Children of older fathers have less evolutionary fitness

[LeBrok]

Today's hunter-gatherers are not European, not even Caucasoid. And average puberty age varies between the races. For example for African-American girls, average age at menarche is below 12 and for European-American girls it is over 13.

For East Asian girls, average age at menarche is even older than for European girls.

Yah, yah, the point was that most majority of people in the past was born and survived to young parents till 30, period. If you have undisclosed information which points to the fact that only human evolutionary changes are due to older fathers, now is the time to speak.

 

[Tomenable]

For everyone's information, IQ, like most human traits, is polygenic, affected by perhaps hundreds if not thousands of alleles. No scientist claims to know what they all are, and therefore no retail testing company is going to be able to tell you if you're "genetically" smarter than anyone else. This is voodoo genetics and part of why there is a blowback against amateurs being left to interpret data from retail genetics companies.

Comparing IQ test results with DNA Land "Educational Attainment" results shows that there is a correlation between them.

No scientist claims to know what they all are

Not all, but a large part is already known. There are also studies about frequencies of IQ associated alleles in populations.

 

[LeBrok]

Well - I don't deny that advantageous mutations are rare.

I claim that both advantageous and deleterious are rare.

Take cigarette smokers for example, and smoke effect on mutations in lung DNA, causing cancer. If your claim that destructive and beneficial mutations are equal in benefits to the human life, mostly neutral, why is that we can see that most long time smokers die of lung cancer. As we know lung cancer is caused by damage/mutation in DNA structure. Why we don't see the good mutations counteracting the bad mutations? Why don't we see many smokers getting better lungs, very healthy lungs and better than average, after long time smoking? On contrary, we see damage, destruction and death from mutations. Where are the good mutations counterbalancing the bad ones?

Look at as getting older and older. Most aging is caused of destruction to our DNA, slowly being damage/mutating, therefore functions worse and worse, slower and slower, with every year till we die. Life long sequence of deleterious mutations kills us.

 

[Tomenable]

Take cigarette smokers for example, and smoke effect on mutations in lung DNA, causing cancer. If your claim that destructive and beneficial mutations are equal in benefits to the human life, mostly neutral, why is that we can see that most long time smokers die of lung cancer. As we know lung cancer is caused by damage/mutation in DNA structure. Why we don't see the good mutations counteracting the bad mutations? Why don't we see many smokers getting better lungs, very healthy lungs and better than average, after long time smoking? On contrary, we see damage, destruction and death from mutations. Where are the good mutations counterbalancing the bad ones?

Good question.

For example Jeanne Calment smoked cigarettes from the age of 21 (1896) to the age of 117 (1992).

And she did not die (in 1997) from lung cancer, but from something else.

That said, for the majority of people smoking is indeed harmful. As is nuclear radiation for example.

But why should we compare a natural process like aging, with smoking?

 

[Angela]

Let's see, do I believe the many papers written on this subject by reputable scientists or Joe Blow on the internet?

All other things being equal, the odds are that you'll have healthier children with a man under 35 than with a man 40+, no matter how much money he has. Those sperm just deteriorate with time. Ladies, take note. With women, by the time her eggs have deteriorated she can't have children anymore anyway, thank-goodness.

Also, whoever said that all deleterious mutations are immediately lethal? We know that most of them aren't immediately lethal, given that the papers above say most people have about 70 denovo mutations, and most of us are here without massive medical interventions.

However, if you have enough even mildly deleterious mutations flooding into the societal gene pool because a good number of powerful old men are hogging all the nubile young women, and then the children of those unions are allowed to reach reproductive age because of the father's power and the advantages he can provide, the effect on society isn't very good. Add to that the fact that in societies with this kind of elite superstructure you have a lot of intermarriage an inbreeding, it's not a good situation.

It was a byword in Europe that the children of the aristocracy were more "delicate". Well, now we know some of the reasons why. No wonder some of these aristocratic trees show evidence of some hanky-panky. Some of these old ***** either couldn't procreate at all, or the children were sickly, and in a pre-modern society, died. If your status depends on providing a healthy male heir, I can see why some women turned elsewhere.

 

[LeBrok]

Good question.

For example Jeanne Calment smoked cigarettes from the age of 21 (1896) to the age of 117 (1992).

And still, she did not die (in 1997) of lung cancer, but of something else.

That said, for the majority of people smoking is indeed harmful. As is nuclear radiation for example.

But why should we compare a natural process like aging, with smoking?

Because it all environmental damage to our DNA. Every mutation comes from environmental effects. Cosmic radiation, radon gas, free radicals, malnutrition, etc. Most of our aging is caused by environmental damage to DNA structure.

 

[Tomenable]

All other things being equal, the odds are that you'll have healthier children with a man under 35 than with a man 40+

And what about women?

Is the likelihood of my children being healthy with a woman of 40 the same as with a woman of 25?

Is the de novo mutational load correlated only with paternal age, and not at all with maternal age?

The only genetic difference between men and women is XY vs. XX so is it related to Y chromosome?

If so, then maybe men with some Y-DNA haplogroups have a lower risk of deleterious mutations?

 

[Tomenable]

With women, by the time her eggs have deteriorated she can't have children anymore anyway, thank-goodness.

Most of women can have children until around 50. But you just claimed that sperm deteriorates already by 35.

So why is there a 15 years difference?

 

[Angela]

Because it all environmental damage to our DNA. Every mutation comes from environmental effects. Cosmic radiation, radon gas, free radicals, malnutrition, etc. Most of our aging is caused by environmental damage to DNA structure.

I once asked an oncologist this question about why some people can smoke for decades before getting cancer if they get it at all while some people are dead at forty. He said it depends how many protective snps were part of their genetic code and whether or not and how early there was damage to those protective snps.

So, for me the moral of the story is just don't do it at all no matter what.

There's something similar for bladder cancer in men. There's a link between the combination of smoking and drinking and bladder cancer.

Another killer is exposure to asbestos. There's lots of litigation seeking damages for people who developed cancer after working with roofing materials, insulation, etc.

 

[LeBrok]

Good question.

For example Jeanne Calment smoked cigarettes from the age of 21 (1896) to the age of 117 (1992).

And she did not die (in 1997) from lung cancer, but from something else.

That said, for the majority of people smoking is indeed harmful. As is nuclear radiation for example.

But why should we compare a natural process like aging, with smoking?

Because she never had cancer causing mutation, or her DNA repair system was very superior. Mind, that there is not even one study discovering good lung mutations in smokers and their lungs functioning better than before smoking.
We should also add viruses as cause of many deleterious mutations in humans, damage to DNA, during our lifetime.

 

[Tomenable]

Another killer is exposure to asbestos. There's lots of litigation seeking damages for people who developed cancer after working with roofing materials, insulation, etc.

Yes. And most of these plaintiffs are men. Because, sadly, there is no gender parity of 50:50 in asbestos-related jobs. Women are so discriminated against. And a woman working at a nursery even gets paid less (!) than a man working with asbestos.

Can you imagine? What a gross injustice.

So, for me the moral of the story is just don't do it at all no matter what.

The only thing I ever smoked was a Shisha Pipe when I was on a trip to Tunisia.

 

[MarkoZ]

Comparison of IQ scores of persons from across the autism spectrum and unaffected people and their relation to mutational load:

We examined the incidence and targets of DN LGD mutations for children with lower and higher IQs. Affected children with higher IQs have a greater incidence of LGD mutations than unaffected siblings, but a lower incidence than affected females or males with lower IQ. Moreover, there are few recurrently hit genes among the DN LGD targets of affected males with higher IQ, and little overlap with the DN LGD targets of affected males with lower IQ or females. LGD targets in higher IQ males are not enriched for the FMRP-associated genes. These observations suggest a different distribution of genetic mechanisms causing ASD in higher IQ males.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4611648/

So it seems like high IQ individuals do tend to have more de novo mutations than people of average intelligence, but less than individuals with significantly lower IQ scores. An interesting case of this dynamic would be the Ashkenazic Jews, who have a disproportionate number of brilliant individuals among them but also a comparatively high incidence of mental retardation.

 

[Tomenable]

I once asked an oncologist this question about why some people can smoke for decades before getting cancer if they get it at all while some people are dead at forty. He said it depends how many protective snps were part of their genetic code and whether or not and how early there was damage to those protective snps.

^ Probably these "bonfire adaptation" SNPs that we inherited from the Neanderthals.

For example rs901033.

So in the end we got something useful from them! Interracial intermarriage isn't so bad.

 

[LeBrok]

Comparison of IQ scores of persons from across the autism spectrum and unaffected people and their relation to mutational load:

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MarkoZ, please add source or name of author to your quote unless it was your creation.

 

[Angela]

What on earth are you talking about? Litigators are the lawyers. Nowadays there's still a bit of a skew toward men, but there's a lot of women litigators, I assure you. The people affected are the plaintiffs.

You might want to consider that nowadays more women smoke than men, just as many female children as male children sit in asbestos insulated classrooms, just as many women as men are exposed to radiation, electro-magnetic fields, impure water, and on and on. So far as I know men don't get breast cancer at the level of women, or ovarian cancer at all either.

You know what, no, I'm not going to continue with this.

I find any "competition" as to who suffers the most incidences of cancer because of exposure to environmental toxins, men or women, disgusting, frankly.

People suffering is people suffering. That's all I see, not their gender, or their race or ethnic group, for that matter.

I'm out. This is becoming pointless. Some people don't know when they've lost or how to withdraw graciously.

 

[Tomenable]

So far as I know men don't get breast cancer at the level of women, or ovarian cancer at all either.

 

[Tomenable]

So it seems like high IQ individuals do tend to have more de novo mutations than people of average intelligence

So I have good news (yay!) for you - de novo mutations are on the decline, "fitness" is increasing: :grin:

http://bioinfo.ut.ee/web/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/jc_lauris_2013a.pdf

https://www.gwern.net/docs/algernon/2012-woodley.pdf

Smash the patriarchy!:

However, if you have enough even mildly deleterious mutations flooding into the societal gene pool because a good number of powerful old men are hogging all the nubile young women, and then the children of those unions are allowed to reach reproductive age because of the father's power and the advantages he can provide, the effect on society isn't very good. Add to that the fact that in societies with this kind of elite superstructure you have a lot of intermarriage an inbreeding, it's not a good situation.

It was a byword in Europe that the children of the aristocracy were more "delicate". Well, now we know some of the reasons why. No wonder some of these aristocratic trees show evidence of some hanky-panky. Some of these old ***** either couldn't procreate at all, or the children were sickly, and in a pre-modern society, died. If your status depends on providing a healthy male heir, I can see why some women turned elsewhere.

So you should tell these old fart American cis white R1b patriarchs to stop searching for nubile young women in Eastern Europe. We don't want your horse-riding Bell-Beaker patriarchs with Gedrosian (or was that Geriatric?) admixture here:

 

[davef]

Not placing any blame on whoever put this article up; just that as a child born to a 38 year old father and 30 year old mother, reading this article has made me very very anxious.

I was hyperactive as a kid and teen, but with meds my grades and number of intellectual achievements skyrocketed. I'm also very healthy physically. I wonder if my hyperactivity was caused by a mutation due to advanced paternal age.

I bragged a bit, but I wanted to show that I turned out great in spite of my dad being 38 when I was born.

Hopefully I'm not destined for a screwy future down the road as a result of the advanced paternal age at birth.

 

[Maciamo]

"One of the earliest theoretical studies of the distribution of fitness effects was done by Motoo Kimura, an influential theoretical population geneticist. His neutral theory of molecular evolution proposes that most novel mutations will be highly deleterious, with a small fraction being neutral.^[61][62] Hiroshi Akashi more recently proposed a bimodalmodel for the DFE, with modes centered around highly deleterious and neutral mutations.^[63] Both theories agree that ...advantageous mutations are rare, which has been supported by experimental results."

Is it clear now or do I also have to explain that MOST means OVER 50%?

Sorry, but it is simply not possible than over 50% of de novo mutations are highly deleterious. As you mentioned above, on average, humans acquire ~74 de novo single nucleotide variants (SNVs) per genome per generation. That would mean that every individual has over 37 highly deleterious mutations, in addition to those inherited from each parent. To keep it simple, let's say even 35 highly deleterious mutations, which would be an underestimation (under 50%) according to what Kimura-san claims. A person would therefore be born with 35 de novo highly deleterious mutations but inherited about 35 highly deleterious mutations from his/her parents (half of each parent's 35 mutations but x2 as they are 2 parents). By that logic, each generation would ineluctably add 35 highly deleterious mutations to the germ line. It quickly rises to the thousands of highly deleterious mutations per individual. Mildly deleterious mutation can cause poor vision, allergies, low intelligence, frequent colds, and so on. Highly deleterious mutations are things that can cause foetuses to self-abort to people to be born with severe genetic conditions like cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease, which lead to deaths at a relatively young age. It just doesn't make any sense to say that all people are born with thousands of highly deleterious mutations, including at least 35 de novo ones. That would be the end of the species.

Anyway, anyone who has studied biology should know that statistically most mutations are synonymous because of the high redundancy in the way amino acids are encoded by DNA (or actually RNA during translation). To illustrate for non biologists, here is a table of RNA translation to amino acids. This is the way our genome encodes proteins. Each amino acid is encoded by a three genetic bases (A, C, G or T in DNA, which become U, G, C or A after transcription to RNA). For example, if you want to produce Methionine, the amino acid that signal the beginning any protein sequence, you will need the RNA sequence AUG. If a mutation occurs in any of these three 'letters', it won't produce Methionine by another amino acid (e.g. Isoleucine if the final G becomes an A), and the protein won't be made. This would be an example of deleterious mutation, as the body cannot produce one type of protein. In most cases this is bad enough to guarantee the non-viability of the foetus.

However, as you can see on the table below, other amino acids can be encoded by any of 2, 3, 4 or even 6 different sequences in the case of Leucine. So if a mutation occurs in a CUA sequence for Leucine, chances are that the resulting protein will still be Leucine. Change the C into a U or an A and you still get Leucine. Change the final A into a C, G or U, and you still get Leucine. A mutation in the central U would result in a different amino acid. But even so, a mutation from U to C would give Proline, which is another hydrophobic amino acid with similar properties that is unlikely to cause major disruptions to the protein structure. So the only cases in which a mutation would be highly deleterious here is if the CUA sequences becomes CCA (Glycine) or CGA (Arginine), as they would turn a hydrophobic amino acid into a hydrophilic or a positively charged one. In this case, out of 9 possible mutations (3 for each letter), 7 are neutral and only 2 are deleterious. Considering that amino acids with similar properties (e.g. hydrophobic) have similar sequences, the chances of mutations changing those properties are not that high.

Any change that tempers with an initial Methionine or results in a stop codon (UAA, UGA or UAG) would be particularly deleterious. You can see here a few examples of highly deleterious mutations.

I haven't calculated all the possibilities of mutations for each amino acid, nor applied those results to the percentage of each sequence present in the human genome. That is the kind of humongous calculation that should be left to computers. But at first sight it looks like over half of mutations would be silent. More than mutations, it is deletions and insertions that tend to cause major problems, as they cause frameshift mutations, potentially altering whole genes.

Furthermore, proteins are only encoded by our exome (coding DNA), which represents a mere 1% of the total genome. Any mutation that occurs in the 99% of non-coding DNA would in all likelihood have no effect whatsoever on fitness or phenotype. That is what we observe in Y-DNA mutations. Over 15,000 Y-DNA mutations have been identified at present, but only a tiny minority of them seem to have been selected by evolution because they benefited the carriers.

 

[Maciamo]

Not placing any blame on whoever put this article up; just that as a child born to a 38 year old father and 30 year old mother, reading this article has made me very very anxious.

I was hyperactive as a kid and teen, but with meds my grades and number of intellectual achievements skyrocketed. I'm also very healthy physically. I wonder if my hyperactivity was caused by a mutation due to advanced paternal age.

I bragged a bit, but I wanted to show that I turned out great in spite of my dad being 38 when I was born.

Hopefully I'm not destined for a screwy future down the road as a result of the advanced paternal age at birth.

I wouldn't worry too much about your parents' age at the time of your conception. The average mother's age at the time of their first child's birth ranges between 28 and 30 years old in most developed countries - the highest being Australia, the UK and Switzerland. In families that have 3 or 4 kids (more is becoming rare) the last child would be born when the mother is about 36 years old. For fathers, add 2 or 3 years in average. So most children born in developed countries today have parents aged between 28 and 40 years old, and the average is actually a bit higher among higher social classes.

Rupert Murdoch's last two children were born when he was 70 and 72 years old. That would be more worrying.