Bad Seed

I told Margaret L Carter (in her post "You Are What You Read" that I had an encyclopaedia by my bed. I lied. By omission. An Encyclopaedia is there, but there are other things, too.

The November 2011 issue of "DISCOVER" magazine, for instance, which talks about Cannabis Clones (I read it at a glance as Cannibal Clones, which is why I picked it up) and False Convictions.... of victims for arson they did not commit, owing to bad science used by prosecutors, also a major piece on Dark Matter, and another on Drinking Sewage In Texas.

Yes. I must confess. There are some famous politicians from Texas, and I did rather hope to read that they had been drinking sewage. Nod to Margaret L Carter's most recent blog post.

However, the article that inspires today's post is "Can Science Save The Human Sperm?" which was penned by David H. Freedman, and which informed me greatly, and amused me not a little.

One of the very popular plot lines of Futuristic Romance and also Science Fiction Romance is that alien females have become infertile for one reason or another, and therefore alien males turn to human women. Susan Grant is one of the few (STAR KING) to bring us an infertile alien hero.

From what I have gleaned from David H Freedman's piece, it would be a lot more plausible if alien females abducted human males for stud duty (or not, given the male problems Mr. Freedman lays out). Maybe I mean that spacefaring human women of the future will need to prey on hapless alien males.

In no particular order, here's why Mr. Freedman thinks our great-great-grandsons will be duds.

1. Modern men are taking testosterone supplements which have a side effect of shriveling the testicles and lowering sperm product.

2. Modern men keep their testicles at unhelpful temperatures, which could be because the men have too much hot belly overhanging places that ought to be cool, or because they have varicoceles (hot blooded varicose veins) snaking around their scrotums, or (I am extrapolating) because they wear inappropriate underwear that bunches everything up into a neat, hot package, or because they exercise too much and thereby get too hot all over.

3. Modern men aren't in good shape. They don't eat right. They are over-medicated. They have infections down there....

4. Modern men have lost what Mr. Freedman compares to the seminal equivalent of a Klingon cloaking device, so women's antibodies recognize the sperm as foreign invaders, and attack them.

5. Modern technology and the wonders of in-vitro fertilization is subverting the "Survival Of The Fittest" safeguards of the natural world. Unhealthy old rich guys (or politicians, or union guys with Cadillac health care plans) are able to pass on their inferior genes.

David H. Freedom does say something about the unfortunate decline in female promiscuity, but I will put that comment down to male bias.

Given that there is now a strain of gonorrhea well on its way to being incurable, not to mention all the other horrible diseases that men can give women, I think any alien females would be well advised to look elsewhere.