Older fathers have 'geekier sons'

Shouldn't they control for that? Otherwise it's simply correlation rather than causation.

I remember a Stanford professor dived into this advanced age gamete suboptimality and stressed to everyone the compromises folks take in delaying past prime biological stages. He showed some time profiles of the diminishing chances for implantation, genetic disorders, etc. It was really palpable because you could sense he was a bit off balance having to present this sort of news to a bunch of young folks with the fountain of youth in their back pockets. The classmates were pretty much silent throughout the delivery. It got me to start thinking about biological optimum and I easily realized it was in the 20s as one would expect. All nighters were a piece of cake, probably to serve the care of an infant waking every 2 hours into the early hours of the night. Another piece of easily perceived evidence was the sheer force of the libido at that age and just how attractive women are in their peak. Lots of conspiring biology to contemplate teleologically.

Apparently this is due to autistics taking longer to find mates, rather than mutation damage.

Be wary of Autism Speaks: https://thecaffeinatedautistic.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/why-...

Their research is biased, and the entire organization follows a gay therapy model (which is to "teach" gay kids that their orientation is wrong).

Plenty of men with single mothers* learn to play sports just fine (see many NBA and NFL players).

*This is not to say that women don't play sports with their sons, but to say that it's silly to assume that all young fathers play sports with their sons.

I would not limit it to athleticism: men generally tend to lose "broism" and gain "wisdom" as they age. The relative levels of bravado and bookish authority that young boys could admire will therefore vary a lot with the age of the father. In addition to that, children calibrate their perception of normality to however their parents are. Many people believe that they don't want to be like their parents, but this normality calibration influences them nonetheless.

...and isolate athleticism from sport.

Engineering is mostly male, so it's easier for female engineers to find spouses from among their classmates/coworkers (and harder for male engineers).

What do you mean by "defective genes"?

This is some Phrenology-grade bullshit

It's an on/off situation. Genetic defects happen 1:100 when the mother is 40 and 1:100000 when the mother is 23.

But in 99:100 cases the kids are as healthy as the ones of a 23 year old mother.

I don't have the exact numbers but it's something in that ballpark.

It's not a weak versus strong physical thing. And it would affect mental capacities at the same rate. Geeks are usually not dumber than average.

The fact that the result only holds in this one case suggests that the result is statistically bogus.

Curious what the correlation is between geekiness, length in career, and career success of women, and also how career success correlates with the age of parenthood.

My completely unscientific impression is that scientific & mathematic acumen generates less of a financial return for women, and that when it does, it tends to generate a return earlier, with technical skills providing a foot in the door but subsequent success due to professional relationships. If, as I think the grandparent is suggesting, you posit that the reason for the observed correlation is that geekier males tend to be the ones that have children late in life (as opposed to earlier or not at all), then if geekiness in females leads to either no delay or not having children at all, you wouldn't observe the effect in females.

Interesting. That might lead to questions about genetic expression in semen, but then you'd expect daughters to not be immune.

That's interesting, I thought there was a correlation between older mothers and autism, and autism has a correlation to geekiness.

My wife had our youngest daughter at 40 (I was 43), and my daughter was diagnosed as autistic at 3 and a half. After lots of therapy she was able to mainstream at age 8, and made the honor roll this year.

This morning she noticed a year in a book her older sister was reading. She exclaimed "That's the year Isaac Newton was born!". I said "okay" not sure if she could be right, and she then whispered to me, "and it's the year Galileo died". I looked it up, and she was right. So I kind of consider her geeky.

If by 'heritable' you mean 'learned behavior' then I'd agree.

I looked at your links, but I'm still not sure I buy it. All of these seem to quote the same study, and it doesn't involve any child under 3, which is actually where a lot of early childhood development happens. That's the time when a child who's left alone in a room will basically turn into a vegetable.

I do agree that there's no magic formula for being a great parent. The baby Beethoven phenom, best color to paint your baby's room, etc are indeed useless. But that's good parents who actually care trying to read studies and be better. These parents are involved, and care. Not all parents are like that.

From your second article:

"In fact, the study found one key instance when parent time can be particularly harmful to children. That’s when parents, mothers in particular, are stressed, sleep-deprived, guilty and anxious."

This sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would happen less with older, more established parents.

On the other hand, if the parents can't hold a job, or are addicted to drugs, I think you'd be hard pressed to say that doesn't have an effect on childhood outcomes. If anything, parents who are criminals are more likely to have children that are criminals.

If you want to say criminality is genetic, that's a fair argument. But I believe it's more likely to be about class/race/means, and is a set of learned behaviors.

I think there's a limit to how good parenting can affect outcomes to the positive (genetics). But I also think bad parenting can't be ruled out. And none of these studies talk about sub-par parenting.

Ah yes, Vox and Quillette, the child development journals of record.

There are several points of contention but here are some of the most common points I've encountered:

- When the term 'sandwich' is used in reference to a bagel being used for the 'bread' there is a presumption that the bagel is sliced along a transverse equatorial plane with the hole of the bagel being orthogonal to the ground. This photo clearly defies that convention.

- A sandwich by most conventions is kept between two or more slices of bread in layers. If there are more than two layers between bread in a sandwich they are stacked vertically and separated by individual slices of bread. The subject under discussion has two layers, which is conventionally acceptable for a sandwich to have, but they are not stacked vertically. Some scholars have argued that this means that it is incorrect to call this a 'sandwich' in the singular sense but it is acceptable to call the entity a composition of 'sandwiches'.

This is just a taste of the great bagel debate currently raging across very small niches of geeks but hopefully it gives you a flavour of why no definitive answer has been accepted by the community. And this has not even touched on the bagel-complete problems such as the topological properties of the mobius bagel http://images.tastespotting.com/uploads/thumbnail/125155.jpg.

Just to clarify, the sperm cells of a forty year old man (unlike the egg cells of a forty year old woman) are not themselves forty years old.

I'd suggest that geeky dads are going to attempt to be very logical with their all their decisions. So they might take their time with their spouse, want to get a house, get finances in a great place, etc, before making the jump to have kids.

At some point the geekier types either alleviate all their concerns and/or realize that a lot of great things can't be framed into a logical decision, and they make the jump. :)

I think it's "obvious" when you consider that education-level and the age at which parents have their first child are (very) positively correlated.

This finding strikes me as epiphenomenal.

Geekiness implies social outsider status almost by definition. Plus the rational argument for contraception and family planning seems more likely to be internalized by people who have a reputation for rationalism.

"Geeky" is the wrong word to use here. Educated people with ""good"" jobs have children later - geeks that work in software/STEM/medicine are included.

Plenty of my non-geek friends with good income careers are just now trying to settle down at 30.

Precisely. I even fit the pattern, being an aspergers STEM major whose father was in his 50s when I was born. But that's no more evidence than the other person's refutation, because personal experience is worthless here. Statistics matter, and our own biases serve only to cloud our analysis.