I was really surprised the article didn't mention this. To be fair it's apparently something that has been evolving for decades, so it wasn't so much prediction but they definitely aren't inventing something wild. https://ourworldindata.org/fertility/
And that entire paragraph touches on random fears about fertility technology that have almost nothing to do with the subject of this article, which is gametogenesis.
Did you actually read the article? They are already thinking about applying it to humans. This kind of thing is almost always first tried in mice or other animals.
Also, the dwindling of our population is mostly due to societal changes like people wanting fewer children on average, or not finding a partner. Infertility is not the major problem, if you even want to call it a problem at society level (personally, it can very well be, of course).
Soy is not exactly a new thing in the history of humans. In fact some of the most populous regions on earth have been eating it widely for a very long time so it seems pretty low down on the list of fertility risk factors to be honest.
Even ignoring the fact that fertility treatments exist...
1 in 4 healthy women in their 20s and 30s will get pregnant in any single menstrual cycle. (The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, 2018)
1 in 10 healthy women in their 40s will get pregnant in any single menstrual cycle. (The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, 2018)
Interesting.. but it assumes that thousand years from now it will still take an entire woman, not just a sub-component called fertile frozen egg to create a baby ex-vivo
Fantastic, if this really translates into human ovaries it will greatly expand the viability of otherwise unfertile couples, and together with better health care and fertility drugs we can tremendously increase the "threatened" human population. We'll finally be able to overrun every other species on the planet, including ants and bacteria. Yay humanity! </s>
BBC did a pretty good video [0] about it. Haven't really heard much about it since. Must be extremely exciting for scientists, as (to my understanding) this kind of self-fertilization is completely unheard of!
Also, since humans are now very numerous and so good at surviving, makes you wonder if humans could mutate this way too. Makes it seem like you'd just get outright pregnant instead of ovulating, which may be a bummer.
The article said there might be "missing cues of fertility that would otherwise increase sperm production" which reminded me of "study shows that when men smell T-shirts worn by women while ovulating, it triggers a surge in the sex hormone testosterone" [1] which would be exactly such a cue of fertility.
Taking a trend with an unknown cause and extrapolating seems unlikely to yield accurate predictions. The actual news here is that in USA and Europe, male sperm counts have fallen 50-60% between 1973 and 2011. That's alarming enough on its own without sensational headlines like this.
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