There were plenty of great moments throughout the article. This in particular cracked me up:
> Others advertise their smarts. John in Arizona wrote: “I have a 1,400 chess rating and am an analyst. I have a peaceful demeanor and high spirits. I exercise regularly, prefer rollerblades.”
The range from 1400-1800 is mostly full of people who play casually but don't seriously train to become better. You can beat any friends who just happen to know the rules, but are at the very bottom tier of people who play regularly.
Saying that one is a 1400 player would be like someone who goes on a 5km jog around the neighborhood once or twice a week talking up their running ability. Sure, it's nice to be in slighty-above-average shape, but it's not really notable.
Doing a 5k jog twice a week would be decently above average, since the average is so incredibly low IMO, after a while you'll get into pretty decent shape. But I wouldn't call myself a runner.
It's decently above average, just like being 1400 in chess is decently above average -- because the average person doesn't play chess at all.
But like the average person could work up to doing a 5kg jog twice a week with a few months of moderate practice (see the couch to 5k program), so too could they become 1400 in chess.
In his defense, he only wanted to impress someone so much that they would want to impregnate themselves with his seed, not do something impossible like impress the HN readership.
morality aside, the men who donate sperm will have an outsize influence on the genetic diversity of our species.
Think ghengis khan except on a smaller scale.
also interesting to think about the implications on human evolution over long periods of time:
will humans still have a 50:50 gender ratio of men to women? seems like sperm donation facilitates a much lower number of men required to maintain populations.
will humans still desire relationships with the other gender, or will we be more like bears (men show up for 20 minutes, do the deed, then don't help raise the kids)?
In general 50:50 ratio is observed in most species even with great variability in male reproductive success because the expectation for offspring is equal between male and female so the selection pressure generally keeps it close to 50.
> the expectation for offspring is equal between male and female so the selection pressure generally keeps it close to 50
It's the other way around: the selection pressure drives the expected offspring to become equal. The expected offspring for an individual of a certain gender is (total offspring)/(number of individuals of that gender). The fewer individuals of one gender there are, the higher the expected offspring and the greater the selective pressure to produce more offspring of that gender. So the gender ratio is self-stabilizing.
This is really a quite surprising and profound fact, worth pondering.
Naively, one would think that if you have (in some antediluvian setting) village A with 50 men and 50 women, and village B with 10 men and 90 women (and children born with that gender ratio, respectively), that village B could "produce" way more offspring and grow faster.
A naive "group selection" view of evolution might even predict something like that to happen.
But, in village B, there is an incentive, so to speak, to cheat and have boys at a higher ratio, because that would increase expected total number of offspring. So, the gender ratio stabilises around 50/50 - a Nash equilibrium, if you will.
Sort of like the prisoners' dilemma; at the end of the day, the selfish actors will choose to locally optimize.
Btw, this argument about the sex ratio stabilizing at 1:1 is known as Fisher's principle. Fisher made another really interesting observation about how extremely exaggerated male ornamentation, like in peacocks, reaches its equilibrium when the aesthetic advantages from a large, attractive tail becomes offset by the practical costs of being slower, needing more food to produce said tail, being highly visible, etc. This one's called "Fisherian Runaway". These purely aesthetic traits will "run away" all the way up until they becoming detrimental to survival.
Then why do we have so many fewer male ancestors than female ones? The truth is that being a human male is a high risk, high reward proposition (from a darwinian perspective) in comparison to being a female.
The momentary blip of availability of sperm donors, moral acceptance, combined with eventually-to-be-figured-out reduction in overall fertility will probably have zero effect on our evolutionary trajectory.
I don't think an increase in sperm donor activity will necessarily make much of a dent. The growing demands of industrial society and the perceived diminishing value of having a family compared to life's other pleasures won't be so easily resolved through readily available sperm.
On that note though, perhaps relationships might be less common. Who knows, maybe we'll turn into bears.
Got a chuckle out of the Genghis Khan comparison. If I was an archer on a rampart, and I saw one of these guys on horseback dressed in Mongol armor, I'd probably laugh so hard that I'd fall right off the wall.
Possibly not on a smaller scale. The man with the most children was a ruler of Morocco with 888, and there was a guy breaking into sperm banks to replace the sperm of astronauts, neurosurgeons and all the rest with his own. He apparently sired over 600 children.
Pictures at various times during their youth, vacations, with family members, and proof of employment by being on a selective school/employer’s website may very well be less random than taking a sperm bank’s word for it.
Who's going to validate all that information? I would assume a (hypothetical) impartial third party who's paid by the sperm buyer. That same third party might even offer services like testing the sperm for diseases, storing it for future use if the donor travels, etc. Which is basically reinventing a sperm bank.
Maybe the parent was talking about how artificial insemination might stem decline, not necessary about how it can grow the population. For example, artificial insemination might help the population remain unchanging.
We really are heading into some Brave New World situation, aren't we?
With that said, I recently used a sperm freezing service as I refuse to have children under the current circumstances (but wish to do so in the future) and this was always one of my concerns: that the business 'fails' and gets bought out by a large corp and my sample is just another asset on their balance sheet, so the vulture/disaster capitalism model is to take it as it assumes all liabilities and tries to recover its 'investment' and finds a certain Market need.
This pandemic baby model driven by low sperm access only proves why that would be a likely scenario after all, at the time I only had a very unsettling sense of unwarranted paranoia to back it up.
I'm not into online dating, as I need more bio-feedback than an online profile to even consider a woman as a possible partner, but hasn't the advent of tinder like apps pretty much made a 'Sperm donor' a SaaS?
> This is a net positive considering the US population is declining at an alarming rate.
I disagree, I think that growth should be curtailed far more this will allow us to implement a better system rather with a less messy transition than to breed only to throw more fodder into the pitfalls of our current casino, rent seeking, war addled, gig-economy mess of a system.
Anyone who has any experience living even remotely in that system often feels the same, hence why so many people even in developed countries with good jobs and partners opt for dogs instead of children these days.
I attribute it to the same reaction mechanisms you see with people in tech who work at Social media corps and do not allow their children to use the very same products they work on.
I've never understood sperm donation. Isn't a child of a sperm or egg donor biologically the child of that donor? Why then do the donor not have rights to even so much as visit the kid? I get that they get paid to waive those rights, but if they regret later and pay back the money they don't regain the right yeah?
I don't know why that situation worries me but it does...
Don't start selling your sperm on a FB group without a good lawyer -- you may accidentally make yourself a legal guardian and be required to pay child support.
Don't start buying sperm without a good lawyer either. In some states, the sperm donor may legally request custody or visitation rights.
Family law is different in each state, making this a thorny issue. For example, Arizona's law states that a surrogate mother is the presumed mother of any baby she births. And if she's married to a man, her husband is the father. Making a contract that says otherwise in Arizona is not legally recognized. So... very few people choose surrogates in Arizona.
Surrogacy and sperm donation aside, in many states, the husband is legally the father, even if a paternity test shows otherwise, leading to men who divorce their cheating spouses being on the hook for financially supporting the result of the affair.
It seems like a terrible situation to me. My wife, who's an attorney, says that the law is for the benefit of the child. Better to have somebody helping pay child support as well as the mother.
Those laws were passed before DNA testing. It seems like they could be updated for that.
Leaving the legal issues out of it, if you were acting in the role of a parent, would you just abandon a child if you found out you're not biologically the father? Like one day you're taking them to sports, reading them bedtime stories, cuddling, all that stuff, the next day you just have nothing to do with them?
To answer obliquely: I observe some men to rage for vengeance at being cuckolded. Subsequently, in an episode of repeat impotence, the bullets rebound on the shooters.
Example: the father may take drugs to relieve the pain. Said father may invite the child to join him, setting up the child for life.
If you are in Michigan and a mother names you as the father for welfare benefits, you most likely will be forced to pay it. There have been many instances of men being declared fathers by default.
One man had won a court settlement when he was young and the woman applying for benefits remembered reading about him in the paper, so she put his name and address on the application to get the money. The court ordered him to start paying child support. He tried to fight it in court with a DNA test, but you need to serve the mother and neither the court nor the social welfare agency would release her address.
In what states is this true? I’m pretty sure it’s not true in any US state the way you have it stated. There is a rebuttable presumption that a husband is the biological father to a child born during wedlock (or a child born within 300 days after divorce, in Oregon, as an example). Disestablishing paternity once you have a DNA test is an easy matter, and DCS (Department of Child Support) will do the disestablishing for you if there is an issue where a mother is seeking child support. Source: I establish/disestablish fathers all the time as part of my job... this is not legal advise.
A quick search shows that many states have changed their stances either through precedent or legislation over the past 20 years or so, so my information may be out of date.
The California court's website states that cohabiting spouses is a conclusive presumption[1] and the exceptions to overturning are very limited, even with genetic testing. I'm not a lawyer and can't easily research precedent, but the law seems pretty clear that if you don't challenge before the 2nd birthday of the child, it can't be overturned. There may be other restrictions as well.
It seems like recent anecdotes I can find relate to the 2 year deadline. The father didn't challenge paternity at the time of divorce, found out he was not biological father (or that he could challenge) later, but it was too late.
Hopefully we can all agree it would be shitty to disown a kid you've been raising for years because you found out you weren't the biological father, but I can certainly have empathy for someone who has limited (or no) visitation and is stuck shelling out money for someone else's kid.
[edit]
It looks like the law was revised recently as well, so amybe the court website is out of date on some of this? AB2684 mentions "rebuttable presumptions" and was passed in 2018, going into effect in 2019. IANAL and don't have time to follow up on this.
> A donor on Known Donor Registry told me that he used to donate to a big sperm bank but that it was too clinical and cold.
I can empathize with that. We did IVF, so I had to go through the same process a sperm donor goes through. It's quite clinical and not really very enjoyable.
But... why? Why would you, in the middle of a pandemic, be emboldened to have a child? Did the financial situation of people wanting artificial insemination improve? Did it get harder to adopt? Are people loving their partners *more* thanks to the pandemic? Has seeing other people struggle being locked in with kids created a wish to personally replicate the same?
A lot of women (millions in the West) are "ageing out" of their eggs during the lockdown because feminists told them school and career were the only priorities in life. IVF is their last shot if they're still single at 35 now. They're literally panicking.
There are many aspects to sperm donation that hit a raw social/emotional/cultural/instinctual nerve.
— There is massive demand for sperm from desirable men but zero demand for undesirable men. There is only a shortage because clients are wholly uninterested in most sperm. This is a reminder of natural behaviors, but made more explicit when society used to soften the blow until now. If in the future, undesirable men have fewer and fewer occasions to reproduce, and are rejected more and more explicitly through increasingly online and impersonal services, this might probably lead to social unrest.
— The anxiety of not seeing your genes passed on. Even if you have an existentialist mindset, it can affect you on a fundamental level. I saw a comment on the NY Times section of a person saying their excellent genes might die with them. But isn't the possibility to reproduce the fundamental, inevitable benchmark for the worth of genes, by definition? It does invoke a strange impression that Isaac Newton not reproducing does imply a certain failure on an important criteria compared to a junkie having many children.
— From a Darwinian perspective, donating sperm to many different women but not having to expend any energy raising them is probably the ideal. Of course, from a cultural perspective it's frowned upon. Some of these donors are probably more genetically successful than many kings and conquerors of the past.
— The complex feelings successful donors experience as a result of all of this
— The clash of morality and Darwinian success. Most commenters on the Times noted the number of foster children awaiting care. But to me, that sounded completely tone deaf. The drive to reproduce is something so raw and fundamental that you'll have a hard time convincing people not to do it in exchange for fulfilling some vague moral appeal. Ironically, the ones who listen to this brand of morality and opt to raise another person's child will be rewarded by not passing on their genes. Conversely, adulterous people who employ to cuckoo tactic or parents who abandon their child for adoption are rewarded for it. Their personality and decision style passes on.
61 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread> Others advertise their smarts. John in Arizona wrote: “I have a 1,400 chess rating and am an analyst. I have a peaceful demeanor and high spirits. I exercise regularly, prefer rollerblades.”
The range from 1400-1800 is mostly full of people who play casually but don't seriously train to become better. You can beat any friends who just happen to know the rules, but are at the very bottom tier of people who play regularly.
Saying that one is a 1400 player would be like someone who goes on a 5km jog around the neighborhood once or twice a week talking up their running ability. Sure, it's nice to be in slighty-above-average shape, but it's not really notable.
But like the average person could work up to doing a 5kg jog twice a week with a few months of moderate practice (see the couch to 5k program), so too could they become 1400 in chess.
Think ghengis khan except on a smaller scale.
also interesting to think about the implications on human evolution over long periods of time:
will humans still have a 50:50 gender ratio of men to women? seems like sperm donation facilitates a much lower number of men required to maintain populations.
will humans still desire relationships with the other gender, or will we be more like bears (men show up for 20 minutes, do the deed, then don't help raise the kids)?
lots of interesting implications to consider.
It's the other way around: the selection pressure drives the expected offspring to become equal. The expected offspring for an individual of a certain gender is (total offspring)/(number of individuals of that gender). The fewer individuals of one gender there are, the higher the expected offspring and the greater the selective pressure to produce more offspring of that gender. So the gender ratio is self-stabilizing.
Naively, one would think that if you have (in some antediluvian setting) village A with 50 men and 50 women, and village B with 10 men and 90 women (and children born with that gender ratio, respectively), that village B could "produce" way more offspring and grow faster.
A naive "group selection" view of evolution might even predict something like that to happen.
But, in village B, there is an incentive, so to speak, to cheat and have boys at a higher ratio, because that would increase expected total number of offspring. So, the gender ratio stabilises around 50/50 - a Nash equilibrium, if you will.
Btw, this argument about the sex ratio stabilizing at 1:1 is known as Fisher's principle. Fisher made another really interesting observation about how extremely exaggerated male ornamentation, like in peacocks, reaches its equilibrium when the aesthetic advantages from a large, attractive tail becomes offset by the practical costs of being slower, needing more food to produce said tail, being highly visible, etc. This one's called "Fisherian Runaway". These purely aesthetic traits will "run away" all the way up until they becoming detrimental to survival.
On that note though, perhaps relationships might be less common. Who knows, maybe we'll turn into bears.
Got a chuckle out of the Genghis Khan comparison. If I was an archer on a rampart, and I saw one of these guys on horseback dressed in Mongol armor, I'd probably laugh so hard that I'd fall right off the wall.
Possibly not on a smaller scale. The man with the most children was a ruler of Morocco with 888, and there was a guy breaking into sperm banks to replace the sperm of astronauts, neurosurgeons and all the rest with his own. He apparently sired over 600 children.
The comment I responded to referred to cutting out middlemen and meeting with the donors directly.
With that said, I recently used a sperm freezing service as I refuse to have children under the current circumstances (but wish to do so in the future) and this was always one of my concerns: that the business 'fails' and gets bought out by a large corp and my sample is just another asset on their balance sheet, so the vulture/disaster capitalism model is to take it as it assumes all liabilities and tries to recover its 'investment' and finds a certain Market need.
This pandemic baby model driven by low sperm access only proves why that would be a likely scenario after all, at the time I only had a very unsettling sense of unwarranted paranoia to back it up.
I'm not into online dating, as I need more bio-feedback than an online profile to even consider a woman as a possible partner, but hasn't the advent of tinder like apps pretty much made a 'Sperm donor' a SaaS?
> This is a net positive considering the US population is declining at an alarming rate.
I disagree, I think that growth should be curtailed far more this will allow us to implement a better system rather with a less messy transition than to breed only to throw more fodder into the pitfalls of our current casino, rent seeking, war addled, gig-economy mess of a system.
Anyone who has any experience living even remotely in that system often feels the same, hence why so many people even in developed countries with good jobs and partners opt for dogs instead of children these days.
I attribute it to the same reaction mechanisms you see with people in tech who work at Social media corps and do not allow their children to use the very same products they work on.
I don't know why that situation worries me but it does...
Don't start buying sperm without a good lawyer either. In some states, the sperm donor may legally request custody or visitation rights.
Family law is different in each state, making this a thorny issue. For example, Arizona's law states that a surrogate mother is the presumed mother of any baby she births. And if she's married to a man, her husband is the father. Making a contract that says otherwise in Arizona is not legally recognized. So... very few people choose surrogates in Arizona.
Those laws were passed before DNA testing. It seems like they could be updated for that.
I think a better solution is taxpayers shouldering the burden than punishing an innocent individual (actually a victim).
Example: the father may take drugs to relieve the pain. Said father may invite the child to join him, setting up the child for life.
One man had won a court settlement when he was young and the woman applying for benefits remembered reading about him in the paper, so she put his name and address on the application to get the money. The court ordered him to start paying child support. He tried to fight it in court with a DNA test, but you need to serve the mother and neither the court nor the social welfare agency would release her address.
The California court's website states that cohabiting spouses is a conclusive presumption[1] and the exceptions to overturning are very limited, even with genetic testing. I'm not a lawyer and can't easily research precedent, but the law seems pretty clear that if you don't challenge before the 2nd birthday of the child, it can't be overturned. There may be other restrictions as well.
It seems like recent anecdotes I can find relate to the 2 year deadline. The father didn't challenge paternity at the time of divorce, found out he was not biological father (or that he could challenge) later, but it was too late.
Hopefully we can all agree it would be shitty to disown a kid you've been raising for years because you found out you weren't the biological father, but I can certainly have empathy for someone who has limited (or no) visitation and is stuck shelling out money for someone else's kid.
[edit]
It looks like the law was revised recently as well, so amybe the court website is out of date on some of this? AB2684 mentions "rebuttable presumptions" and was passed in 2018, going into effect in 2019. IANAL and don't have time to follow up on this.
1: https://www.courts.ca.gov/1202.htm
And I wonder also, if it'd be deemed undesirable to be able to pick and choose traits and prototypes..
All in all, fun conversation, and makes me want to read Brave New World again.
I can empathize with that. We did IVF, so I had to go through the same process a sperm donor goes through. It's quite clinical and not really very enjoyable.
0] https://youtu.be/QAZfHHi58AU
Very curious...
— There is massive demand for sperm from desirable men but zero demand for undesirable men. There is only a shortage because clients are wholly uninterested in most sperm. This is a reminder of natural behaviors, but made more explicit when society used to soften the blow until now. If in the future, undesirable men have fewer and fewer occasions to reproduce, and are rejected more and more explicitly through increasingly online and impersonal services, this might probably lead to social unrest.
— The anxiety of not seeing your genes passed on. Even if you have an existentialist mindset, it can affect you on a fundamental level. I saw a comment on the NY Times section of a person saying their excellent genes might die with them. But isn't the possibility to reproduce the fundamental, inevitable benchmark for the worth of genes, by definition? It does invoke a strange impression that Isaac Newton not reproducing does imply a certain failure on an important criteria compared to a junkie having many children.
— From a Darwinian perspective, donating sperm to many different women but not having to expend any energy raising them is probably the ideal. Of course, from a cultural perspective it's frowned upon. Some of these donors are probably more genetically successful than many kings and conquerors of the past.
— The complex feelings successful donors experience as a result of all of this
— The clash of morality and Darwinian success. Most commenters on the Times noted the number of foster children awaiting care. But to me, that sounded completely tone deaf. The drive to reproduce is something so raw and fundamental that you'll have a hard time convincing people not to do it in exchange for fulfilling some vague moral appeal. Ironically, the ones who listen to this brand of morality and opt to raise another person's child will be rewarded by not passing on their genes. Conversely, adulterous people who employ to cuckoo tactic or parents who abandon their child for adoption are rewarded for it. Their personality and decision style passes on.