Post: #1

We all know that older women have a harder chance conceiving and a greater likelihood of having a child with a range of congenital defects.

However a father's age also matters. As men age, they contribute more "de novo" mutations to their offspring. The increase in de novo mutations is highly correlated with higher probabilities of autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD



http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v48...E-20120823

Just a reminder that if you want to have kids, waiting until you're older and finding a younger woman isn't going to be quite the same as having kids when you're in your prime. This is not to say that older men can't or don't have healthy kids, but that the odds of having kids with certain problems does in fact increase with age.

Post: #2

Quote:Just a reminder that if you want to have kids, waiting until you're older and finding a younger woman isn't going to be quite the same as having kids when you're in your prime.

I don't object to this statement, and am sure that my seed now will be stronger than when I'm 60, but this study provides no guidance on knowing what ages are the cut off and what potential diseases we increase passing on.

Post: #3

There is already a thread about this:

/thread-33366.html

The most important thing to note is that mentioning the risks due to the mother's age and the father's age in the same breath creates the false impression that they are somehow comparable. Nothing could be further from the truth, as I noted in this post:

(02-21-2014 09:13 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  The article cited in the OP makes by far the most relevant point that needs to be made:

Quote:So should men be encouraged to have children in their 20s rather than waiting until their 30s or 40s. Probably not. Although there is a big increase in risk for many disorders, it's a big increase in a very small risk. A 40-year-old is about 50 per cent more likely to father an autistic child than a 20-year-old is, for instance, but the overall risk is only about 1 per cent to start with. Having older parents may also be beneficial – giving their children a more stable home environment, for example.

This is the key and is so often overlooked when "increased risk" is mentioned.

Assume it's true that the risk for a man of 20 of having an autistic child is 1 in 100 (I think this is greatly overstated because of the overdiagnosis of autism, but I'll let this pass for now), and that the risk is increased by a "whopping" 50% for a man of 40.

A 50% higher risk sounds like a much higher risk, but what does this really mean? In absolute numbers it means that of every 200 kids born to men of 20, 2 will be autistic; whereas of every 200 kids born to men of 40, 3 will be autistic. In other words, a very small number in either case. So if you wait 20 years to father a child, the risk that the child will be autistic only rises by an additional 1/200 (0.5%).

The lesson is that even a large relative increase in a risk that was very low to begin with is not that big a deal and is pretty much completely negligible. This is also true of a lot of studies that you hear about in the news: XYZ doubles your risk of having a particular cancer, for example. Well, if your risk of having that cancer was very low to begin with, then doubling it sounds bad but it's really not that big of a deal.

The bottom line is that there is no comparison between the additional risks of childbirth to an older mother vs an older father, because the birth defects whose risk is increased for older mothers are much more common to begin with, so the increases in risk are much greater in absolute terms.

In other words, as long as the mother is young, there is very little to worry about.

Post: #4

I think the real question is do you really want to changing diapers at age 60?

I feel like 50 is a decent cutoff...although chasing toddlers around the house
and waking up in the middle of the night is really a young man's game.

Post: #5

Quote:I think the real question is do you really want to changing diapers at age 60?

I won't be changing diapers at any age. That's the mom's job.

Post: #6

Roosh, I think the issue is there is no cutoff point as much as it just consistently gets worse. The study says that each year you age, on average you contribute 2 new de novo mutations to your offspring. The difference is not huge from one year to another, or over a few years. As with everything, the averages do not tell you much about your individual case. Any individual could buck the trend in either direction.

But having more de novo mutations is linked to poor brain function generally. Your brain is so complicated, and so many things need to go right, that having more mutations can lead to any number of things going a bit wrong.

For instance, here they outline a study showing that children of parents with normal IQs who are born with Mental Retardation (IQ below 70), in general have more de novo mutations than their mentally typical siblings:

http://www.livescience.com/23620-mutatio...cause.html

Here is another study, it seems like the biggest risks, at least those elucidated in published studies, are mental problems of all sorts. This article states that comparing fathers who are 45 to fathers who are 20-24, the children of the 45-year-old fathers are more likely to have:

Autism, ADHD, Psychosis, BPD, attempt suicide, abuse substances, fail grades, and have low educational outcomes generally.

http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article....id=1833092

The above link also notes that these studies are not air-tight and have not all eliminated other confounding factors, and so these results are not to be taken as 100% definitive. However these across-the-board findings that basically indicate "This kid ain't right in the head" do seem suggestive.

I have no real recommendation when a man should have a kid, I'm in my 20s and thinking about it myself, hence writing this thread. Just food for thought.

Post: #7

The problem with the study is that older fathers in overwhelming majority have also impregnated older women. We should clear the data and see how 45+ year old fathers with young mothers do - 18-25 year old.

So - we have to really be careful about those studies out there.

Quote:Autism, ADHD, Psychosis, BPD, attempt suicide, abuse substances, fail grades, and have low educational outcomes generally.

autism - other reasons for rise of it - toxins and older mothers
ADHD - fake disease - co-developer of it said so in interview before his death
psychological issues are unlikely to result from older fathers - somehow the study tries to really claw at some data to confirm the anti-male bias

Post: #8

As Zelcorpion points out, this study is completely worthless because the age of the mothers that the men were using aren't accounted for.

Garbage study that ignores key variable? Smells like feminist propaganda from Iceland here.

My hypothesis?

Older men who impregnate younger women have a mild increase in mutations, but so small it's statistically insignificant.

I reach this conclusion because according to the above study, 15 year old boys have the least mutations. But in reality, these 15 year old boys were knocking up very young girls who just finished puberty, which means that it's the woman's age which is the overwhelming factor.

Post: #9

(05-22-2015 09:57 PM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  The problem with the study is that older fathers in overwhelming majority have also impregnated older women. We should clear the data and see how 45+ year old fathers with young mothers do - 18-25 year old.

So - we have to really be careful about those studies out there.

Quote:Autism, ADHD, Psychosis, BPD, attempt suicide, abuse substances, fail grades, and have low educational outcomes generally.

autism - other reasons for rise of it - toxins and older mothers
ADHD - fake disease - co-developer of it said so in interview before his death
psychological issues are unlikely to result from older fathers - somehow the study tries to really claw at some data to confirm the anti-male bias

This whole thread and even this post sounds oddly familiar. . .Like I've seen it before somewhere. . .I can't quite put my finger on it.

Post: #10

Even assuming this is true, that all the more reason, among countless others, for an older man to seek out a young woman for an LTR

Post: #11

This has already been debunked. No matter which way they dice it feminists can't create a world where men and women face the same sort of procreative wall. The difference in ages that a man can be a father and a woman a mother is absolutely baked into biology and in consequence human behavior. They obviously don't like the consequences of reality, but it doesn't change reality in the slightest. Nature is pitilessly indifferent.

Just to add to the excellent comments above. Another thing to consider is that very often "percentage increase" is fairly meaningless in a practical day to day sense. If an incidence increases from 0.01% to 0.03% that's a 200% increase, but makes no real material difference at an individual level.

Post: #12

I appreciate the fine efforts of the men on this thread debunking the claim.

Post: #13

I'm confused why people don't generally accept this.

Older sperm has more mutations. These mutations are passed on to your offspring. They are in almost every case deleterious.

Yes older women also cause problems, and a man of any age having kids with a younger woman will help his kids be healthier than an older woman.

Men's ability to have kids lasts for a lot longer than women, we don't "dry up" the way they do.

Independent of that, a 24 year old man passes on fewer de novo mutations to his sons than a 34 year old man.

Here is Greg Cochran, the most "red pill" scientist I have discovered, talking about the phenomenon:

Quote:Decode Genetics has a new report out in Nature that shows how mutations increase with age, by sequencing family trios. They found that women contribute about 15 de novo mutations, independent of age.

Men contribute more (55 on average) , and the number increases rapidly with age. They found that the average 20-year old father passed on 25 mutations, while the average 40-year old passed on 65, an increase of about two mutations per year of paternal age.

The researchers talked about the problems caused by these de novo mutations – things like schizophrenia and autism. We already knew that such risks increased with paternal age, but this work quantifies the mutations responsible.

Stefánsson opines that the higher mutation rate with older fathers is not that worrisome, since the absolute risk for schizophrenia and/or autism is still small (~2%) and since mutations are our friends: “You could argue what is bad for the next generation is good for the future of our species. ”

Well, not for the first time, Kari Stefánsson is wrong. If mutations with large effects are more common with increased paternal age, mutations with small effects must also be more common. Those small-effect mutations are removed slowly by natural selection, and so they accumulate with time. This eventually results in a population in which everyone has a higher genetic load, not just a few unfortunate kids out of each generation.

What this means is that modest differences in social structure, differences that cause changes in the average paternal age, are likely to have major effects on the mutation rate. If those differences are maintained over time, say for a few thousand years, you would expect to see significantly different levels of mutational load in different populations. Genetic estimates of split times and such would also be wrong, but that’s a nit.

What do I mean by a modest difference? Assume that population A has an average paternal age of 25: then the average number of new mutations per generation is 50. Assume that population B has an average paternal age of 30: then the average number of new mutations per generation is 60, a 20% increase. As Kondrashov put it in his commentary, “It seems that multifactorial disorders that result from impaired brain function, such as autism, schizophrenia, dyslexia and reduced intelligence, are
particularly susceptible to the paternal-age effect. This is consistent with the fact that more genes are expressed in the brain than in any other organ, meaning that the fraction of new mutations that will affect its functions is the highest. ”

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/paternal-age/

Post: #14

This makes sense. It's better to have children at a younger age. It doesn't matter whether you're
man or woman...besides I'd rather be young and enjoy my kids rather than pulling my AARP senior
discount when we go to the movies or at the themepark.

Post: #15

^^^Sonsoway

Some mutations are good. It's just that the way we look at things we tend to concentrate on the harmful ones.

I get the point about potentially harmful mutations being spread widely in a population, but paternal age at conception is minor contributor to this. If you really wanted to tackle that "problem" (It probably isn't really a problem) you'd have to have the kind of eugenic program that the Nazi's would approve of.

For a start, the fact that our partners now are much more distantly related than in even the fairly recent past is a big contributor to mutation dispersion. The average degree of relatedness of parents throughout the history of all cultures, including Western, is probably around second cousin. For reasons you can probably imagine. Lack of travel. Small communities. Importance of family networks as opposed to "the state". In the contemporary world it is obviously more distant. This seems to be an improvement that weeds out harmful mutations, but as alluded to in your post above it just spreads them out. i.e. Kicks the can down the road. If you really wanted to get rid of harmful (and good) mutations you'd have a eugenic program that concentrated them by encouraging parents to be closely related and an intentional lack of any sort of welfare so that the small percentage of children who end up with a harmful mutation either die, or at least fail to procreate. Good luck instituting such a policy. It would be rightfully condemned as inhumane.

The fact that we seem to have more people with problems now is due to the fact that in the past they would not have survived, or if they did they would have hidden away. People misinterpret statistics and their observations. The fact that they survive is a good thing and really doesn't harm the remaining population in the way a eugenicist would claim.

Post: #16

I also think this study is nonsense for the good reasons posted above. And one other... Since the law changed in the UK on sperm donor anonimity, there was a big drop in donors. To make up the loss the UK regulatory body the HFEA were happy to accept older male donors , 40 or 45 years old, depending on the individual clinic. Provided the test came back clean for disease and genetic problems and your guys are good swimmers and a good volume %, then 40-45 year old men are now welcomed as viable sperm donors. The limit for egg donors is 36.


http://www.hfea.gov.uk/sperm-donation-eligibility.html

In the UK the change in the anonymity law has had the effect of deterring many of the traditional student age donors, the effect being that the average donor in the UK is now in his 30s.

Post: #17

Sort of a tangent but if you were to have mixed kids. Maybe you married your Thai gf. Doesn't that create a healthier child? I thought I read somewhere the stronger genes get passed through.

Post: #18

Frost hit the nail squarely on the head in the other thread. The blog post explains it well.

Frost Wrote:I think it's mostly a selection effect. What sort of men have children later in life? Nerdy guys, i.e. men on the autism spectrum. These men are more likely to have low-functioning autistic children. I wrote a post on this subject a little while ago:

http://www.thumotic.com/delayed-fatherhood-and-autism/

Post: #19

(05-26-2015 11:12 AM)samsamsam Wrote:  Sort of a tangent but if you were to have mixed kids. Maybe you married your Thai gf. Doesn't that create a healthier child? I thought I read somewhere the stronger genes get passed through.

It gets a bit complicated. There are two forces pushing in opposite directions. One force pushes people to choose mates dissimilar to themselves and gain the benefit of "hybrid vigour". The other force pushes people to choose mates very similar to themselves, but not too similar. This allows for the survival and propagation of individual rare genes. Also there are certain benefits for the mother and child when the parents are close, but not too close. e.g. Miscarriages are much lower. I seem to remember from reading a study many years back that some biologist has determined that the ideal biological degree of consanguinity for parents is second and a half cousin (I know there is no such thing), but I tend to take these sort of finding with a pinch of salt. There are so many variables to consider it hard to accept a specific result as "gospel". But it is true, biologically, that there are both benefits and costs to an organism, including humans, of in and out breeding.

Another study I remember showed that couples are much more similar than they realise when you look at completely random variables that we don't consciously select for. Silly things like subtle differences in distance between mouth and eyes. That sort of thing. Even people in relationships with others they consider physically very different, like with interracial couples, are shown to select partners who have very similar micro physical measurements to their own. Or at least massively more similar than the general population. It is very weird, because they are not at all consciously aware of what is happening.

Post: #20

The possible mutations when sperm is observed under a microscope ignores the performance test that sperm must pass to fertilize an egg.

Post: #21

One of the nice things about a discussion like this is you can look things up for yourself

1. Research shows that as men age, damaged sperm gets replaced less often,
thus contributing to higher risk of infertility.

2. Among children with Down syndrome, when both parents are over the age of 35,
sperm is the related cause 50% of the time.

3. Older men have more damaged sperm than younger men. Men over 35 had more abnormalities
in sperm movement and more damaged sperm with more seriously damaged DNA than the younger men.

4. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle and staying away from toxic agents can help you maintain
optimal fertility.

http://www.webmd.com/infertility-and-rep...in-men-too
http://www.webmd.com/infertility-and-rep...m-die-hard

Post: #22

Solution: wait to have children until Gattaca technology is fully developed. I think 20 years or less from today.

I can be 60 and father a version of me that is 4 inches taller, 30 more IQ points, and zero risk of any genetic defects. A worthy heir.

Quote:Antonio: We were just wondering if, if it is good to just leave a few things to, to chance?
Geneticist: We want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn't need any more additional burdens. Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply, the best, of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result.

Post: #23

Absolutely bullshit, a feminist creation that reared its ugly head when I was still in university. Who are the older men impregnating? Older women, or younger women? These are the main contributing factors to these disorders, and they are ignored. FAILED STUDY

The older the woman, the higher chance of disorders, the younger the woman the higher chance of disorders.

Of course there's mutations in your sperm, just like any other cells in your body. Does a mutation spell imminent disasters to come for your future child? NO.

How about you examine YOUR health before that of the hypothetical?

Watch the cell phone near crotch, microwave near crotch, stop x-raying your crotch. Those heated seats? Bad for your crotch. Work out more, be on a healthy diet; you'll live to see your baby, and judge whether or not that cute face has 'disorders'.

This is just worrying for nothing.

Post: #24

(05-26-2015 11:12 AM)samsamsam Wrote:  Sort of a tangent but if you were to have mixed kids. Maybe you married your Thai gf. Doesn't that create a healthier child? I thought I read somewhere the stronger genes get passed through.

Many people carry some really harmful recessive genes. They live out healthy lives, but if they have children with someone else who also carries the recessive gene, the child may be born with those genes manifesting themselves in a harmful manner.

As a corollary, many of these harmful recessive genes cluster within ethnic groups, so that if you carry one of these, having a child with someone outside of your ethnic group would, statistically speaking, lower the chance of your partner also carrying the recessive gene.

So, if you have children with a woman from another part of the world, you're less likely to both carry the same recessive genes, and less likely to have a child with certain very serious genetic disorders.

Here's a section of a site that briefly gives examples of the ethnic clustering of certain recessive genes:

Quote:Recessive genetic disorders

Recessive genetic disorders (RGD) are caused when both parents supply a recessive gene to their offspring. The probability of such an event's occurring is 25 percent each time the parents conceive. About 1,000 confirmed RGDs exist. Some of the better known examples of the condition include cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease, galactosemia, phenylketonuria (PKU), adenosine deaminase deficiency, growth hormone deficiency, Werner's syndrome (juvenile muscular dystrophy), albinism (lack of skin pigment), and autism.

Some RGDs tend to affect people of one particular ethnic background at a higher rate than the rest of the population. Three such RGDs are cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, and Tay-Sachs disease. Cystic fibrosis is one of the most common autosomal recessive diseases in Caucasian children in the United States. About 5 percent of Caucasians carry this recessive gene. Cystic fibrosis is characterized by excessive secretion of an unusually thick mucus that clogs respiratory ducts and collects in lungs and other body areas. Cystic fibrosis patients usually die before the age of 20, although some individuals live to the age of 30.

Sickle-cell anemia occurs with an unusually high incidence among the world's black and Hispanic populations. However, some cases also occur in Italian, Greek, Arabian, Maltese, southern Asian, and Turkish people. About 1 in 12 blacks carry the gene for this disorder. Sickle-cell anemia is caused by mutations in the genes responsible for the production of hemoglobin. (Hemoglobin is the compound that carries oxygen in red blood cells to tissues and organs throughout the body.) Sickle-cell anemia patients have red blood cells that live only a fraction of the normal life span of 120 days. The abnormal blood cells have a sickled appearance, which led to the disease's name. Sickle-cell patients also die early, before the age of 30.

The Tay-Sachs gene is carried by 1 in 30 Ashkenazi Jews. Children born with Tay-Sachs disorder seem normal for the first 5 months of their lives. But afterwards, they begin to express symptoms of the disorder. Eventually, the condition leads to blindness and death before the age of four.

Here's a link if you want to explore further:

http://www.scienceclarified.com/Ga-He/Ge...rders.html

I'm sure there's a host of other benefits to having children with folks that are not too closely related to you, and there may or may not be some drawbacks as well, but for sure there is the decreased risk of having a child with one of these ethnically clustered RGDs.

Post: #25

I found this joke of a "study":

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v48...11396.html

Quote:Mutations generate sequence diversity and provide a substrate for selection. The rate of de novo mutations is therefore of major importance to evolution. Here we conduct a study of genome-wide mutation rates by sequencing the entire genomes of 78 Icelandic parent–offspring trios at high coverage. We show that in our samples, with an average father’s age of 29.7, the average de novo mutation rate is 1.20 × 10−8 per nucleotide per generation. Most notably, the diversity in mutation rate of single nucleotide polymorphisms is dominated by the age of the father at conception of the child. The effect is an increase of about two mutations per year. An exponential model estimates paternal mutations doubling every 16.5 years. After accounting for random Poisson variation, father’s age is estimated to explain nearly all of the remaining variation in the de novo mutation counts. These observations shed light on the importance of the father’s age on the risk of diseases such as schizophrenia and autism.

This is a contrarian study that goes against MOUNTAINS of evidence which shows the mothers age to be the #1 factor in the health of the child and there is no mention of the age of the mothers? And it bases it's conclusions off a measly 78 trios?



How anyone can make a conclusion based on such a small sample is beyond me, but the study then takes their "findings" (from 78 couples) and extrapolates it to 752,343 father-child pairs since 1650. The inherent absurdity of doing something like this boggles my mind, but wait - there's more!

According to this study, if older fathers keep having more children over time then the mutations will increase and build upon each other, yet according to Figure 4 in their own study the amount of de nova mutations went down dramatically between 1900-1979 despite the prior 300 years having the average age of fathers being over 35. There appears to be little evidence of these mutations doing anything negative at all.

The definition of a de novo mutation:

Quote:An alteration in a gene that is present for the first time in one family member as a result of a mutation in a germ cell (egg or sperm) of one of the parents or in the fertilized egg itself

So, in summary:

- De novo mutations are not inherently bad or good.
- We have no idea what the role of the mother is since the study does not show how they separated the father's role from the mother's role.
- The sample size was pathetically small.

Apparently you need to pay $3.99 to "rent" the article and see, or $32 to "buy". I hate Academia, it's such a scam. Charging money so people can see your results is absolutely retarded. This means that if we don't pay we're expected to take this shit at face value based on the authority of this "peer-reviewed journal." God knows if knowledge was made available to the public I wonder how many people would take them seriously?

It is telling is that this study has gotten 700K page views, which just goes to show people will believe what they want to believe without doing any checking of the facts because people are too cheap to pay $3.99 or $32 for the article thus giving Nature a lazy-man's monopoly on information.

This is feminist pop-science, and probably deserves to be exposed via RoK. How did such a weak study make it into Nature, supposed a prestigious academic journal?

And then this weak "science" is used to generate the following headlines:

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/24/...n-20120824

Quote:Older dads pass down more mutations: the implications

A study this week reported that older men pass on more new mutations to their offspring than do younger men, a fact that could help explain higher rates of disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and others in kids born of older fathers.

LA Times just talking out of their ass, but I actually got a real link to a full study from this article:

http://www.nature.com/articles/ng.2398.e...atimes.com

In this article they claim to know that mutations are not caused by the mother, yet they do not explain how they arrived at the conclusion. They say, "see supplementary tables, which are included in the online version of the paper," which means you need to pay.

Whole system is fucked, again, but there isn't any reason to believe they used accurate or sound methods after withholding such important information. My bullshit meter is off the charts.

Also interesting about the above study is that they try to infer, based on the rate of mutations, how fast humans evolved from the apes; I believe what they found is that the white race based on higher numbers of mutations evolved from apes faster than blacks and other types of apes in Table 2. But again, because they do not list how they calculate mutations, I wouldn't take this with more than a grain of salt.

So, to TL; DR:

1. Mutations: probably good if anything since mutations are the main drivers of evolution. Some mutations will be bad; these children die. Some mutations are good; these children then go out to reproduce successfully while young which according to the above papers means younger fathers = less mutations, so if fathers reproduce while young even if their fathers were old, it means they got a helpful mutation that allowed to them reproduce successfully earlier than normal.

2. If these studies are true, older fathers more likely to create unique characteristics in their sons and daughters (more likely in their sons since they inherit the Y chromosome). Again, it's a gamble but according to evolutionary theory mutations are one of THE most important drivers of evolution.

Therefore, older fathers are a GOOD thing if what these papers say is true. The Bible wins again.

3. Modern Academic science journals are a racket and charging money just to look at a single paper is reprehensible and immoral.