This framework is designed to take into account a wide range of locations, individual conditions, and other data that can contribute to changing trends in sperm counts. The GenderSci Lab team warned that this kind of Eurocentric focus has been used by alt-right, white supremacist, and men’s rights activists to argue that the health and fertility of men in Western nations is being threatened, particularly by feminist and anti-racist movements.īy contrast, Richardson and her colleagues proposed an alternative approach to examining developments in sperm counts called the “sperm count biovariability” hypothesis. Credit: Harvard GenderSci Labįurther, the claims of decline were based on a “species optimum” of Anglophone developed nations of the 1970s, which the researchers argued was scientifically unsound. A new study from the Harvard GenderSci Lab in the journal Human Fertility, “The Future of Sperm: A Biovariability Framework for Understanding Global Sperm Count Trends” questions the panic over apparent trends of declining human sperm count. This design does not allow researchers to examine differences in individual conditions across rural and urban locations and did not properly showcase the relative imbalance in data available for all nations within the “Other” group. In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies and assumptions because it categorized data as “Western” sperm counts or “Other” sperm counts. The GenderSci Lab researchers found that neither of these assumptions are supported by scientific or geographic evidence. Richardson and her colleagues found that earlier research claimed causal links between declining sperm counts and declining fertility, as well as between exposures to certain environmental chemicals and lower sperm counts. “The extraordinary biological claims of the meta-analysis of sperm count trends and the public attention it continues to garner raised questions for the GenderSci Lab, which specializes in analyzing bias and hype in the sciences of sex, gender, and reproduction and in the intersectional study of race, gender, and science,” said Richardson, director of the GenderSci Lab, and a professor of the history of science and of studies of women, gender, and sexuality. ![]() Specifically, the researchers re-evaluated a 2017 meta-analysis by Hagai Levine, Shanna Swan, and others, “Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis.” The Harvard researchers called for a reconsideration of this widely cited paper and other research that has led to “apocalyptic claims” about a dramatic and imminent human population decline. Richardson, Marion Boulicault, and other colleagues argued that the assumptions underlying these claims are scientifically and ethically problematic, and they proposed alternative methods for understanding sperm count trends in human populations. ![]() ![]() In a new paper published in the journal Human Fertility, “The future of sperm: a biovariability framework for understanding global sperm count trends,” Sarah S. Rising fears over declining human sperm count among men in Western countries may be overblown, according to researchers at Harvard’s GenderSci Lab.
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