data. This, for example, is a bubble plot that illustrates the sample size of each of the constituent data sets.

Temporal decline in sperm concentration (×106/ml) from 1965 to 2015, bubble size corresponds to the number of men in the study.

Look at all that variation! You can see that the earlier studies had much smaller sample sizes, and that the studies ballooned in recent years. If you like more conventional statistical analyses, here’s a box & whisker plot.

Box and whisker plot of sperm concentration data of European men of the past 50 years.

That doesn’t lend itself as well to hysterical over-interpretation, of course. That says instead that we should be carefully studying this real problem, rather than freaking out over the imminent extinction of the human species, which isn’t really happening. There’s so much variation in these numbers that we can console ourselves with the fact that even if we personally are functionally sterilized by the chemical bath we’re living in, there are plenty of men still pumping out lots of sperm to step in and fertilize womankind (which is really a terrible perspective on it all.) One paper I read found that rural men were more strongly affected, but that the men of New York Citaay maintained a robust sperm count. That urban men will do the job of maintaining humanity’s numbers is probably not reassuring to readers of the Daily Mail, though.

The point here is not to diminish the reality of the problem — BPA, atrazine, various pesticides, and fracking chemicals are all doing unpleasant things to our masculine (and feminine!) bits, and we should do something about it. We are being poisoned, it’s just not going to drive us to extinction in the near future. Eventually, yes.


Hagai Levine, Niels Jørgensen, Anderson Martino-Andrade, Jaime Mendiola, Dan Weksler-Derri, Irina Mindlis, Rachel Pinotti, Shanna H. Swan (2017) Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis. Human Reproduction Update, pp. 1–14, 2017.

P Sengupta, E Borges, Jr, S Dutta, E Krajewska-Kulak (2017) Decline in sperm count in European men during the past 50 years. Human & Experimental Toxicology, https://doi.org/10.1177/09603271177036.

Buh-bye, Sam

Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced today to a 25 year prison sentence, which is probably fair since it was less than what I would have vindictively handed down (I am not a judge), but seems fairly substantial.

His comments were mildly amusing.

Given a chance to speak, Bankman-Fried stood and apologized in a rambling statement, saying: A lot of people feel really let down. And they were very let down. And I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about what happened at every stage.

He added that, My useful life is probably over. It’s been over for a while now, from before my arrest.

What makes you think you ever had a “useful life,” you thieving parasite?

Now we need to lock up all the crypto bros.

I detested the NY Times since before it was cool

Among my earliest complaints was about their editor, Jodi Wilgoren (now Rudoren), who was always waffling over ‘both sides’ in the creation/evolution debate. Those complaints are so old, back 20 years and more, that they were posted when this blog was just a little personal endeavor posted on an old Macintosh in my lab, and you can’t get to them anymore. Wilgoren infuriated me with comments like this one, after she’d dedicated a huge amount of time ‘reporting’ creationist claims about the Grand Canyon.

I don’t consider myself a creationist. I don’t have any interest in sharing my personal views on how the canyon was carved, mostly because I’ve spent almost no time pondering my personal views — it takes all my energy as a reporter and writer to understand and explain my subjects’ views fairly and thoroughly.

So what was she doing writing science articles for the NYT, if she’d never thought about the science?

Anyway, I was reminded of that by this recent comic.

This has always been the way of the NYT. All through the Bush years, the Iraq War, every political issue, the New York Times always been the banner carrier for the passive voice and both-siderism. It’s just the worst.

Wilgoren/Rudoren is now the editor of The Forward, where she has won awards from, among others, the Religious News Association, which is no surprise. It is not clear if she has yet started thinking.

I join the non-engineers in solving engineering problems!

There was a terrible accident at a bridge in Baltimore — it was struck by a container ship and collapsed horrifically. I didn’t think I had anything to contribute to the discussion. Minnesota had a terrible bridge collapse back in 2007, but that was a consequence of neglect and failure to maintain critical infrastructure. This event seems to be completely different.

But then I looked at the news and noticed that a lot of idiots are throwing out explanations. Hey, I have no engineering expertise, know nothing about bridge construction, but have ridden on a ship a few times, therefore I’m just as qualified as the Fox News team or Victor Davis Hansen, or some guy who has appeared on Ancient Aliens, therefore I should opine.

You should look at how they’re explaining the crash.

A non-exhaustive list of things that are getting blamed for the bridge collapse on Telegram and X include: President Joe Biden, Hamas, ISIS, P Diddy, Nickelodeon, India, former President Barack Obama, Islam, aliens, Sri Lanka, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Wokeness, Ukraine, foreign aid, the CIA, Jewish people, Israel, Russia, China, Iran, Covid vaccines, DEI, immigrants, Black people and lockdowns.

The Francis Scott Key truss bridge actually collapsed when the MV Dali cargo ship collided with one of the bridge supports. Six construction workers, who were filling potholes on the bridge at the time, are presumed dead. The ship is owned by Singapore-based Grace Ocean Private Ltd, and the 22-person crew were all Indian. The ship was on route to Colombo, Sri Lanka at the time of the accident.

This did not stop people from “asking questions” about the incident, a frequent conspiracist response to major events. And though conspiracy theorists are having a hard time pinpointing exactly what conspiracy caused the collapse, the one thing they do agree on is that this incident is a “black swan event.”
The term “black swan event” has been around for decades, and is used to describe a major global event (typically in the financial markets) that can cause significant damage to a country’s economy. But in recent years, the term has been co-opted by the conspiracy minded to explain an event triggered by the so-called deep state that would signal an imminent revolution, a third world war, or some other apocalyptic catastrophe.

Man, a lot of them blame DEI, which seems to be the go-to excuse on the right wing for everything. I don’t get it, though. This ship was crewed by Indians, and the bridge, the victim in this collision, was crewed by immigrant labor, so we can’t blame the magic word “DEI” for that. Fortunately, I, a non-engineer, am here to explain the problem and how to fix it.

The bridge was clearly under-engineered. It crumpled so easily with a slight bump! Clearly, those pilings (or whatever bridge people call them — you know, the bits sticking up out of the water holding up the road) were flimsy and inadequate, and need to be built back stronger. As it is, they probably wouldn’t hold up if they were slammed by a 6-ton wrecking ball, so it’s back to drawing board, and they need to be built with the goal of standing up to the force of a 100,000 ton wrecking ball traveling at 8 knots. Easy, right? I am also not a physicist, so I will leave it to the smarter people here to calculate the amount of force it needs to resist. It’s something like , where you have to multiply and divide and solve for F, way above my pay grade.

So, yeah, just build bridges that are that strong.

I’m not sure where Wokeness or P Diddy or vaccines fit into the equation. We might need to recruit some social scientists to work on the bridge redesign team, and I’m definitely not smart enough for that stuff.

Or I could stand back and let competent people find solutions, which probably don’t involve impossibly strong structures or firing people with the wrong skin color, but where’s the fun in that?

Synchronicity! Convergence! It must be significant.

I’ve been seeing more examples recently of theists pointing at the ‘miracle’ of solar eclipses. It’s amazing the the diameter of the moon as seen from Earth is almost exactly the same as the diameter of the sun, as seen from the same position. That couldn’t possibly be by chance — it must be a sign from a god.

Except…sorry, this kind of thing is exactly what can happen by coincidence. It’s a neat phenomenon, but not at all persuasive of the existence of a deity.

But here’s another miraculous coincidence: both Adam Lee and Gregory Paul have written about this same event, and both are saying it’s not evidence for a god. A miracle! So unlikely.

Both Lee and Paul explain the physical basis for eclipses, and suggest it’s nothing but chance. Lee points out the fallacious reasoning behind thinking this is causally significant.

Creationists love talking about the “rare Earth” idea: the argument that Earth is specially and uniquely fine-tuned to support life. It orbits in the habitable zone, not too close or too far from the sun, which is a stable star without massive flares. We have a regular day-night cycle, a mostly stable axial tilt, a magnetic field that screens out cosmic radiation, and so on. The creationists claim that this is evidence of God’s special favor.

The fallacy of the rare-Earth argument is that it’s an inference based on incomplete data. Just as you can’t compute the probability of a particular hand of cards unless you know what’s in the deck, we have no basis for proclaiming how common Earthlike planets are. Our sample size is too limited (although it’s growing all the time).

Paul wonders why a super-powerful cosmic being who can juggle stars and planets is trying to impress us with a meaningless, illusory light show.

Wrapping this up by looking at the really big picture, it’s important to understand that the beautiful total eclipses should be seen as compelling evidence of God thing is part of a greater cover-up conspiracy. It is a use of a wowzer but trivial item to help divert mass awareness away from the far larger issues that tell a very different tale about the state of our existence. Theists have long been working to get us to focus on the supposed sheer existence of a creator via the beauty of our Lord’s creation. That’s because they don’t want us to pay due and necessary attention to the deeply dark underside of the proposed super intelligence. The universe may be pretty, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is correspondingly arbitrary, and can cover profound dysfunction or evil. Far from the universe being truly fine-tuned for intelligent life, it is in many respects hostile to it, to the degree that Earth is a toxic blue dot so infested with lethal microbes that diseases have killed off half of humans born, to the tune of fifty billion dead children (https://americanhumanist.org/what-we-do/publications/eph/journals/volume28/paul-1 and see part 2 too). There is nothing pretty about that.

Let us assume the following. That children are immune to diseases, so that few if any kinds die young. Rather than the 5,000 that will die around the globe on April 8. Such a world would be pushing happenstance way beyond its logical, natural cause limits. Such benign protection of the lives of the most vulnerable and innocent would not only constitute solid evidence for the existence of a truly intelligent designer of immense power. It would demonstrate that the entity really is ethical and in fact cares about the free will of humans. As it is, we dwell on a kid-killing planet that, regardless of its awe-inspiring aspects including total eclipses, is fully and far more compatible with amoral natural origins than with loving design, and there is nothing trivial about that terrible fact.

Yeah, I wonder too why a god would rather play shenanigans with the lighting than actually do something about all those suffering, dying kids. It’s not a good look, God. It makes you look like a clown in the cancer ward, tossing kids out the window.

I’m not going to indulge in the spectacle. I think we get about 60% totality here in Minnesota, and that’ll have to be good enough for me. It’s all going down on a school day, you know, and I’m not traveling to some ungodly place like Indiana or Texas for a brief period of darkness.

Great Bible, but what about the STICKY PAGES?

Which is worse: 1) the guy peddling silly Christian theology who truly believes in that nonsense, or 2) the guy peddling silly Christian theology who doesn’t understand it or believe it? For me, it’s a toss-up; #1 isn’t lying to everyone, but is still a gullible ninny, while #2 is trying to convince everyone to buy something he doesn’t think is worth it. They’re both awful people.

Now Donald Trump has become a Bible salesman. He’s selling them for $59.99. Of course he gets a cut — he’s not doing this because he wants to save everyone, but because he wants to save himself. He’s #2.

These are special Bibles, the Lee Greenwood Version. Greenwood is the folksy singer who got rich off one song, a patriotic country-western anthem that gets the good ol’ boys tearing up and cheering, while I’m leaning over to puke under the bleachers. What makes his Bible special is that it’s in easy-to-read large print (it won’t get read much, though), and also includes copies of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, and among those immortal words, the lyrics to Greenwood’s best-selling country song, “God Save the USA.” It’s also The God Bless The USA Bible is the ONLY Bible inspired by America’s most recognized patriotic anthem, God Bless The USA. It’s not just divinely inspired, it’s Lee Greenwood inspired, which makes it just that much better.

They have a FAQ page for this grift, with one question that did set me back a bit.

WHAT IF MY BIBLE HAS STICKY PAGES?

This is not something I usually worry about when I buy a book, but it just tells you how wonderful and exciting this Bible must be.

(They say it’s just because of the gilded edges, but we all know what it’s really about…)

Big tough TV cowboy

Forrie Smith is a regular John Wayne — all hat and no cattle, nothing but air and noise pretending to be a cowboy. He’s on some show called “Yellowstone,” and he’s been making a fuss about vaccines and masks and all that right-wing BS. He’s taken it a step further than most, though, insisting that not only will he not wear a mask, but he will get mad if you wear a mask.

On March 24, Smith posted an Instagram story with the caption, “You need to hear this story.” He then proceeds to delve into the story of how he was kicked off an airplane. In the video, he appears intoxicated and disoriented, even expressing confusion about which city he is currently in. The video is filmed from the Houston, Texas, airport, where he claims, “I just got kicked off a plane … because I told them that I didn’t feel comfortable sitting next to somebody with a mask on.” Smith also revealed the staff cited his intoxication as the reason for kicking him off the plane. While he admitted he had “been drinking,” he insisted he wasn’t intoxicated.

He claimed the real reason he was kicked off was “because you people won’t stand up and tell everybody what bulls**t this is. I just told them I didn’t feel comfortable about sitting next to somebody that had to wear a mask, and I’m off the plane.” The incident may have gone unreported if Smith hadn’t posted it on social media. However, he seemed to think the video would garner sympathy or make some kind of point about vaccinations. Instead, it just made him look like a fool.

This is a new level of stupid. So he’s drunk — he mentions sitting in an airport bar for 3 hours — and he’s offended that he would be asked to sit next to someone wearing a mask. That’s bad enough, but then he goes on Instagram thinking he will be inspiring the people to rise up and complain right alongside him that someone dared to mask up in his presence.

I didn’t need to hear his story, but now that I have, I know to never pay attention to his pretentious, entitled, ignorant ass ever again.

Wilson’s Principles of Teratology

It’s another busy week of EcoDevo, and even though the campus was closed I still had to give a lecture on endocrine disruptors. I started by laying out Wilson’s Principles of Teratology…wait, what? You don’t know them? I guess I’d better explain them to the internet at large.

These principles are a bit like Koch’s Principles, only for teratology — you better know them if you want to figure out the causes of various problems at birth, and you do: about 3% of all human births express a defect serious enough for concern. Here’s the list:

  1. Susceptibility to teratogenesis depends on the genotype of the conceptus and the manner in which this interacts with adverse environmental factors.
  2. Susceptibility to teratogenesis varies with the developmental stage at the time of exposure to an adverse influence. There are critical periods of susceptibility to agents and organ systems affected by these agents.
  3. Teratogenic agents act in specific ways on developing cells and tissues to initiate sequences of abnormal developmental events.
  4. The access of adverse influences to developing tissues depends on the nature of the influence. Several factors affect the ability of a teratogen to contact a developing conceptus, such as the nature of the agent itself, route and degree of maternal exposure, rate of placental transfer and systemic absorption, and composition of the maternal and embryonic/fetal genotypes.
  5. There are four manifestations of deviant development (death, malformation, growth retardation and functional defect).
  6. Manifestations of deviant development increase in frequency and degree as dosage increases from the No Observable Adverse Effect Level (NOAEL) to a dose producing 100% lethality (LD100).

The first two tell you what is tricky about teratology. There are multiple variables that affect the response: genetic variability in the conceptus (and, I would suggest, maternal variations), and also timing is critical. A drug might do terrible things to an embryo at 4 weeks, but at 3 months the fetus shrugs it off.

Ultimately, though, the teratogen is having some specific effect (3) on a developing tissue. We just have to figure out what it is, while keeping in mind that that effect might be hiding in a maze of genetics (1) and time (2).

Another complication is that in us mammals the embryo is sheltered deep inside the mother, who has defense mechanisms. The agent has to somehow get in (4). A complication within a complication: sometimes the teratogenic agent is harmless until Mom chemically modifies it as part of her defense, and instead creates a more potent poison.

#5 is just listing the terrible outcomes of screwing with development.

#6 I do not trust. It’s saying the effect is going to follow a common sense increase with increasing dosage, but even that isn’t always true. There is a phenomenon called the inverted-U response where the effect increases with dosage, then plateaus, and then drops off at high concentrations. We’re dealing with complex regulatory phenomena with multiple molecular actors that may have unpredictable interactions. There are teratogens that do terrible things to embryos at low concentrations, but do nothing at ridiculously high concentrations — as if the high dose triggers effective defense mechanisms that the low dose sidesteps.

I had to review these principles in class yesterday, because although I’d also discussed them earlier in the semester, we are currently dealing with teratogens of monstrous subtlety, these compounds that mimic our own normal developmental signals, the same signals our bodies use to assemble critical organ systems. It’s as if some joker were placing inappropriate traffic signals along a busy highway — most would do no harm, but some may totally confuse travelers who then end up detouring up into the kidneys rather than down the genitals, as they preferred, or they end up crashing into the thyroid.

Unfortunately, in this case the responsible jokers are mainly gigantic megacorporations who are spewing these dangerous signals all over the countryside…and then we get to wait until the people swimming in them try to have children, and then the teratologists get to say “death, malformation, growth retardation and functional defect”.


In case you were wondering, Wilson didn’t come up with his list first — a 19th century scientist named Gabriel Madeleine Camille Dareste did it first. No, not first. Lots of people have been documenting these developmental problems as long as there’s been writing, like on this Chaldean tablet:

When a woman gives birth to an infant:
With the ears of a lion There will be a powerful king
That wants the right ear The days of the king will be prolonged
That wants both ears There will be mourning in the country
Whose ears are both deformed The country will perish and the enemy rejoice
That has no mouth The mistress of the house will die
Whose nostrils are absent The country will be in affliction and the house of the man will be ruined
That has no tongue The house of the man will be ruined
That has no right hand The country will be convulsed by an earthquake
That has no fingers The town will have no births
That has the heart open with no skin The country will suffer from calamities
That has no penis The master of the house shall be enriched by the harvest of his field
Whose anus is closed The country shall suffer from want of nourishment
Whose right foot is absent His house will be ruined and there will be abundance in that of the neighbor
That has no feet The canals of the country will be cut and the house ruined
If a queen gives birth to:
An infant with teeth already cut The days of the king will be prolonged
A son and a daughter at the same time The land will be enlarged
An infant with the face of a lion The king will not have a rival
An infant with 6 toes on both feet The king shall rule the enemies’ country

Nowadays we’re more interested in causes than imagined consequences, I hope.

Does anyone care that the Republican candidate is obviously ill?

Let’s get this out of the way: Biden is old. He’s slow and halting in his speech, he sounds like an old man. I’d rather we had a younger candidate running, but he’ll get the job done.

His opponent, on the other hands, sounds like he’s damaged mentally. He has a fucked up brain, and it’s obvious that there’s something more going on than just an age-related slow-down. Here’s a diagnosis by Dr. Elizabeth Zoffman, a forensic psychiatrist and an Associate Clinical Professor of Forensic and General Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.

  • Changes in speech patterns with many fewer and simpler words (decline in vocabulary) with fewer adjectives and adverbs.
  • A decline in cognitive focus on speech subjects with incomplete sentences and an inability to focus on a topic long enough to complete a sentence when not reading from a teleprompter.
  • Difficulty pronouncing words, word substitution and nonsense words – known as paraphasia
  • Tangential thinking where the topic switches mid-sentence to some unrelated topic.
  • Frequent repetition of words and phrases as if his mind is stuck in a loop.
  • Disinhibition and an inability to control verbal outbursts.
  • Socially inappropriate behavior – mocking a man with muscular dystrophy, disrespecting fallen soldiers as losers.
  • Lack of self-awareness in that he apparently cannot see how inappropriate his behavior has become and use his judgment to stop himself.
  • Changes in movement and gait. His walk appears wide-based and he has developed a swing of his right leg. He appears glued to the floor when he “dances” for his audience. If caught on camera standing still, he appears unnaturally immobile.
  • The changes in judgment and impulse control have uncovered and perhaps worsened underlying personality traits that others have characterized as narcissistic and antisocial. The changes have led some experts to suggest a diagnosis of “malignant narcissism.”

All of that is apparent. This isn’t just picking a biased doctor to invent a diagnosis — that’s all stuff we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears. His fanatical voters don’t care, the media doesn’t care, he plans to shamble into office like a rot-brained zombie.