Testosterone in the Wild
Does a study of South American hunter-gatherers really upend our understanding of testosterone?
Before we get into this substantial examination of a new study on testosterone, here’s a reminder that my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, is available now from Amazon in hardcover, Kindle and audiobook versions. Get it here.
“Anthropologists just upended our understanding of ‘normal’ testosterone levels,” reads the headline.
“A study published in the American Journal of Human Biology suggests that Western medical standards for male testosterone might not reflect the natural vaxriation found in different environments. Researchers found that among Indigenous Shuar males in the Ecuadorian Amazon, testosterone levels change across the lifespan in ways that differ from patterns seen in high-income nations. These findings imply that what doctors consider a typical hormonal profile is actually a physiological response to specific lifestyle and environmental factors.”
You see studies like this with a fair amount of regularity, and their findings are often used to rubbish claims about important things happening in the West, including supposed crises and “moral panics.”
Calm down, we’re told: you’ve actually got it all wrong.
In this case, the broader target is the very well-founded claim—one of the central claims of my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity—that there is something worrying happening to men and their testosterone levels today. Testosterone levels are suffering a rapid, apparently unprecedented decline: 1% year on year, according to the Massachusetts Male Aging Study (MMAS), which maybe doesn’t sound like much until you release that’s a quarter in just 25 years. Studies from across the Western world, from Finland to Israel, have corroborated the findings of the MMAS, and even suggested the decline may be more severe than first thought.
This precipitous decline isn’t an isolated phenomenon. In fact, it’s part of a broader decline of male reproductive parameters, including sperm counts and sperm quality. Professor Shanna Swan, a world expert on reproductive health, has predicted, on the basis of sperm-count trends, that by the middle of the century the median man will have a sperm count of zero: one half of all men will produce no sperm, the other half will produce so few they’ll never be able to get a woman pregnant.
Humanity, it seems, is staring down the barrel of species-level sterility in less than a generation.
If that isn’t something to be worried about, I don’t know what is.
This kind of logic is something I’m used to from studying anthropology myself, at Cambridge. “Tribe X”—let’s call them the Bunga-Bunga, from the Highlands of Papa New Guinea—”don’t have Western custom Y, therefore custom Y isn’t natural.”
Many anthropologists build entire careers just doing this one trick, over and over again: undermining the claims of Western philosophy, science, reason, imperialism, the patriarchy—all bad words and bad things—by finding exceptions in out-of-the-way places. From personal experience, I can tell you it makes those anthropologists feel pretty good about themselves.
And look, there’s obviously some merit to this approach. If something is treated as natural and therefore a human universal, and then you find an instance of a people who don’t display that belief or practise that custom—well, that belief or practise isn’t natural or a human universal, is it? But as an end in itself, it’s not particularly useful, unless your aim is chaos and inspiring a lack of self-confidence.
Rules often have exceptions—big news!—and the existence of the latter doesn’t undermine the existence of the former. Quite the opposite, in fact: they reinforce each other. A near-universal isn’t universal, but it might as well be. If 99 out of 100 societies do something, and one doesn’t, it’s still the case that 99 societies do do it, and that there may be a good reason—innate programming, evolutionary utility, whatever—to explain why that’s so.
In this particular case, although the new study may deepen our understanding of what testosterone is and how it functions in different kinds of societies, I don’t think it really tells us anything about what’s happening across the Developed World, and increasingly in the Developing World too, to testosterone levels and fertility.
It doesn’t provide any reason not to be worried, or not to try and do something to arrest the decline in male reproductive health in our own societies.
Let’s look at what the study says in a little more depth.
