Ygorcs
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Interesting stuff. Particularly fascinating to see an evolutionary phenomenon previously observed in fruit flies being reproduced (with big consequences) by human beings.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science...y-brought-the-mothers-curse-to-canada/540153/
The first King’s Daughters—or filles du roi—arrived in New France in 1663, and 800 more would follow over the next decade. Given their numbers, they were not literally the king’s daughters of course.
They were poor and usually of common birth, but their passage and dowry were indeed paid by King Louis XIV for the purpose of empire building: These women were to marry male colonists and have many children, thus strengthening France’s hold on North America.
And so they did. The filles du roi became the founding mothers of French Canadians, for whom these women are a source of historical pride.
[...]
For many years, says Dowling, Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy has been on the radar of evolutionary biologists interested in the mother’s curse. Doctors knew the mutation causing the disorder sits on mitochondrial DNA, and they have noticed that it seems to affect men eights times more than women.
In 2005, researchers at the Université de Montréal actually traced the ancestry of 11 modern-day patients with Leber’s back to a single fille du roi who came to New France at the age of 18. Her particular mutation is responsible for 89 percent of Leber’s cases in the Quebec population. By following her daughters, granddaughters, great-granddaughters and so on all the way to the present, it is possible to identify people who had lived with this particular Leber’s mutation over a 290-year period in the area. “It was the ideal setup to test the mother’s-curse hypothesis,” says Emmanuel Milot, a geneticist at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières.
[...]
If the mother’s curse is real in humans, that opens up a whole host of other questions in biology. Women usually live longer than men—could some of that difference be explained by mother’s-curse mutations that have accumulated in mitochondrial DNA? (Milot thinks so.) And how is it, exactly, that the same mutation can harmful in men but benign in women?
One hint comes from a recent study published in the European Journal of Human Genetics, which linked mitochondrial dysfunction to lower fertility in men. Sperm do not contribute any mitochondria to an embryo, but they themselves are packed with mitochondria that power their swim toward the egg. “Anything goes wrong with mitochondria, those sperm are not going to fertilize an egg,” says Dowling. That could be why mitochondrial mutations may impact fertility in men more than women.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science...y-brought-the-mothers-curse-to-canada/540153/