And we’re not even talking about the RNC. Seth Mnookin, in the New Yorker, on aging fathers and their degrading, mutant sperm:
Autism, as anyone who has ever written about the topic can attest, is a subject that provokes strong reactions. So it was no shock when a recent Nature study that clarified the well-established link between paternal age and a child’s risk for autism and schizophrenia got lots of attention. What was surprising was how that news, which one of the study’s lead authors described as “sort of a little bit of our side story,” obscured the implications of the paper’s main findings—namely, that the genetic health of the species is now facing a serious threat.
The study, by Kari Stefansson and his team at Decode Genetics, in Iceland, used an elegant application of brute-force genetic sequencing to show that approximately ninety-seven per cent of the difference in the rate of de-novo mutations can be attributed to the age of the father. These new mutations arise during the production of eggs or sperm. Since females are born with a lifetime supply of eggs already in their ovaries, the number of de-novo (or novel) mutations a mother passes down is roughly fifteen, regardless of how old she is. Male sperm-producing cells, on the other hand, are constantly dividing, and as a result, the number of spontaneous mutations increases over time.
For sociological and environmental reasons, men are living longer and having children when they’re older. That, combined with the fact that we’re living in an era of diminished pressure from natural selection, means that Stefansson and his colleagues may have identified the single biggest factor in the ongoing development of the human genome: new mutations caused by old sperm. Mutations can be beneficial, but they are much more likely to be harmful—which means the changes will be overwhelmingly negative.
“This is really scary,” Alexey Kondrashov, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, said last Thursday from Moscow. In a Nature commentary that accompanied the Decode study, Kondrashov raised the spectre of an inevitable “decline in the mean fitness of the population.” As it happens, it’s likely that this is already occurring. If you combine the findings of a 2009 PLOS ONE paper that examined the link between advanced paternal age and a decline in social and exploratory behaviors with Decode’s results, you get a scenario that is as alarming as it is plausible.
“Diagnoses of autism and schizophrenia is one thing, but [older fathers may have] a perfectly normal [child] in the sense that there may not be a diagnosis, but his IQ is 108 instead of 110,” Kondrashov says, noting that this hypothesis tracks with results from his own research on fruit flies. “This means this is a problem that will lead to very severe consequences for society over several generations.” Over the past several decades, these changes were likely masked by improvements in the environment—“getting rid of lead paint, fewer infections, less malnutrition, whatever”—but moving forward, Kondrashov says that he “strongly suspect our gene pool gets worse.”…
dollared
Wow, bullshit detector is going off like a day at Fukushima Beach!
How about a bit of statistical analysis to go with the eugenics discussion? How do mutations relate to this idea that kids’ IQ drops with father’s age at conception?
Oh, none? Gawrsh, what a surprise!
Ruckus
but moving forward, Kondrashov says that he “strongly suspect our gene pool gets worse.”…
You think he means we’ll have more conservatives? Cause that would sure fuck up the gene pool. End up being more like cesspool.
Parmenides
oh dear god what the fuck are they talking about. This has gone one too long. We now need to make sure that the world is populated by children who have the 15 year old fathers as nature intended it.
Both Sides Do It
Prepare for pedantic snark based on excerpts of a third-party summary of one piece of research
“For sociological and environmental reasons, men are living longer and having children when they’re older” gives the game away. These factors change rapidly, some even within one generation’s worth of time. Worrying about this is as silly as putting money in a 401k from your first summer job because you’re worried about affording acne medication when you’re 68.
They’re also specific to individual societies. So they’re worrying about America’s genetic stock deteriorating as compared to, say, China’s, within the next decade or two. Hmmm, nah.
Also how silly do you have to be to be a researcher in one of the most exciting and lucrative fields of science currently being showered with dollars to waste it on this nonsense.
Also what @dollared said.
Mary G
I am having trouble sleeping because I don’t think I can live in a country with a president named Mitt.
Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn
So, Papa Romney was, what, 90 or so when he sired Sir Mittsenberg?
Oh, wait, I’m confusing intelligence with integrity.
Do carry on…
mai naem
Here’s proof our gene pool’s going down the tubes. Freaking Floriduhhh turns down federal dollars for Healthy Start – a program which sends people into homes with new babies in high risk situations because the dollars are part of Obamacare. The money quote from a Repub state rep that this is going to make parents dependent. I am sure the idjit is against abortion in all situations including incest and danger to mothers health.Prolife Party my ass. More like the ProNatal FU after that Party
Kane
Republicans have been opposing, obstructing and railing against all things Obama for three and a half years. And yet, when the time comes to make their argument as to why they believe that their policies are better and why they believe that they would do a better job in governing, they choose instead to build their argument on the axis of a quote taken out of context (We built that), the racially-tinged welfare fib that has been widely discredited, and the false accusations surrounding Medicare. I just don’t get it.
raven
@Kane: What don’t you get? It’s all they have.
M.J.
The answer is simple.
We need our people in Congress to push legislation for forced sterilization of males after the age of 36.
We need to save the future and the children and all that kind of stuff.
PPOG Penguin
Off topic, but here in New Zealand, Parliament has been voting on marriage equality. 48 hours ago it was in the balance. This afternoon it looked like the bill would scrape a small majority. And I don’t know what happened this evening, but a few minutes ago, it passed by 80 votes to 40. Waverers and even some ‘definite no’ votes seem to have stampeded to the equality side.
It’s not law yet: this was a ‘first reading’ and the bill now goes to select committee. But that’s going to be a tough margin for the bigots to reverse. Details at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10830345, Twitter celebrations on #marriageequality. Cheers!
ETA: corrected initial voting figures
prufrock
That gives away the game. The minute someone starts referencing IQ tests, you know they are full of shit. Jesus, Steven J. Gould debunked IQ tests in The Mismeasure of Man more than thirty years ago.
The Pale Scot
Since ave. sperm count globally is in free fall, it’s far more likely guys will be sterile before we’re fathering five legged hermaphrodites with antennae
raven
Halperin. “Her speech was a piece of tactical amazingness”. Uh huh.
someguy
I don’t know, Prufrock. If you could make a case that stupid, over-30 white men shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce because over time it is damaging the gene pool – and you have to believe that’s the majority of men in this category of people waiting until they are older to have babies – then I’m willing to listen to it. A combination of autism and plummeting IQ would certainly explain the prevalence of white morons who can’t empathize with the suffering of others in the Republican Party.
El Cid
Nominee for the day’s most interesting first paragraph in a news article in a major English-language newspaper:
AnonPhenom
… and everyone thought the movie Idiocracy was a comedy.
Schlemizel
I’ll second the comments above about the quality of this work. But, if it were true, the answer is quite simple. Sperm banks. A national program where 14 year old boys would go to a clinic once a week to have a sample of sperm manually produced and then cryogeniclly stored for later use.
It would make the boys happy ;) and ensure a supply of super genes for their use when they want to become fathers.
/tongue removed from cheek\
AnonPhenom
Invest in companies that freeze genetic material, now.
The next time some wingnuts brings up “religious freedom” B.S. to advance their war on women, the response (from women) should be to site this study and demand that all males – in this, the age of Viagra – undergo mandatory vasectomies after the age of 40. For the good of the country and god good people, of course.
TheMightyTrowel
also, and I feel dirty even having to say this, evolution doesn’t happen over ‘a few generations’. The fruit fly dude has spent too much time thinking in terms of the fruit fly life span.
WereBear
It is considered that Queen Victoria acquired the hemophilia gene (previously unknown in her family) from her father, who was over fifty when he came under great pressure to marry and reproduce.
With consequences for all the crowned heads of Europe.
Of course, if we had a society where it was easier for young parents; one that helped with child care and health care and had good schools and maybe even ensured the child would have a hot meal as needed…
But I’m just that kid of nut to think those are good things! Instead, we should be like Sparta, and issue every child a fox to gnaw their guts out!
danielx
Not news. This is amply confirmed by observing a monster truck rally, visiting a state fair or for that matter making a trip to Walmart. Any of these provides solid evidence that the gene pool is seriously polluted.
Matt McIrvin
Is this guy claiming that we’re in the first period in history when men tended to sire children at an advanced age? I seem to recall that the early marriages we think of as the norm in “the olden days” actually were not the perpetual historical norm. Combine that with the tendency for older men to marry younger women, and for very large families in some eras, and I have my doubts that this genetic menace is all that unique.
The Pale Scot
@AnonPhenom: Your not thinking it all the way through, bank the fresh stuff, then get a vasectomy at 15 yrs of age. Unintended pregnancy problem almost completely solved.
And require math and science tests to make a withdrawal. Solves that whole ID thing.
ant
yeah, I aint a scientist an all, but my understanding of evolution is that it’s more likely to happen when a species gets put under a lot of pressure to survive.
If we had a big human die-back from a disease or something, some kind of funky mutation may come in handy.
Also, too, I aint never seen no plants grow ot da toilet.
J R in WVa
@AnonPhenom:
You probably mean “cite this study” rather than “site…”.
Site is a place, sight is visual, cite is reference another paper in your paper. Engrish is so confusing.
Also, in front page text, claim made that women are “born with their lifetime supply of eggs [or words to that effect, paraphrasing…] but new research seems to show that stem cells in ovaries develop new eggs until menopause.
Pongo
People really don’t understand scientific publishing. Nature presented an interesting study. The MSM ran with the most salacious aspects of it to generate clicks. Commenters on forums like this respond to the MSM and not to the actual study (which very few actually read), thereby perpetuating the bad analysis and vilifying a paper based on what some lay person said about it rather than what it actually contained. Maybe before getting your nose out of joint over lack of ‘statistical analysis’ or (ironically) ‘jumping to conclusions’ read what is actually contained in the paper–not in a blog on the New Yorker website.
RSA
It’s been a while since I’ve read anything in the philosophy of biology, and I’m not an expert, but this just seems wrong to me. My understanding is that fitness is defined in terms of two things: ability to survive and ability to reproduce. If this is the case, then the lower IQ example is not a very good one–the connection to fitness is very tenuous. That is, there are a lot of things most of us associate with being a better human being that evolution doesn’t really care about.
becca
Could ED drugs be linked to the rise in autism?
I bet it would be difficult to find funds for a study, regardless.
Ohio Mom
Sigh. The list of autism “causes” grows ever longer. Here is one scientist’s (who is also an autism mom) tongue-in-cheek list of them all:
http://biologyfiles.fieldofscience.com/2011/10/this-just-in-being-alive-linked-to.html
There are three main things to remember. One is that there are many autisms, with different causes, presentations (sets of symptoms) and possible outcomes. No one has teased those apart yet. But claiming there is one cause is as silly as claiming too much sunlight is THE cause of cancer. Yes, it might cause some types of skin cancer but it sure doesn’t cause lung cancer.
The second is that there is a huge range of autism presentations. Some aspects of austism are actually useful to us — Temple Grandin, the famous animal scientist who has austim once called NASA the world’s biggest sheltered workshop for autistics. Of course that isn’t to say that there are many people whose functioning is serverely impacted by their autism. But as a whole, the human race benefits by having many different types of brains.
The third thing is, can we please stop obsessing about what causes autism and start obsessing about making sure everyone on the autism spectrum who needs services and supports gets them? When Ryan talks about gutting Medicaid, he’s talking about ensuring that my autistic kid spends the portion of his life after his dad and I die living on the street in a box.
That’s the bottom line. There isn’t one single cause to find and eradicate, but there will always be people with autism who need our attention.
Ohio Mom
@prufrock: And even if you believed in IQ tests, a difference of two points, between 108 and 110, would be meaningless, statistical noise, within the margin of error, etc.
AnonPhenom
@The Pale Scot:
True, but the sight of all those shocked Republicans reaching reflexively with their hands to cover their junk …
“Mr. Ryan, the doctor will see you now”
AnonPhenom
@J R in WVa:
Thanks.
Coulda’ bean wurst. Mighta’ used ‘sight’ in sted.
Ur a credit to gramma nazis everywhere.
AnonPhenom
@J R in WVa:
Thanks.
Coulda’ bean wurst. Mighta’ used ‘sight’ in sted.
Ur a credit to gramma nazis everywhere.
Origuy
@El Cid: Ned Kelly’s head has supposedly turned up before. An article in this month’s Archaeology magazine says that his body, along with a piece of his skull, has been identified. The article in the Independent doesn’t mention the condition of the skull. An intact skull is unlikely to be Kelly’s.
RP
Mutations are what allows evolution to happen. I’m hardly an expert on this subject, but the claim that mutations are typically harmful seems far-fetched.
Joel
Kondrashov is crossing a bridge too far. There’s a reason why the guys at DeCode wouldn’t attribute high-level social behaviors to subtle evolutionary changes.
I think the more interesting correlation would be a higher rate of miscarriages for children born of older men. I would assume that is definitely the case.
Joel
@Pongo: This.
Mnemosyne
So any day now we’re going to start hearing calls for men to delay their careers and focus on making healthy babies early in life, right? ‘Cause I distinctly remember that’s what the media message was for women.
No? Funny how that works, innit?
@Ohio Mom:
One of the stupidest and most frustrating arguments I ever got into online was with someone who insisted that vaccinations totally do cause autism because there’s a metabolic disorder that can cause autism-like symptoms if the person gets a high fever, and some kids got a high fever after vaccination, so therefore vaccinations cause autism.
Just from personal observation, autism spectrum disorders seem to have a strong genetic component — my nephew is somewhere on the spectrum (fortunately closer to the Asperger’s end), which was not a shock, because I’ve known my sister-in-law’s family for years.
CarolDuhart2
@WereBear: I always thought it was the inbreeding. Royal Cousins married Royal Cousins and the marriages between nations. If there had been an expanded gene pool, there might still be a Russian Royal Family of sorts.
mdblanche
Alexey should be careful. The last political leader to share his concerns about human genetic fitness thought names ending in -ov were a sign of low fitness.
Hypatia's Momma
@Pongo:
Yes. This isn’t exactly new news.
Zifnab
Too bad the brain isn’t highly plastic and easily influenced by training and development at a young age. :-p
I suppose I should also note that this seems to be something of a self-correcting phenomenon. If people get dumber and our society declines, you’ll have more poverty and fewer stable households. This will lead to working families with latch-key kids with no prospects that end up hanging out and screwing at younger ages. This will, in turn, refresh the gene pool with bright young street rats who can grow up and repair our society again. Of course, as soon as its fixed, people will want to wait to have kids. At which point, we’ll sink back into stupidity again.
Cluttered Mind
I hate when people just use “autism” as a scare word. As was previously stated in this thread, there are a whole lot of different kinds of autism, and not all of them are negative. In my career (I’m a digital librarian dealing with system management and cataloging), my Asperger’s feels more like an evolutionary advantage than a disability. It feels like that in many other areas of life too. There’s a world of difference between a non-verbal kid with serious autism that can’t communicate with the world and a guy on the high functioning end of the spectrum whose brain just works differently. Most of my problems functioning in the world are a result of unintentionally violating society’s mostly arbitrary rules of social conduct, not because of anything I would consider to be a cognitive defect. Asperger’s feels more to me like evolution in action than a disability. I hate when people just stigmatize “Autism” as a whole.
Beth
Total and complete BS.
FWIW, older men have been marrying and procreating with younger women since forever. Read your Bible. Look at paternalistic cultures, where sobbing 9 year old brides are led off to live with some creepy old guy with a long grey beard on a routine basis.
This is total crap.
Beth
And by the way, that child-bride crap is still happening around the world, including in our own country with the fundamentalist Mormons. Who are having more trouble from inbreeding, actually.
yahoo
@Zifnab: What is that about?
Brachiator
@CarolDuhart2:
Uh, no. The Revolution kinda took care of that.
@Pongo:
There is no law saying that science reporting cannot be accurate. And people have to pay to get access to the Nature article online, which is a powerful disincentive unless you are a researcher.
The remaining news stands in my area don’t carry Nature; I think that for most people, the MSM second hand reporting is the only game in town.
That said, the New Yorker piece is stupid, as are many of the quotes from the researchers.
Nicole
In Ancient Greece, the average man married at 30 and the average woman at 14 or 15.
I thought a fair amount of the increase in life expectancy in the past century or so was attributed to a drop in infant and child mortality.
JustRuss
The population is getting stupider? This is great news for John McCain!
Honestly, 48 comments and no McCain reference? What’s wrong with you people?
Jinchi
If you look at the figures in the paper, you’ll see that the “mean age of the father at conception” was roughly 35 between 1650 and 1900. It dropped sharply to about 28 in the 1970s and has since risen to 32. Maybe we should hold off on concern for the species until it gets somewhere above the long term mean.
Mandalay
@Brachiator:
There is no law saying that science reporting cannot be accurate
Consider the background of the author of the New Yorker article:
A former music columnist for The New York Observer, he began his journalism career as a rock critic for the now-defunct webzine Addicted to Noise and has also worked as a crime reporter at The Palm Beach Post, a city hall reporter at the Forward, a presidential campaign reporter at Brill’s Content, and a jack-of-all-trades at Inside.com.
That bio hardly inspires confidence that the author will provide accurate reporting of a very complex issue. Here is a much better MSM article on the study:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19336438
That study “shed light on the importance of the father’s age on the risk of diseases such as schizophrenia and autism”, and nobody on this board has made any sensible refutation of their conclusions.
Nicole
@Mandalay:
That reminds me of the single funniest comment I ever saw made about Angela Merkel- an angry commenter on an article on her handling of the German economy, said, in her defense, “She has a degree in chemistry! I think she understands economics!”
Heh.
I think no one is really commenting on the autism/schizophrenia angle because the thrust of the New Yorker article was that older dads might be siring dumber kids and oh my god, the humanity. So that, naturally, is what we ridicule.
Thanks for the link to the bbc article, by the way.
Brachiator
@Mandalay:
Let’s see now,
A single study is interesting, but not a slam dunk with respect to any conclusion about anything.
And this:
At what age is the risk significant? What is the cost of storing sperm over an entire lifetime?
And let’s see: “The results indicate that a father aged 20 passes, on average, approximately 25 mutations, while a 40-year-old father passes on about 65. The study suggests that for every year a man delays fatherhood, they risk passing two more mutations on to their child.”
So, now, 20 is elderly as far as sperm quality is concerned? Again, if the risks were as significant as the more alarmist would like to believe, then the human race should have died out long ago.
The primary discovery, that age of sperm may be more important than the age of the egg, is very interesting. But almost everything else connected to the story is speculation piled on nonsense.
The most humorous aspect of it suggests that men between the ages of 16 and 20 should be allowed to nail every fertile woman they can. In the movie Logan’s Run, no one was allowed to live past age 30. The remake should focus on hot teen boys and sexually voracious cougars.
And the song from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life needs to be re-written.
All young sperm is sacred.
All young sperm is great.
If young sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
joel hanes
@TheMightyTrowel:
evolution doesn’t happen over ‘a few generations’
Uh.
Given adequate selection pressure, quite striking changes in allele frequency and phenotype can be achieved in “a few generations”.
See The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner for evidence.
Not that I’m defending the statistical and biological assumptions of A.L.’s front-page post ….
However, a moderate reduction in human fecundity for a few centuries would in my view be a good thing for humanity and for the planet, a negative feedback mechanism that just may save us from ourselves.
joel hanes
@RP:
Most mutations are in fact deleterious; many of these deleterious mutations are so seriously harmful that the developing zygote is spontaneously miscarried long before the mother suspects that she’s pregnant, and the resulting flow is perceived as a late/heavy menses (the shed zygote still being invisibly small).
Mammalian reproduction has many many layers of feedback mechanisms; it takes a lot more than a couple generations of older fathers to “pollute the gene pool”.
jacksmith
“Give me Liberty, or Give me Death!” – Patrick Henry
What a brilliant ruling by the United States Supreme Court on the affordable health care act (Obamacare). Stunningly brilliant in my humble opinion. I could not have ask for a better ruling on a potentially catastrophic healthcare act than We The People Of The United States received from our Supreme Court.
If the court had upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate under the commerce clause it would have meant the catastrophic loss of the most precious thing we own. Our individual liberty. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Supreme Court.
There is no mandate to buy private for-profit health insurance. There is only a nominal tax on income eligible individuals who don’t have health insurance. This is a HUGE! difference. And I suspect that tax may be subject to constitutional challenge as it ripens.
This is a critically important distinction. Because under the commerce clause individuals would have been compelled to support the most costly, dangerous, unethical, morally repugnant, and defective type of health insurance you can have. For-profit health insurance, and the for-profit proxies called private non-profits and co-ops.
Equally impressive in the courts ruling was the majorities willingness to throw out the whole law if the court could not find a way to sever the individual mandate under the commerce clause from the rest of the act. Bravo! Supreme Court.
Thanks to the Supreme Court we now have an opportunity to fix our healthcare crisis the right way. Without the obscene delusion that Washington can get away with forcing Americans to buy a costly, dangerous and highly defective private product (for-profit health insurance).
During the passage of ACA/Obamacare some politicians said that the ACA was better than nothing. But the truth was that until the Supreme Court fixed it the ACA/Obamacare was worse than nothing at all. It would have meant the catastrophic loss of your precious liberty for the false promise and illusion of healthcare security under the deadly and costly for-profit healthcare system that dominates American healthcare.
As everyone knows now. The fix for our healthcare crisis is a single payer system (Medicare for all) like the rest of the developed world has. Or a robust Public Option choice available to everyone on day one that can quickly lead to a single payer system.
Talk of privatizing/profiteering from Medicare or social security is highly corrupt and Crazy! talk. And you should cut the political throats of any politicians giving lip service to such an asinine idea. Medicare should be expanded, not privatized or eliminated.
We still have a healthcare crisis in America. With hundreds of thousands dieing needlessly every year in America. And a for-profit medical industrial complex that threatens the security and health of the entire world. The ACA/Obamacare will not fix that.
The for-profit medical industrial complex has already attacked the world with H1N1 killing thousands, and injuring millions. And more attacks are planned for profit, and to feed their greed.
To all of you who have fought so hard to do the kind and right thing for your fellow human beings at a time of our greatest needs I applaud you. Be proud of your-self.
God Bless You my fellow human beings. I’m proud to be one of you. You did good.
See you on the battle field.
Sincerely
jacksmith – WorkingClass :-)