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posted by janrinok on Thursday June 25 2015, @02:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the chip-off-the-old-block dept.

Bioethicist Dr. Kevin Smith has recommended that the sperm of 18-year-old males be frozen and stored with the UK National Health Service (NHS) to prevent the effects of genetic damage being passed to offspring:

Men are having children later - the average age of fatherhood in England and Wales has increased from 31 in the early 1990s to 33 now. But while it remains possible to have children well into old age, there are consequences. Making his case in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Dr Smith said even small increases in the risk of disease could have a big effect when scaled up across a whole nation.

His solution is sperm banking for everyone on the NHS so that in older age men can turn to the sperm from their younger selves. He said there was no fixed age when someone could become an "older dad" but that people in their 40s might want to return [to] the sperm bank freezer. He said sperm should be banked ideally around the age of 18. It costs £150-200 per year to keep sperm privately, although an NHS equivalent should be cheaper to run.

From the abstract:

Modern genetic sequencing studies have confirmed that the sperm of older men contain a greater number of de novo germline mutations than the sperm of younger men. Although most of these mutations are neutral or of minimal phenotypic impact, a minority of them present a risk to the health of future children. If demographic trends towards later fatherhood continue, this will likely lead to a more children suffering from genetic disorders. A trend of later fatherhood will accelerate the accumulation of paternal-origin de novo mutations in the gene pool, gradually reducing human fitness in the long term. These risks suggest that paternal age is of ethical importance. Children affected by de novo mutations arising from delayed fatherhood can be said to be harmed, in the sense of 'impersonal' harm or 'non-comparative' harm. Various strategies are open at societal and individual levels towards reducing deleterious paternal age effects. Options include health education to promote earlier fatherhood, incentives for young sperm donors and state-supported universal sperm banking. The latter approach would likely be of the greatest benefit and could in principle be implemented immediately. More futuristically, human germline genetic modification offers the potential to repair heritable mutational damage.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Australian Court Rules That Woman Can Use Donor Sperm for IVF Without Estranged Husband's Consent 56 comments

Woman can use donor sperm in IVF without estranged husband's consent, court rules

A Victorian woman will not need her estranged husband's permission to undergo IVF using donor sperm following a ruling by the federal court in Melbourne. The court heard that the woman, who cannot be named, has been separated and living apart from her husband since late 2017. The woman wanted to try to conceive through IVF using donor sperm, but was told by a Melbourne reproductive clinic that under Victoria's Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act she first needed her husband's consent.

The matter was urgent because the woman is 45 and patients are generally only able to use their own eggs in an IVF procedure when they are younger than 46. The woman said she recently underwent a procedure to collect her eggs and freeze them for later use after she was divorced, but was told the prospect of a successful pregnancy using frozen eggs was lower than IVF using fresh eggs. The clinic told her that with her husband's consent, she could begin a round of treatment later in September.

[...] Under the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act, there is a guiding principle that "the welfare and interests of persons born or to be born as a result of treatment procedures are paramount". But the court heard that this should not justify requiring the consent of a former partner who, without such consent, would have no responsibility for the child anyway.

Federal court Justice John Griffiths ordered that the woman could undergo IVF without consent and that the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act discriminated against her on the basis of her marital status. He declared that part of the law "invalid and inoperable". In his judgment published on Friday, Griffiths said nothing in his ruling was intended to harm the reputation of the woman's estranged husband and that the decision would not directly affect his legal rights, and that he would not be imputed with any parental rights, obligations or responsibilities.

See also: Parents likely to block girlfriend's attempt to access sperm from dead son (2016)

Related: Bioethicist Recommends Freezing Sperm to Lessen Genetic Risks
Divorced Couple Fighting in Court over Frozen Embryos
Medical Ethics of Multiples, Surrogacy, and Abortion
Deceased Dutch Fertility Clinic Doctor's Belongings to be DNA Tested
Japanese Man Granted Paternity Rights to 13 Children Born to Surrogate Mothers


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by C R Johnson on Thursday June 25 2015, @02:56PM

    by C R Johnson (5368) on Thursday June 25 2015, @02:56PM (#200989)

    It costs $$$ to keep it frozen and costs $$$$ to actually use it to make a child.

    Are they suggesting that all women use chemical birth control (not so good for the environment by the way) and that men never have sex?

    And is the government then in charge of giving you permission to reproduce now?

    Totalitarianism is a much bigger risk to health then older men having kids.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:08PM

      by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:08PM (#200998) Journal

      Wow. How did you get from "One Doctor thinks that offering men sperm-freezing advice & service would be beneficial to nation's long-term collective health" to "Totalitarian government seizes control of all citizens' reproductive systems"? Please, show your working.

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by M. Baranczak on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:59PM

        by M. Baranczak (1673) on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:59PM (#201036)
        Because Obamacare!!!
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:08PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:08PM (#201042)

        In all fairness, this is in the UK which pretty much is a totalitarian hell-hole

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:28PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:28PM (#201056)

          National sperm donation would have the added "benefit" of making DNA sampling national as well. Law enforcement will be delighted, because they will never lack the evidence to convict.

          Here's my dystopian plot: gov.uk promises to collect sperm, collects DNA samples, selectively discards sperm of undesirables (fat Tory bastards, most of northern England) and replaces it with sperm from other sources (insert your favorite co-conspirators here-Jews, Masons, Illuminati, immigrants, socialists, bankers, socialist Muslim Jew bankers, etc) to raise a new English nation of children born from technocratic cuckoldry.

          In the end, whatever Daily-Mail-worthy dystopian novel emerges from this is always already a cuckold fantasy, just with pleasureless scientists and faceless politicians in place of the big black cock.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:16PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:16PM (#201049)

        Not even a real doctor, a PhD.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:52PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:52PM (#201152)

          Ph.D.'s ARE the real doctors. It is the physicians that squatted on the title in order to try to make themselves feel important.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:12PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:12PM (#201168)

            Medici doctores get something like twelve years of intense, difficult training beyond the undergraduate degree. A Philosophiae doctor sips latte for five years if he's smart, or more if he's dumb, until they finally just give him a degree for learning how to baffle people with bullshit.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @02:06PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @02:06PM (#201504)

              The reason they needed to steal the "doctor" mantle is to give themselves an aura of credibility. Physicians spew more bullshit than even your typical humanities Ph.D. "THESE HANDS HAVE BEEN TOUCHED BY GOD!" The Philosophiae doctor at least has learned something in his specialty; the Medici doctor has no fucking clue how the body works. They are still only excising evil humors, it is just that the potions and concoctions they prescribe now have scientific sounding names. The mere fact you have a very active billion dollar "alternative medicine" industry shows that the Medici doctor remedies are functioning not much above the noise.

      • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday June 25 2015, @08:00PM

        by edIII (791) on Thursday June 25 2015, @08:00PM (#201203)

        The circle is finally complete.

        First half of my life the government was only interested in fucking me up the ass. Now in the second half, they want to start controlling the testicles as well with a literal reach-around :) Will they at least warm their hands, and cup the balls?

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:29PM (#201015)

      Are they suggesting that all women use chemical birth control (not so good for the environment by the way) and that men never have sex?

      They can avoid women having to use birth control if the men are castrated after providing the sperm. So at least the environmental aspect could easily be solved.

      And it doesn't need to lead to the government deciding if you are allowed to reproduce. Instead, the task of storing the sperm and providing it back if you want a child is given to a company of your choosing, and the right to have children is then coupled to the ability to pay for it. However some totalitarianism would still be needed to enforce mandatory castration at the age of 19. If you want children, you either have to reproduce before that, or have the money to freeze your sperms for later. As a side effect poor people have less children simply because they cannot afford freezing their sperm. Evasion of castration would be considered a crime, for which you would get into prison if found out (and of course a forced castration without previous opportunity to save your sperm). Probably you'd get a certification of castration, and if you can't show that document (or the police believes it to be forged, for whatever undisclosed reason), they can take you to a mandatory fertility test.

      Indeed, that might give a nice dystopian novel.

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:34PM

        by kaszz (4211) on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:34PM (#201019) Journal

        I think you meant sterilization not castration? Sterilization makes men unable to reproduce, castration makes any sex uninterested in any sex at all.

        • (Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:38PM

          by bob_super (1357) on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:38PM (#201023)

          Must have been, because testing if a 20 year-old has been castrated would make for quite a short novel...

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:59PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:59PM (#201037)

          Probably. English is not my first language, and those are not exactly the type of words you learn in school. ;-)

        • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:37PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:37PM (#201062)
          Depends on who's in charge of the dystopia. What if it's radical "smash the rape culture patriarchy" feminists?
    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:02PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:02PM (#201040) Journal

      sex != reproduction

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @02:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @02:59PM (#200992)

    Sounds like "older dads" increase the genetic diversity of a population. There is a fitness cost but a genetically diverse population has a greater chance of adapting to a crisis.

    • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:18PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:18PM (#201005) Journal

      WTF? Two brothers grow up together. One marries early, and raises a family, and boots his youngest child out of the house to fend for himself before he is 40 years old.

      The other guy doesn't have any kids until he is over 40, then he has the same number of children that his brother had decades ago.

      How in the FOCK did that other guy increase "genetic diversity?"

      Are you one of those SJW's who has fallen in love with that term "diversity", and you're just looking for some place to use the word? Really, man, WTF?

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:25PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:25PM (#201012)

        Social justice warriors? What?! The older guy decreased genetic diversity because the DNA in his sperm is more mutated than that of his younger brother. Did you even read the summary?

        • (Score: 2) by morgauxo on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:11PM

          by morgauxo (2082) on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:11PM (#201045)

          I'm not entirely convinced he CAN read. No idea how he managed to type a reply.

        • (Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:13PM

          by M. Baranczak (1673) on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:13PM (#201047)

          older guy decreased genetic diversity because the DNA in his sperm is more mutated

          s/decreased/increased/

    • (Score: 2) by morgauxo on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:15PM

      by morgauxo (2082) on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:15PM (#201048)

      I think I remember reading an article that was linked to either here or on that other site some time ago that spoke about that. It was saying that in the past children were fathered more by old men who were the tribal leaders with many wives. It said that this helped us evolve a bit due to the increased mutations of their germline.

      That kind of makes me wonder if the author of that article or the paper he was quoting happened to be an old man who would like his own harem. Then again.. in this society what are the odds of a scientist being the alpha. More likely the 'alphas' would be anti-science.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by kaszz on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:13PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:13PM (#201001) Journal

    Options include health education to promote earlier fatherhood

    Well considering that many people need a very long education before getting a shot at a decent salary. And then perhaps need a few years to gain experience. Earlier fatherhood is economically and time wise incompatible. To put it blunt, if government wants earlier or more children then PAY or suffer the current outcome. Subsidize living costs and financial stability as well as decent housing. Then people might perhaps change life planning (there ain't no good return policy for children).

    There will not be any change until there's a real good crisis!

    I suggest a new program. Subsidize people that take education and success seriously to balance the demographics. It tend to be those exact people that get fewer children.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:10PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:10PM (#201043)

      It's not costs but culture. Germany (high employment) and Greece (no employment) have low birthrates, while France (declining employment) remains healthy. As little as anyone wants to admit it, economics are not behind the birthrate crisis in Europe. It's even more obvious when you compare subpopulations within countries, although if you do so you'll be branded a racist. There's simply a cultural difference that pushed many Europeans to avoid having children at an early age (which lessens the chance of it ever happening).

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:59PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:59PM (#201070)

        Birthrate crisis? There are around 7 billion people. Fewer people is a good thing.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:53PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:53PM (#201116)

          Until you realize how many of them are from non-genetically diverse stock (Whatever the predominant Indian race is, as well as the Han chinese.) and having the collective diversity of Western countries NOT breeding could actually lead to LESS overall genetic diversity over time.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Friday June 26 2015, @01:21AM

          by kaszz (4211) on Friday June 26 2015, @01:21AM (#201330) Journal

          Start to ask where and what education level those children will get and the picture is not as simple as fewer is better.

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 26 2015, @01:23AM

        by kaszz (4211) on Friday June 26 2015, @01:23AM (#201331) Journal

        It's not economics vs culture. Both play a part. Otoh in some cultures, women is essentially captive for breeding purposes. Give them education and financial independence and it may change demographics.

    • (Score: 2) by physicsmajor on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:27PM

      by physicsmajor (1471) on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:27PM (#201055)

      You're entirely correct. And yet those same people tend to be the ones which are, politically, unlikely to ever get or have any eligibility for subsidies.

      Instead, we subsidize and incentivize the opposite. Single mothers get more money in aggregate, from all possible government sources, if they make zero dollars than if they make more. And it gets worse the more they make. The whole financial picture does not start to tick upwards until they make more than $70k. So there is perverse incentive at play; it's better to do no work at all, because you get punished if you try. Oh, and for each additional child more subsidies are available.

      Do these people need assistance? Yes, absolutely! But it should be designed such that every dollar they manage to earn improves their total financial picture, so rising out of the regrettable situation is incentivized.

      Subsidies and their direct or indirect effects via incentivization desperately need to be overhauled.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:04PM (#201076)

      > Well considering that many people need a very long education before getting a shot at a decent salary.

      Very true, but that is a product of a diseased society. In a healthy one, the increase of productivity would have led to a decrease in time spent at work, a family would afford to have a baby with basically no repercussion.

      Not to mention the places where education is not related to work, but it's a way to keep the youth busy, away from the family, and indoctrinated.

  • (Score: 2) by penguinoid on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:54PM

    by penguinoid (5331) on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:54PM (#201033)

    Modern genetic sequencing studies have confirmed that the sperm of older men contain a greater number of de novo germline mutations than the sperm of younger men.

    Cue people suggesting that the practice will slow down our evolution, as if we won't be doing millions and billions of years worth of evolution by next century using genetic engineering.

    --
    RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:57PM (#201034)

    The abstract is full of weasel words: "a greater number", "most of these mutations", "minimal phenotypic impact", "a minority of them present a risk", "later fatherhood", "reducing human fitness", "delayed fatherhood", "reducing deleterious paternal age effects", "earlier fatherhood", "young sperm donors"

    Does TFA attach any numbers to these claims? If not, we can be sure they do not actually understand the impact of aging on sperm and human fitness (how would you even measure such a thing?).

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:16PM (#201050)

    This kind of matches up with something that's been in my head for a while.

    1. Males (allegedly) hit their sexual peak around 15, females in their thirties. (Can confirm the thing about women in thirties. Oh yeah.)

    2. Women's bodies are best at childbearing in the late teens, and having a kid at that age has long-term health benefits (certain cancers less likely) not to mention preparing the body for later pregnancies. However, increasingly women don't want have kids until later in life. More and more they are leaving it too late or relying on traumatic IVF in their forties or something when pregnancy is very difficult.

    3. Teen kids experimenting together with sex often get pregnant because teenagers are irresponsible, then end up screwing up their lives.

    4. Also because teenagers are paired up with other, equally ignorant teenagers, the teenager sex is often terrible because they have to learn everything from scratch without an experienced partner. Girls think their role is to turn up and look hot and nothing else, boys think that 3 minutes of vigorous humping will to satisfy her.

    5. Men are often attracted to youthful partners, particularly during his various regular mid-life-crisis-events.

    6. Young women are often attracted to wealth, which is usually held by older men.

    7. Modern society has barriers between generations. People don't trust/respect/care for people twenty years younger or older unless they are family (and even then not always) and old people often have no friends, because all their friends are the same age but they got old and died. So more bridges between generations are needed.

    These things cause all sorts of society problems. Here's an idea. So imagine if society was different so that the following was considered normal.

    In their late teenage, young people are expected / accepted to have a not too long and not too serious relationship with someone in thirties or older. Weird? Maybe, but consider the logic. The horny as hell teen boys would be paired up with horny as hell MILFY cougars who will appreciate teenager stamina & enthusiasm. The not so libidinous teenage girls could benefit from more experienced lovers a few decades older to show them (metaphorical) the ropes and raise their sexual expectations. These guys will be very happy to have a sexy-looking younger girlfriend.
    Because the teenagers are paired with theoretically more wise and responsible elders, accidental pregnancies & STD transmissions would be less likely. If a teen girl does get pregnant it's not considered a great disaster, but rather an opportunity to prepare her body for later pregnancies when she will want a family and also to provide a baby (via adoption) for someone who waited too long or cannot conceive. Also she has the support of an older, wealthier, wiser partner during the pregnancy and not a jobless idiot teenage boy. Maybe this "practise pregnancy" could even become expected thing, although (to go back on topic) ideally she would want younger man's sperm for this and it's a very big thing to expect.

    In early twenties this "introduction relationship" naturally and in a friendly way dissolves, and the young people would usually settle down and look for a partner of their own age to spend their life with. When they reach their "mentoring" age they can choose to temporarily open up their long term relationship to have an on-the-side relationship or a few years with someone younger of a matching libido, which might help refresh things a bit with their long-term partner. If this was culturally normal there wouldn't be jealousy, unless one partner takes obviously too much advantage of this opportunity for another relationship. Throughout their life, everyone has benefit of a close older ex-lover for support and advice, and a close younger ex-lover to be there when you are old and lonely.

    Yeah it sounds very weird to us because it is outside our normal culture, but when you consider all the places that polygamy is acceptable, and how even in western countries it was not long ago acceptable for old men to take young brides is this really much more weird? In an age of safe sex would it truly be harmful for anyone?

    Maybe it makes a good setting for a science fiction story.

    Posted anonymous because someone will call me a pervert ;)

    • (Score: 2) by WillAdams on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:06PM

      by WillAdams (1424) on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:06PM (#201079)

      Robert A. Heinlein, is that you finishing up _Grumbles from the Grave_?

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:30PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:30PM (#201098)

        Or every ancient Greek novel. There's always a set of older characters who teach the young ones how to fuck.

      • (Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Friday June 26 2015, @12:31AM

        by M. Baranczak (1673) on Friday June 26 2015, @12:31AM (#201319)
        Actually, I was thinking of the last scene in "Doctor Strangelove".
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:01PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:01PM (#201125)

      Erm . . . and how exactly does one keep a stable population if each woman gives one birth for practice, and then has a normal number of children after being married ? I doubted you at first, but google confirmed that pregnancy and breastfeeding do have positive health effects for the mother, and yes, the younger the better. Mostly lower cancer risk.

      Raising the average number of children per mother from 2.5 to 3.5 would cause unacceptable global population growth. Yet as breastfeeding is essential for the mother's health (forbidding abortions of the practice pregnancy), it seems that the correct age to kill off unwanted children is around 3 to 5 years of age ? Just long enough to finish breastfeeding ?

      As few would voluntarily submit their 3 to 5 year old child for being killed; maybe we could at least get some entertainment out of it. Gladiator-style toddler deathmatches.

      • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:21PM

        by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:21PM (#201137) Journal

        Maybe the practise pregnancy babies could go live with the father and his wife, with the birth mother getting access. This would have added bonuses: women in their thirties who want bigger families need not waste so much career time on pregnancy. Couples who can't conceive or left it too long get a second chance at parenthood via the young girlfriend ( or boyfriend if the reproductive issues are on the man's side), the young birth mother gets to see how the mentor couple parent the child, giving them knowledge and experience for later. Also, of course, the kid grows up knowing both birth parents.

        The only real flaw I can see with op's arrangement is that as a thirty something with a young family, I have no time, money or energy for my smoking hot 18 year old girlfriend.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @10:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @10:26PM (#201257)

      So where do I sign up for this?

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by gnuman on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:12PM

    by gnuman (5013) on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:12PM (#201132)

    If demographic trends towards later fatherhood continue, this will likely lead to a more children suffering from genetic disorders. A trend of later fatherhood will accelerate the accumulation of paternal-origin de novo mutations in the gene pool, gradually reducing human fitness in the long term.

    This is obviously false hypothesis, yet it is repeated over and over and over again. And all you need is a thought experiment to prove it wrong.

    Consider father A that then fathers son B. Then B fathers C. C fathers D. And so on. Since birth to reproductions, mutations will "accumulate" in all these fathers' Y-chromosome of the sperm producing cells. Since there are thousands of generations, are these people saying that copies "magically snap back in time" to earlier form? They obviously cannot do that - mutations must either be corrected when recombining with X, or they propagate. Since likelihood of getting such propagation mutation is linear with time from "pristine sample", how does it matter how does it matter if it happens at age 50 of father A or age 15 of father F ?

    Therefore this hypothesis is utterly wrong. Older fathers cannot weaken the genepool of populations, any more than simple passage of time to consecutive generations.

    If that guy is so concerned about purity of genepool, then perhaps banning IVF and other medical reproductive therapies (including ovulation drugs), should be what he's advising instead.

    As for correlation of things like autism to age, that's not causation. There is correlation between industrialization and asthma, but it's also not the cause of it either. We all know that today. As for autism, who is more likely to run with their kid to the doctor because they have a runny nose? The teenage father or the well established 45 year old?

          http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/autism-enigma [www.cbc.ca]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @10:02PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @10:02PM (#201249)

      They also don't seem to think that long term freezing will do any damage to the sperm. I wonder what justification they have for that?

  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday June 26 2015, @03:44AM

    two of my direct ancestors met on the same wagon train as the donner party but they were clued into that the oregon trail would be a better idea than going skiing in tahoe without their iphone charges.

    After claiming a homestead in what later became lafayette, california they spent an entire week travelling to monterey to apply for visas. At the time alta california was a mexican province.

    The successfully homesteaded their land, i dont know their specific requirement but in general one had five years to improve a oatch of wilderness by building a house, barn and other outbuildings, clearing the land then raising crops as well as livestock.

    At the time they wed, he was seventeen and she fourteen.

    Facebook often shows me ads for older women who want to marry me. i actually went out with one once she was quite nice.

    What facebook doesnt advertise isbwomen who are syptill young enough to bear my child.

    I spend a lot of time these days dwelling on all the women ive known who would have been glad to do so had i not found some spectacular way to screw it up.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]