Why older fathers pass on more genetic mutations to their offspring
rockefeller.edu
rockefeller.edu
Research says that incidences of both rise as the age of parents does, but it's not something heavily studied at this time. His oncologist said at least partially because they already deal with parents blaming themselves enough.
Here's a story of a grandmother birthing her own grandchild.
https://people.com/human-interest/grandmother-gave-birth-son...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/geriatric
It’s a bizarre cultural problem.
We did not plan it this late, but just wanted to say that higher age is not a guarantee of bad things.
For men 35 is nothing, men can sire children to their last breath.
Ask your friends who have started families past 35, so many stories about fertility, doctors, etc.
It is also why you see so many twins among middle aged professional couples, the children were the result of fertility treatments.
With the way society is changing, I think eventually human evolution will catch up and allow women to stay fertile later in life.
Just because you had a healthy kid does not mean everyone will or that there is no risk.
Humans evolved to have sex and get pregnant before middle age. That's just our biology. DNA itself is a machine, and ours doesn't have built in protections to accommodate later pregnancies with high fidelity. If we had evolutionary pressure, it would. But there is no such pressure.
Cultures that encourage starting families at 25 will genetically dominate cultures that encourage starting families at 35.
Thats more than simple correlation. Having kids when you are in middle age might have been known as physically difficult, especially for the mother. We've made huge leaps in medicine to trivialize child birth but for most of human existence, it was a game of dice, to some degree it still is, where mother and/or child could perish.
Maybe younger women cope better with the physical stresses of pregnancy? Nature seems to think so.
Not really. That's when they start having sex. So you end up having kids whether you like it or not.
It's been a long road to understanding we weren't at fault for either condition though. We lost a lot of friends and family who just found us too needy during that, and that hurt our self confidence as well.
We made some friends at the hospital but after all those shared experiences and solidarity none us really kept in touch either. Which is sad in a way but honestly we were all there for one another when we needed it in the way we needed it.
We had to reboot our lives in every way imaginable and that worked for us. It doesn’t for everyone though, some people need the familiar things in life to stay grounded, my wife and I mainly needed each other.
Do your best for yourself and each other. That approach was the main thing that kept me sane afterwards and I don’t regret it for a minute.
https://www.cancerhealth.com/article/live-near-cancer-hot-sp...
That said I've been exposed to all kinds of crap in my career. Even money that any given military ship would be considered a moving cancer zone.
DNA can have an abundance of errors, epigenetic signals, etc. It has spatial packing and organization problems to overcome. Attempting the repairs themselves will each be bespoke mini problems that could introduce further disease states if the fix fails.
My thinking is that by the time we have this technology as described, the world will have moved beyond humans.
We're in a race. Will we advance 10x in molecular capabilities before we advance to AGI and beyond? I think not.
Speaking as someone who was adopted, I also can't relate to the necessity of having a child borne of your own genes. There are lots of ways to increase value in this world, and solving this problem completely is an incredibly niche application of the limited time and talent we have. The necessary tech advances themselves are way more valuable than the problem described here.
It's a really good movie, but what's depicted in the film is not necessarily a world I'd like to live in.
And actually, hybridization between near species or more robust mixing between more genetically unrelated pairs tends to be better for more useful adaptations.
Unfortunately we already killed off, or out bred all other members of genus homo. Though to be fair our ancestors do seem to have got on with them so maybe we just absorbed them more than drove them to extinction?
But in any case, increasing the mutation rate, does increase the chance of bad mutations of happening, since it increases any kind of mutations from happening.
Exposing yourself to excessive radiation is much more likely to cause cancer than superpowers. (In addition to a bunch of neutral mutations that do neither.)