One of the most worrying but least acknowledged trends in the modern world is how for decades men’s testosterone levels and corresponding sperm counts have been in precipitous decline. This collapse in virility is already affecting fertility rates the world over – and, alarmingly, it’s only set to get worse. Why is this happening? What can we do to change it? And if we don’t, could it mean humanity is on the brink of dying out?

Dr Charles Cornish-Dale, also known as the Raw Egg Nationalist, is an anthropologist, political commentator and men’s health writer and author of several books whose work has appeared in publications including the American Mind and the Spectator. In his latest book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, out later this summer, he sounds the alarm about these worrying trends.

This week, the Daily Sceptic’s Associate Editor Laurie Wastell spoke to Dr Cornish-Dale about his book for the Sceptic podcast to find out what’s really going on. What follows is an edited extract of their conversation. You can watch the full interview here.

: Why is the modern world making us sick?

: That’s a very good question. And it’s a very pertinent question – now is definitely the time to be asking it.

Americans are basically the most unhealthy people on the planet and you’ve got a huge, burgeoning political health movement in the US. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now leading the US Department of Health and Human Services with his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda, which is specifically focused on the question: “why are Americans so unhealthy?” So now is a good time actually to be addressing this problem before it gets any bigger and any more unmanageable.

My fundamental contention in all of my work, not only in The Last Men but also in my previous book, The Eggs Benedict Option and in essays and articles, is that there’s a fundamental mismatch between our evolved natures as animals, as humans, and the modern world that we live in.

Modern humans have been around for, let’s say, 200,000 years. And we’ve only been practicing agriculture for 10,000-12,000 years on any kind of scale, and only in certain parts of the world. Industrial societies, meanwhile, have only existed for 200 years. Britain was the first industrial society, and the industrial revolution began around the turn of the 19th century.

We’ve been living one way for a very, very long time and then all of a sudden, things have changed in an incredible way and that change is accelerating very, very rapidly. So there’s a mismatch between the way that we’ve evolved – the creatures we’ve evolved to be – and the world that we live in.

That’s the general outline of the problem. The specifics are, for example, we’re exposed to an enormous burden of toxic chemicals, especially endocrine-disrupting chemicals – hormone-disrupting chemicals. Many of them mimic the female hormone oestrogen in the human body. And this is a totally new thing that we’re only starting to understand. We’re also increasingly sedentary. And we eat ultra-processed food, which is a totally novel type of food that has no real parallel in human history.

But what do we do instead of instead of changing the world to be more in harmony with our nature? We come up with superficial answers to these problems, things like Ozempic, these new GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs – weight loss drugs – which mean you stop eating, you stop digesting food, and you lose weight.

But this is a sticking plaster for the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that we are a particular kind of organism, and we’ve now created a society that is in so many different ways actually at odds with our nature. And it’s making us very ill.

: A key part of that nature is having to reproduce – to produce the next generation. But the title of your book is The Last Men and you write about extremely worrying statistics on sperm counts and birth rates. Tell us about those. Why is that happening?

: The title is The Last Men, which I chose for various different reasons, but it’s not hyperbole. One of the fundamental reasons is that sperm counts have been declining precipitously across the Western world for decades, and also in the non-Western world, as new research is showing. And if you extrapolate the data, by 2045-2050, the median man will have a sperm count of zero.

What that means is that one half of all men will produce no sperm whatsoever, and the other half will produce so few that it doesn’t really matter. You need a certain number of sperm to fertilise an egg – the odds are pretty low even when you have millions of millions of sperm per decilitre of semen – but when you have, say, 10, it’s just not going to happen. So we’re moving towards a situation very rapidly where reproduction by natural means may be impossible.

And this is a mainstream prediction – we’re not off in conspiracy land here. These are predictions based on existing data by world experts in reproductive health. Professor Shanna Swan at Mount Sinai Hospital medical school in New York is more or less the world’s foremost reproductive health expert. And she released a book in 2022 called Count Down, which was specifically about sperm count decline. She calls this “Spermageddon”. Which it makes it sound funny, but actually it’s serious – very serious. And it’s part and parcel of this broader health problem that we’re witnessing.

Again, it’s a fundamental mismatch. The cause is a fundamental mismatch between our evolved natures and the world that we’re living in. It’s exposure to harmful chemicals which are found in plastics and in nonstick coatings and in personal care products and herbicides and pesticides that are on non-organic food and even on organic food, and in the water supply. It’s sedentary lifestyles. It’s even things like wearing tight trousers – there have been studies that show that men who wear skinny jeans and tight underpants have drastically reduced fertility.

One of the things I talk about in the book is the fact that more or less every single society faces some kind of reproductive problem. This isn’t a new thing we’re facing. So if you look at the ancient world, ancient Sparta, for example, the Spartans had reproductive problems, which were basically a result of their kind of militaristic society. Sparta was a slave society with a very narrow aristocratic warrior elite. Warriors were always at a premium and Sparta was very often at war. And these elite soldiers are hard to replace. It’s actually hard to get women to have enough children to replace the warriors being killed in war. You’ve got this constant churn rate of people being killed.

Then you had the ancient Scythians, who were nomadic pastoralists on the Eurasian steppe. They lived on horseback, herded animals and fought from horseback with bows like the Plains Indians. And they had reproductive problems because they wore tight trousers and because they were in the saddle all day. Sitting in general for long periods of time is very bad for male reproductive health because the testes overheat.

All sorts of different societies throughout history have had different reproductive problems. It’s not a new thing. But both the scale of our problems today is different, as are the causes. In particular, these harmful industrial chemicals that didn’t exist until the last century. The first truly synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was invented in 1907. Plastics have been around for about 100 years. And it’s only since the 1950s that plastics have really been adopted in a huge way. Now we’re churning out billions of tonnes of plastic a year, and it’s become an essential part of our society. We live in a plastic world now and the world functions on plastic and needs plastic. So we’re in a bit of a dilemma.

As for the scale, while reproductive issues are something all human societies face, our problem today is existential. Like I say, Spermageddon.

It affects women, too. It’s not just the headline-grabbing statistic about sperm counts – women are suffering equally precipitous declines in all sorts of indexes of fertility as well. There was a study done out of Singapore, for example, that showed that women with higher levels of PFAS chemicals – nonstick coating like Teflon – in their blood have a 40% reduced likelihood of bringing a live baby to full term. That’s pretty serious.

So, both sexes are in this problem together. And that’s something that I also try to say in my work is we can talk about ‘The End of Men’, which was a Tucker Carlson documentary that I was in about these fertility problems, but actually the end of men is the end of women as well.

So it’s really a problem that unites both sexes and indeed should unite our civilisation in trying to find some sort of answer to it. But at the moment at least, it just seems to be America, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now in charge of health over there, that’s taking these problems seriously. But I’m hoping it will catch on.

You can watch the full interview here: