2023-12-01

Ben Braddock

We will be hearing about Ben Braddock on the selection impacts of some of these fertility trends. Thank you for inviting me here.

I want to start off with a quote from a medical researcher.

".. it is plain that the proportion of celibates was high in the Roman empire and that the fall in the fertility of marriages was going on. It is the childless marriage, the samll family system that contemporary writers deplore... The human harvest was bad, it was bad in all classes, but the decline was most marked in the upper ranks, the most educated, the most civilized, the potential leaders of the race." - Eileen Power

Here is a world population graph over the past 12,000 years. In other words, fertility decline and population decline is not a new problem. But we are doing different now: we're at this huge peak. 300 years ago, human population for 10,000 years was relatively flat globally. In the past 300 years, it has been a total historic anomaly.

As this chart started to go up, someone noticed in 1840 that 1 out of 3 women were dying of a fever. 1 out of 3 women giving birth. Whta happened is that one of his other doctors were performing autopsies and then going and delivering children. This was the state of medicine in 1840s. That's not that long ago, if you think about it. So he had his students start washing their hands with a lime solution and they found that this lowered the rates of this fever that these women were getting and lowered it to negligble rates in comparison to what it was.

So we were picking this low hanging fruit in the 1840s. The big driver of this was capitalism. For the first time, we were able to produce enough and raise people up. But we had an agrarian pre-industrial culture where you had to have a lot of kids to have a next generation.

Adam Smith in the 1700s wrote about how the average woman in Scotland was having about 15 children and maybe 3 or 4 if they were lucky would make it to adulthood. The main driver of this, capitalism paired with what it has wrought-- the medical innovations, the sewage systems, the big drivers of the decline in infant mortality going into the 1900s. It's widely credited as being vaccines, but that's a myth.

Measles death rates dropped by 98-99% before the measles vaccine. Just look at every other childhood mortality causes dropped. The one where it did do work was the smallpox vaccine which is a different one, which was around the 1950s where the WHO finally came up with one and was able to eliminate that disease which was one of the main contributors to human mortality for a few millinea. For some reason we kept a few vials of it around. Researchers in 2018 figured out how to make this virus synthetically in a lab and take a sequence of ..... ((this is just false, we were able to do this before 2018)).


The big contributor to that decline wasn't vaccines, but water systems, sewage systems, competence, specific works projects, etc. That's who deserves credit. Often the medical industry wants to take more credit than it deserves.

One thing I would give credit to is that around the 2 billion mark in 1928... was the advent of anti-biotics. Since that happened, it's been a straight line up. Many of the bacterial infections that contributed to human mortality in the past.. and now we think of them as common almost harmless infections. A century ago, our grandparents, this was not the case. The specter of death would hang over your house constantly.

Unfortunately we are frittering away antibiotics as a medical marvel. We are rapidly approaching total antibiotic resistance across a number of pathogens. It's quite alarming. There's a new strain of gonnorhea and only one antibiotic is working. I am in contact with a researcher who monitors sewage and hospitals to monitor antibiotic resistance. Some samples are resistant to all antibiotics and also to silver.

Antibiotics were a big driver for the growth for our population  Without antibiotics, you don't get the sexual revolution and hypergamy because people would just self-select out and die of syphilis or something. Technology made it possible for us to de-link sex and the consequences of sex. In the case of antibiotics, the consequences are sexually transmitted infections. In the case of birth control pills, the unwanted consequence would be children there.

We are finding it harder to find fruitful antibiotics. Here's a chart of the percentage of teenagers taking antidepressnats from 2015 to 2019. These are teenagers. As of 2019, it's at 10% formerly on SSRIs. The Danish Register Study ound that SSRI exposure in utero leads to substantially higher likelihood that the next generation will have psychiatric disorders because they are being exposed to these drugs in the womb. This is likely the epigenetic effect. It's like a supercomputer that contextualizes our DNA. ((This is false. It's not a supercomputer.))

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The greatest inheritance you receive is not wealth but your genetics. We won't be able to produce a high exponential increase in the human population because there's no low-hanging antibiotics anymore. We have a declining epigenetic and genetic quality between generations. ... there's high mutation loads out there. It's not just that our own fertility may be declining, it's that the births that we do have are increasingly people who won't be able to reproduce or they have severe problems of their own.

Here's a chart going back to the 1960s. It's childhood obesity rate. It cut off at 2016 for this chart. It's over 20% for 12-19 year olds. That's a cardiac and diabetic bomb waiting to happen. If you have morbid obesity at that point... and severe obesity BMI over 30, over 35 is at 6.3%. These are 8-9 year old children who weigh 300-400 pounds.

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There has been a substantial increase in autism diagnosis. There are a lot of theories about what is driving the increase, but the actual increase is not itself up for debate. It's not just a change in diagnostic criteria. Autism puts a large strain on families. As the risk goes up, it will become harder to make the sell to young women and young couples who are going to be afraid of these increasingly more likely outcomes.

I think the best way to deal with it is you have to start by talking about the problem because it has gotten to where this is... this is not that widely discussed. The public health agencies are talking about it a little bit, but the solutions are mostly about throwing more money at it. I think the issue is that there's a lot of powerful interests and money being made off certain products.

One of the things with autism is that there's now a link between tylenol, a mother taking tylenol when she is pregnant, increases the risk of autism for male sons. 

Let us now praise the famous men and our fathers that begat us... ECCLESIASTICUS xliv.

Solutions? I might have depressed a lot of people here. When we talk about pro-natalism, one thing that comes up is tax credits which I'm all for. The Hungarian model gets trotted out a lot. If you go to Hungary, they still have a relatively traditional agricultural society and they don't use a lot of pesticides.

The issue with adopting a model policy from one of these countries is that they don't have the same problems we have. It's difficult from a policy standpoint and say okay let's go after big pharma, big medical cartels and let's tackle Monsanto or something and all these other companies driving pollutants into our food supply. A lot of things are being sprayed on food not just toxic to cells but they are also mutagenic especially in germline cells.

It's more than manning up, getting married and getting a job or whatever. When there's this message, you will see ... they target these messages exclusively to young men. Nobody is willing to get up and say, maybe let's rethink the approach to mental health altogether. Maybe let's not have doctors who are pushing teenage girls to get on SSRIs or to get on birth control which may have permanent consequences. There's this conception that people can just jump on birthcontrol and then off. In some women, once they discontinue birth control their testosterone levels may never fully recover. Everyone thinks that testerone is for males and estrogen is for women. Women have higher cellular division rates and they have more stress they need more estrogen. These are not male/female hormones. Everyone has these hormones. If men do not have enough estrogen, they become infertile. If women don't have enough testosterone, then their fertility shuts down and their openness to reproduction will also shutdown. Chemical birth control can also raise the levels of sex-hormone binding globulin which binds the stress hormone and reduces interaction with receptors. It lowers a woman's testosterone, sometimes on a permanent basis. This alters their behavior and their openness to having children. There's a lot of talk about xeno-estrogens, endocrine disruptors, etc.... .... Hormones are the difference between a baby gorilla that you can hold in your hands, and a 1200 pound monster that can rip your arms off. Hormones are incredibly powerful.

There's a lot of things we can do.

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We can improve qualitative fertility by focusing on mate selection and creating great beautiful kids through mate selection. For single men, the mother's mitochondrial health, the women you decide to have kids with, this will determine a lot for your kids. Even if she yells at you, throws things at you, if she gets out in the sunlight and she's marinaritng garlic and honey you probably wnat to go with her anyway. You can work on some of those other issues. Learn to dodge the pans being thrown but don't let good things get away. I'll leave you with that.