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Fathers Pass On Four Times As Many New Genetic Mutations As Mothers, Says Study (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Children inherit four times as many new mutations from their fathers than their mothers, according to research that suggests faults in the men's DNA are a driver for rare childhood diseases. Researchers studied 14,000 Icelanders and found that men passed on one new mutation for every eight months of age, compared with women who passed on a new mutation for every three years of age. The figures mean that a child born to 30-year-old parents would, on average, inherit 11 new mutations from the mother, but 45 from the father. Kari Stefansson, a researcher at the Icelandic genetics company, deCODE, which led the study, said that while new mutations led to variation in the human genome, which is necessary for evolution to happen, "they are also believed to be responsible for the majority of cases of rare diseases in childhood." In the study published in Nature, the researchers analyzed the DNA of 1,500 Icelanders and their parents and, for 225 people, at least one of their children. They found that new mutations from mothers increased by 0.37 per year of age, a quarter of the rate found in men. While the vast majority of new mutations are thought to be harmless, occasionally they can disrupt the workings of genes that are important for good health.
The more disposable gender is the better one to experiment with. You could lose a LOT of men to bad genes before it costs you same (raw) reproductive capacity of losing even 5% of women.
Everybody knows that men and women are exactly the same at everything.
... except when the boat is sinking, then suddenly equality vanishes.
lucm, indeed.
This makes me wonder if men having substantially higher mutation rates than women is a result of sex selection: women tending to be more attracted to men whose genes mutate faster,
Probably not. Almost all "just so" stories about evolution (and biology in general) are wrong.
A nice way to test your hypothesis would be to, say, do the experiment with the lab standards, mice, rats, zebrafish and drosophila. You could also both allow for choice and largely eliminate it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I lose faith in slashdot readers sometime. The study said nothing about X or Y chromosomes or that men had more mutations than women. It said fathers as they age pass on more mutations to BOTH their sons and daughters than mothers.
Mutations occur mainly during cell replication. Given how many sperm are produced (compared to eggs) there's going to be many more generations of sperm (in the stem cell lineage) replications between a man and a woman over their lifetime. I've seen 5 billion quoted as a man's lifetime sperm production. From 1 starting stem cell that's over 30 generations. I don't see any hard data on how many eggs a woman is born with (since they don't replicate beyond that) but if it's say 50,000, that's around 15 generations. Each generation is an opportunity for more mutation. So the man has up to 15 additional generations of sperm production as he ages.
I've also seen a study awhile ago that mentioned that older men have more mutations in their sperm, which also makes sense for the same reason, they're farther down the generation tree in their sperm production. Nothing about this article is surprising in the least.
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