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Fathers Pass Along More Mutations As They Age
ananyo writes "In the 1930s, the pioneering geneticist J. B. S. Haldane noticed a peculiar inheritance pattern in families with long histories of haemophilia. The faulty mutation responsible for the blood-clotting disorder tended to arise on the X chromosomes that fathers passed to their daughters, rather than on those that mothers passed down. Haldane subsequently proposed that children inherit more mutations from their fathers than their mothers, although he acknowledged that 'it is difficult to see how this could be proved or disproved for many years to come.' That year has finally arrived: whole-genome sequencing of dozens of Icelandic families has at last provided the evidence that eluded Haldane. Moreover, the study, published in Nature, finds that the age at which a father sires children determines how many mutations those offspring inherit. By starting families in their thirties, forties and beyond, men could be increasing the chances that their children will develop autism, schizophrenia and other diseases often linked to new mutations (abstract)."
I just need to jerk off and store my sperm in the freezer at the age of 20? But then isn't mutation the key to natural evolution?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It meshes with the theory that women choose older men as partners because they are in a better position to care for offspring, but will try to have affairs with younger, sexier men. A man's sperm is separate from his ability to care for a child I suppose.
Cue hundreds of slashdot commenters with some vein of "She's been cheating on me with the gardener I just KNOW it!"
Well there is research that shows that women are attracted to different men when they're ovulating than they are when they're not. Link here
... They'll pass on super-powers!
But seriously, who thought that leaving something like fathering a child would lead to fewer or the same number of mutations? Everybody who's everybody knows age and telomere shortening leads to a higher rate of mutation... That's why if we didn't otherwise get killed, wear out or otherwise malfunction, we'd eventually die from all the cancer.
For the sake of balance:
Doctors have warned women that concieving later in life carries significant health risks.
The first eggs out the box are always the freshest.
Maybe with more men having children later in life we will have more mutations. More mutations means more chances to evolve to Homo Novus or whatever the next level is for us.
The testes are towards the outside of the body and vulnerable to all sorts of things, while the ovaries are better protected. Furthermore, sperm is produced over the course of a lifetime, whereas eggs aren't. The end result is that eggs are likely to have the original genetic material of Mom, while the sperm is more likely to have been modified (by radiation, damage from trauma, copying errors, etc) from the original genetic material of Dad.
This seems like a good evolutionary strategy, however it arose: Mom provides a version that has allowed her to survive and reproduce, suggesting a minimum viability, which she passes on to the child. Dad provides a version of an evolutionarily successful human that is modified, allowing the species to improve itself (And if he's lived to old age, he was probably an effective survivor evolutionarily speaking).
I am officially gone from
men could be more mature (no need to get in a divorce situation due to a driving urge to mount some other female) and be earning more money, thereby ensuring a more stable and financially sound basis for their household.
that the chance the kid might come out with biological issues is a slight increase. while a younger father has a significantly increased chance to still feel a need to sow the wild oats and not be earning a lot
not that older men can't be broke, and not that older men can't still cheat. but it helps to have all your sexual adventures when you are in your 20s, and not feel the need to do that when you are older. additionally, marrying older means the woman is more mature too, and you are more mature, and so the chance of your marriage lasting is greater because you understand the value of commitment over impulses, you are more interested in settling down, and you can pick the right spouse based on more ephemeral mature qualities rather than the mistakes you can easily make in your 20s and then feel like leaving the person later. all of this is of course better for kids: a stable home of mature parents who earn more money
in other words, this news is a big shrug: "so what." the beneficial factors for having kids in your thirties and forties vastly outweigh the slight genetic risks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Mutations accumulate over time, news at 11.
I was 40 when my son was born, and I can't keep up with the little mutant (though I hear of a special school for kids like him out in Westchester County, NY). There's a reason people have kids in their 20's, it's a physically exhausting challenge.
But yeah, the mature relationship with my wife and stable financial situation are nice. Though I do wish I could stay awake past 8:30 PM.
So older men may father more sick children. But they also father longer-lived ones.
Knowing that something is true isn't the same understanding it scientifically; more knowledge is still useful.
but it helps to have all your sexual adventures when you are in your 20s, and not feel the need to do that when you are older
shit.
yet another thing I've fucked up in life.
If we want mutants with super powers all the old men need to get busy with young women, I am totally for this.
Seriously though, I think the operative phrase in the article is "could be"
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
40? Pah. I'm 55 and we've just had twins. Sure, its hard. Physically exhausting, nope.
By starting families in their thirties, forties and beyond, men could be increasing the chances that their children will develop autism, schizophrenia and other diseases often linked to new mutation
The link is between when the father sired the particular child, not the age at which he started the whole family. I suppose logically if you don't start until you're say 50 then ALL your children are at greater risk. But if you sire your first child at the age of 14 and then have another 3 when you're in your fifities than those last three don't have a lower risk due to you starting your family when young.
Have all the sexual adventures you want, I am, I'm just not getting them knocked up.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Not to mentation not all mutations are bad. Walking upright was a mutation at one point and I'm pretty glad we got that one :P
I'm hard at work polluting the gene pool with my dangerous mutant offspring. Bwa ha ha ha!
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Well, it has been known that older men will father more daughters than sons because the male embryos are more delicate and more prone to be rejected by the mother's body than female embryos. A case in point, Tony Randall fathered a daughter at age 76 and another at age 77. It's never too late.
I said "So, since I was about 40 when our daughter was born, are you going to start blaming me for her 'behavioral issues"? Her response was, "What do you mean 'Start', I already DO!"
Sigs are for losers
Sooo... are the amount of mutations constant over time eg. compare a 40yr old father vs a 40yr old grandfather whos son reproduces at 20.
So there are also benefits to older fathers: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9325945/Children-of-older-fathers-are-more-likely-to-live-longer.html Besides which, it's been known for a long time that older men tend to have less viable and more deformed spermatazoa, so TFA is not surprising.
I do not doubt the research that shows that older men pass on more mutations, but is it that simple? Do these older men also have older wives/partners? If so, is it strictly that the sperm of older men is more susceptible to mutation or are the eggs of older women less discriminate and more likely to allow a defective sperm to penetrate and fertilize the egg? In other words, would these mutant sperm been able to fertilize a younger healthier egg?
We need more empirical testing. I, for one, am willing to fertilize a statistically significant number of 18, 24 and 30 year old women for very little compensation.
Walking fractionally more upright than cousin Ugg was a mutation at one point
FTF any creationists reading.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The article is rather neutral, but the premise is being misinterpreted. This is comparing the genetic mutations of older fathers, not the genetic mutations of older men relative to their younger days. A man more susceptible to mild genetic abnormalities may be a late bloomer who takes years longer to be comfortable in social and family settings, resulting in him becoming a father later. If a slightly odd duck doesn't manage social situations well until they are later in life, doesn't this mean older fathers would be more likely to pass on genetic mutations? Also, women are typically accepted more in social situations they younger they are, regardless of whether they are slightly different or not. It is much harder for young men then young women, but then the roles reverse. Young women's main problem is keeping people away from them. A clean, polite, well-established older man has a much easier time socially than a similarly positioned and aged woman. I for one am looking forward to being an older man of leisure.
Then again, they seem to have compared against mutations in the children which don't exist in the parents. But did they take multiple genetic readings of the parents, or simply compared the child's readings against the different readings from when the older parent was a child?
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
I was 35 when I conceived my son. He was diagnosed with a 'de novo' (new) mutation in one of the two copies of his MLL2 gene: a single base pair was deleted at position 2272 ("c.2272delG"). This causes half of his MLL2 proteins to be not working resulting in Kabuki Syndrome. He has an academic IQ of around 50, but with some tasks he out smarts everyone I know: he can instantly see who are missing from a certain setting. Saw him walk into his class room, look around, walk to his teacher and when asked by her who were missing, mention the names without hesitating (or looking around) for a second.
This bodes ill for the future. A lot of people are waiting until their thirties until they have kids. I wonder if anyone has done research on whether birth defects are increasing overall?
The financial benefits of not having kids at all are pretty significant too. Plus, who wants to deal with a teenager when you're 60?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Seems more like the process of "maturation" is suspended as men become confirmed bachelors and women become confirmed sluts. Compare your grandparents who married at 20 and the current generation who are more likely to have autistic bastards than settle down and tell me who is more of an "adult".
But also increasing the chances their children will develop mutant super powers.
We need more empirical testing. I, for one, am willing to fertilize a statistically significant number of 18, 24 and 30 year old women for very little compensation.
You can start by me! I'm on the second set of empirical test subjects.
My maternal grandfather was 67 when my mother was born... No joke. He had a reputation as a very "sturdy" individual.
His children have all been very healthy and are all doing fine. The only negative attribute passed on, which endures through the lineage is a propensity for the drink.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I never understood the desire to voluntarily be a genetic and memetic dead end. The emotional and psychological benefits outweigh the costs.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
>and women become confirmed sluts.
WTF? Talk like that will have people thinking you're just another ignorant conservative throwback.
So, it turns out that Nature is gender neutral. Old mothers have increased risk of passing congenital diseases to their offspring, no we know it's the same for the fathers. I'd say that's not very unexpected, although it's good to have some evidence for that -- this study is a step in the right direction.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I never understood why I should care whether I'm a dead end or not. I'm still dead either way.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
there is no such thing as human evolution. We came from Adam and Eve and thats it.
Mutations are what provide "fuel" for evolutionary innovation. Sure, they more often cause problems than "good", but without mutations fish would never walk on land, apes would never step down from trees, and that mole on the back of my neck would never grow an eye, allowing me to see people sneaking up on me in basketball.
Okay, I made up the last one, but the point is that mutations are a trade-off, and perhaps necessary for the long-term survival of humanity. The problems an individual faces by being nature's Guinea Pig can be unpleasant, but view it as "taking one for the team".
Table-ized A.I.
I live in a very upscale and rather posh part of California. There is an abnormally high rate of children born with disabilities including M.S. and Down Syndrome. The one obvious correlation is the shockingly obvious tie between the age of the fathers and the children with disabilities. As is the case with many upscale neighborhoods, there is a significant number of men in their 50s and 60s fathering children with women in their late 20s and early 30s.
Though I often voted for something more amusing, such as correlating the genetically influenced disabilities to the permanent impact of sexually transmitted diseases, if only so that Jenny McCartney's child would attest to her having some horrible disease like Syphillis as an offset to her horribly damaging anti-vaccination efforts.
This is why we should be pushing teenagers to have children.
Absolutely. We need to encourage our children to have children at about 16, and and have us raise them. Then, when they are 32, and actually ready to raise children, they can have their children do the same.
To have more energy as an adult, look into vitamin D deficiency, iodine deficiency, omega-3 deficiency, and fruit/vegetable/bean phytonutrient deficiency. And of course stay away from refined starch and refined sugar, and food additives etc.. Eating right can also, paradoxically, help your kids be calmer and easier to deal with (as their brains grow better and they are less hyper and cranky).
And no one is alive anymore who gives a fuck about you.
That can be a pretty stressfull 20-30 last years of your life.
On balance, unless you are insanely wealthy and able to put in place multiple safeguards, children are your best bet to avoid a slow, horrible end.
ironic captcha: abstain
This definitely explains Chris-Chan. XD
... this is our first one and I am absolutely terrified of all the possible things that can go wrong. I really think the future should be more Gataca like in the sense that I would feel a lot better if the DNA of our embryo could have been fully sequenced in order to spot any possible issues.
40? Pah. I'm 55 and we've just had twins. Sure, its hard. Physically exhausting, nope.
Someone's got a Bowflex Body(TM)!
Well, that might explain why the kids of most of the people I've met who waited until their 40s and 50s to have children are all retarded or otherwise 'a bit touched'. But I don't suppose being a spoiled only child helps matters much.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
From your profile picture, I think it would be better if you just put it on toast and fed it to your dog.
Insults based on idiosyncratic morphological characteristics of an individual: edgy, daring, expressing dominance.
Insults based on shared haplogroup/ethnic morphological characteristics of an individual: crass, atavistic, symptom of diminished intellect.
I presume you advocate this double standard based on your history. Thanks for clearing that up for me through your object lesson!
Your reply is off topic.
Divorce not going well for you, I see?
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
You're mischaracterizing it. As I understand it:
- Until recently it was assumed that, in mammals at least, females were born with all the egg cells they would ever have, rather than having new ones developed from stem cells over time.
- But this was apparently based on the observation that the number of immature egg cells present diminished with time from initial numbers were adequate (by a couple orders of magnitude) for the "born with 'em all" explanation to work, not by some hypothetical experiment marking some girl's egg cells and then examining her ovaries later in life to see if there were unmarked cells.
- Recently it was noticed that the explanation didn't hang together well for mice.
- Further experiments on mice showed that they had special stem cells in their ovaries (apparently the same kind as produce sperm in males) and that these cells did form new egg cells (or at least immature egg cell precursors) during the mouse's adult life.
- This new reported experiment shows that human ovaries have the same sort of stem cell, and that transplanting human ovary tissue with labeled pre-egg stem cells into a suitable mouse ovary (where they can be observed and receive both human and mouse signals) causes them to produce new immature human egg cells (in human ovary tissue!), just like the mouse stem cells do for the mice.
This strongly suggests that they may do the same in human ovaries. If so, the menopause is something else shutting down ongoing egg production, not necessarily the exhaustion of a fixed-at-birth supply.
It ALSO strongly suggest that, even IF the human immature egg production IS stopped by the time of birth (or some other very young age) and the menopause IS an exhaustion of a fixed supply, providing appropriate chemical signals could (re)activate the egg cell production, delaying or reversing menopause. (It also hints that this could be done without extensive side-effects beyond those you'd expect from ongoing fertility, because it appears to be a normal mechanism in at least some mammals.)
Either way it shows that drug intervention to delay or reverse menopause in humans is a realistic target.
Further, a releated article referenced from this one ("Old Mice Made 'Young'-May Lead to Anti-Aging Treatments.") describes an in-vitro experiment on reactivating senescent stem cells with signals from non-senescent cells, by growing them in a flask separated by a membrane that allows signaling chemicals, but not cells, through. If the same can be done stimulating egg production in human ovary tissue, an extension of the experiment with the signaling chemicals transferred between separate cultures using an intermediate step that sorts out the chemicals (for instance by chromatography) could home in on the responsible chemicals, leading to their identification and the identification of the relevant receptors. That's enough information to enable the design of drugs and therapies to achieve the same effect in adult humans.
The road is now clearly mapped.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm in my late 20s and I'm a severe hemophiliac. Scares the hell out of me to think what may happen when I have kids.
40? Pah. I'm 55 and we've just had twins. Sure, its hard. Physically exhausting, nope.
Well no, not if it's your wife who has to get up at 3:00 AM to feed the baby. But most modern men are a lot better than that. You can say with a straight face that you can get up in the middle of the night and still be productive at work? I did it at 35 and it was hell.
Free Martian Whores!
Children are stressful, and accordingly parents are consistently less happy than non-parents, despite their assertions to the contrary.
If you're infertile, or if you lost custody in the divorce, and this is your rationalization to help you stay sane, then stop reading at this paragraph. You're absolutely right. Children are nothing but stress and heartache, and you should pity us as you jet off to your vacation in Europe, made affordable by the fact that you never had to buy any diapers. Children are nothing but heartache.
If you've chosen never to have children because you don't want the responsibility, then stop reading at this paragraph. You're absolutely right. You don't want the responsibility. There's no shortage of people on a planet with 7 billion of us. You should pity us as you jet off to Bali...
Still here? OK, here's what this parent knows. Children are stress. Children are heartache. My children are the gray in my hair, and the points on my blood pressure.
And they and their mother are every bit of the joy in my life. Have you noticed when storytellers want to paint a picture of a man in psychotic amounts of pain and regret, they take away his family and he Goes Mad From the Grief? If I lost my wife and children, there would be nothing left but to crawl into a bottle, screenprint a skull on my chest and run off to kill the Emporer in the arena.
I worked with a man this week who makes millions a year. He's pushing fifty, and he still lives like he's twenty. He's a gym rat, could probably trade his car for my house, dresses hip and expensive, and has enough real estate to host the President of the United States without shame.
For all that, this man seems manically adrift. Since this is Slashdot, I'll pull a geeky Jim Butcher reference and tell you I don't think this guy's house has a threshhold. He catered in expensive food from a local "in" restaurant, and he seemed to think commercial cooking was the best you could get. He took a call from his much younger grilfriend, and he seemed ... less ... not more, like a lot of happily married guys I know when their wives walk in the room, as if the two of them together were more than the sum of the two of them apart. Every ounce of his expensively toned and coiffed appearance screamed "I'm desperately hanging on to my youth." To be fair, I look like a guy who can't get to the gym nearly enough, has pulled out far too much of his own hair, has luggage under his eyes and has a face with worrylines that look like a highway map.
I felt kind of bad for the guy, like watching a child with a lot of toys, but no friends, versus a kid with a lot of friends, but nothing more than sticks and a vacant lot to play in.
Children are more than just responsibility and care and exasperation. They're joy and hope and -- what's the cliche -- "the embodiment of God's belief that the World should be given another chance."
There is more to the baby than the sound of the cries and the smell of the diaper. Don't worry about me and my happiness. Sure, I'm hemorraghing money, losing sleep, losing my voice from the shouting, pushing the clinical definition of obese, shedding hair like a cat in the spring and probably losing my sanity in the process... ...and I would cheerfully murder any genie that tried to take me back to my early 20s. :-)
I traded my "happiness" for joy.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Just curious. Which did you get first: the kids or the nickname? :)
Right - if I had followed that "wait until you're older and financially stable" strategy. . . I would have been very disappointed. My financial golden years were my late-20's.
This is a social construct - and civilizations collapse and societies change. Lineages go on. (if you don't get rounded up and genocided). You can gamble on financial beneficial factors for having kids in your thirties and forties - but anyone can get the rug pulled out from under them - for no reason at all. And it happens quite commonly and frequently.
In any case - most of the more "mature" parents I know, (kids same age as mine - parents are generally about 10-20 years older) divorced about 5 years ago. By "most". . . I mean, probably 90%. A shockingly large portion of them did crazy-ass shit. (like - one is sitting in prison; lifer now; in the space of a few years, did all three of his strikes - including running a meth lab for gangs - he previously owned his own construction company. . . another dude's doing 1yr for assaulting his wife's girlfriend - doh!). I do not believe that age==maturity. AT ALL. full stop.
I think that one reaches a certain maturity, by age 16-17 (and some people, maybe a few, or many years later); or one does not - and of those who do not, they learn how to fake it; until the wheels come off the wagon.
Financial stability is obviously more healthy and 'safe' for kids. And age used to be almost a guarantee of that. Not anymore.
If you're into the whole karma thing, and if you believe in anthropogenic global warming, and/or peak-oil, you'll realize that it's probably much better karma to NOT have children, and impose another generation of world-destroying sentient bacteria onto the earth, to your own selfish emotional benefit. (or, perhaps, to satisfy one's parents who are constantly pressuring one to provide them with grandkids so they can get a "do over" on all their regrets and fuckups as parents).
no what happens is that the people such as you don't breed and those people who have no qualms having 12 kids inherit the earth
so by choosing not to breed, you extinguish your awareness and consciousness values and hand the earth over to the viral teeming masses values
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
reproduction is immortality
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You were supposed to stop reading at the second paragraph. :-) But, yes, undoubtedly. It's just the endorphins. You should pity us as you jet off to Carnivale.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I got a son with a "de novo" mutation (proven by DNA-sequencing of the MLL2 gene) and although the chance of getting such a child is small, the impact is very big. Luckily, I live in a country where lots of support is available and I did not go broke financially, but still the impact it had on our family is quite big. Although he is almost 15, he needs supervision like a 6 year old. Luckily, my marriage did not break-up, but I know that it happens frequently. Especially, for my daughter, this was a big burden, because for many years our family life was organized around his needs. He is a lovely boy and I love him very much, but we went through a lot of trouble.
This really begs me to ask the question I always had. Does this mean if I have a Kid when I'm older the kid will have my mutated qualities good and bad. Lets assume I was immature at 20 and lot more mature at 40 does this mean the babies I have at 20 and 40 will have different traits. Basically I'm assuming my DNA is the a program for life that keeps changing and not static.