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Do Fathers Who Exercise Have Smarter Babies?
- Willson50 9y ago.
- isakkeyten 9y agoAre you implying only rich people have time to exercise?
- wufufufu 9y agoThe study described (albeit in mice) eliminates that confounding variable.
- mi100hael 9y agoMaybe the researchers only allowed the rich mice to move to the "fun house" cage
- iskander 9y agoIt's worth reading the article, it's about an interesting study in lab mice.
- mathgeek 9y agoActual title: "Do Fathers Who Exercise Have Smarter Babies?" To further quote the article: “My personal opinion is that exercise is probably much more important” than mental stimulation for altering brains and gene expression and potentially even the aptitudes of one’s offspring, Dr. Fischer says. If the author of the article specifically phrased it as a question, let's not jump to making a definitive statement by changing the title.
- drb91 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- gk1 9y agoI used the title from the NY Times homepage, which at the time of submission had the more definitive version of the title.
- sctb 9y agoWe'll update the headline to the current title, then, which is also in the URL.
- yakuza00000 9y agoSo wouldn't the study just need to compare athelete's children with a rocket scientist's children?
- gsteinb88 9y agoMost of the rocket scientists I know also exercise
- Someone1234 9y agoI know a handful at Boeing (inc. family) and they're pretty representative of the American male population for their ages (meaning some healthy, some less healthy, with more in the latter than the former categories). By the way, I'm talking literal rocket engineers in the sense that they work on ICBMs and counter systems as contractors for the US Government.
- wgjordan 9y ago> If the author of the article specifically phrased it as a question [...] Small but important correction: authors typically don't get to specifically phrase the title of their article, that is usually controlled by the editor (or some clickbait-optimizing a/b testing algorithm to maximize revenue).
- fortythirteen 9y agoCorrelation implied as causation. Here is another correlation into causation article linking cardiovascular fitness to IQ[0] Another way to look at it can be from the per-capita relation of economic class to fitness[1]. It is entirely possible that, because people higher up the economic ladder are more likely to be fit, and because they are more likely to receive better prenatal care, generally have better nutrition, and give their children more educational opportunities, that the actual cause may be economic status. [0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/quilted-science/200912/cardiovascular-fitness-is-linked-intelligence https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/quilted-science/2009... [1] https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/06/10/the-correlation-of-fitness-with-class-and-education/ https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/06/10/the-correla...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wkrause 9y agoThis article is about a study done on mice. Having not read the underlying study, and it not being my field, I can't speak to how well the article articulates the study's findings, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss it with the "correlation does not imply causation" argument.
- historylurker 9y ago>t's fair to dismiss it with the "correlation does not imply causation" argument. In almost every thread for an article of this sort, someone pops in to say "correlation isn't causation", as if people doing research don't understand this concept.
- fortythirteen 9y ago> on mice And the article automatically relates it to humans, when absolutely no study has been done. Correlation to causation.
- ksk 9y ago
- zerostar07 9y ago" mice whose fathers grew in environmentally enriched cage have better LTP". That's basically what the study says, and they attribute it to epigenetic effects through some miRNA. The effect lasted for 1 generation. How can someone take that, put an image of a human baby and start talking about "smart babies" and "fathers who exercise" is beyond me.
- l5870uoo9y 9y agoThe title makes it sound like a dull statistical correlation was found in some sociology report, but they did some actual measuring. From the report summary: > We show that this effect is mediated through sperm RNA and especially miRs 212/132. In conclusion, our study reports intergenerational inheritance of an acquired cognitive benefit and points to specific miRs as candidates mechanistically involved in this type of transmission. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(18)30404-2?sf186956567=1 https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(18)304...
- nostrademons 9y agoIn mice, though. It's an open question to what extent rodent results apply to humans. This result should open doors to future research, but by itself should be taken with the appropriate grain of salt.
- godelmachine 9y agoIt's a well known fact that mice and humans promdominantly share the same genome, so this research should be taken with more than grain of salt, methinks.
- jonlucc 9y ago> mice and humans promdominantly share the same genome And yet you're 70kg and a mouse is 20g. Plenty of diseases have been treated/cured in mice in ways that don't translate to the clinic, so I think the caution is warranted.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoIsn't that also true of me and corn?
- joombaga 9y ago~85% with mice, ~60% with bananas. I suspect corn is more like a banana than a mouse.
- xstartup 9y agoMost people don't exercise because no one is paying them to exercise. If a government wants healthy people, they should pay up $100 per hour to just exercise. I think this is the conspiracy of rich people to make poor people fat so that they get sick and rich people sell medicines, fast food, and garcinia combogia, gym membership (which is just another name for drugs like cocaine, meth etc.... but licensed and regulated)
- ct0 9y agoThere are plenty of fat rich people.
- xstartup 9y agoYes, but they are fat by choice not due to lack of choice.
- andai 9y agoMost people don't exercise because they can't be bothered to. They think that they need energy before they can exercise, when it works exactly the other way around.
- wanderr 9y agoMaybe for some people. Exercise doesn't give me energy. I do it anyway and find ways to make it enjoyable, but if I'm tired it's a slog.
- tankerdude 9y agoSo that would imply that people who actually must exercise for their job (construction workers) would have smarter children, on average? And how would that be measured if the child gets stuck in a poorly performing school and no real academic challenges?
- amelius 9y agoNot smarter in absolute sense, just smarter than they would be without exercise, I suppose.
- Jagat 9y agoMaybe, unless there's a correlation (or inverse correlation) between smartness and those who must exercise for their job (vs those who don't). Makes me think about the old question about those who have a higher paying mostly mental desk job. Is it because they're smarter (say through some genetic predisposition), or is it because of all the socioeconomic situations that led them to that job? (Yes there are exceptions, like you, the one who's about to quote an anecdote. I'm talking about the majority)
- JohnJamesRambo 9y agoExercise for work and exercise done for play may have different outcomes though. I remember reading George Sheehan’s Running and Being and he says dockworkers etc don’t seem to get the same health benefits from their work exercise. There’s something unique about it being for play.
- gamblor956 9y agoImportantly, mice are exercised by being forced to run in wheels, i.e., cardio. There have been studios in humans showing that cardio exercise has mental benefits, presumably in part due to increased blood flow to the brain. And anecdotally, among knowledge workers like lawyers and doctors, cardio exercise is disproportionately over-represented compared to average populations.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- amelius 9y agoMakes me wonder how sperm motility correlates with offspring IQ. And could an improved selection for higher sperm motility (e.g. by giving sperm some extra challenge before they reach the ovum), lead to higher IQ or some other beneficial trait?
- creaghpatr 9y agoInteresting thought, could also lead to lower fertility is the other side of the coin there.
- thankthunk 9y agoI wish HN would ban all betteridge's style headlines. How much did newton or einstein's father exercise? Were they body builders?
- ksk 9y ago>How much did newton or einstein's father exercise? Were they body builders? Why would that matter? Are they the only smart people? And why are you conflating exercising with body building?
- Jagat 9y agoDid anyone else notice that there's been an increasing number of mildly successful research that hint towards Lamarckian evolution as being real sometimes? Has something changed (either ease or impetus) that's made it easy to do such research? Or does it have something to do with the fact that most people's conception of evolution is Lamarckian in nature? Whenever I ask someone to describe evolution, they describe it the way Lamarck thought it worked. And when I talk about natural selection, they say they need time to digest that.
- zerostar07 9y agoEpigenetics is a nascent field and it has become easier to get funding for such studies. That s my guess
- toasterlovin 9y agoThe way I conceptualize of it is that evolution is still almost entirely Darwinian, but that there's also a ton of other stuff that happens. Without wanting to get political, I think a good analogy would be human gender and sexuality. The statement that there are two human sexes, male and female, and that they seek each other out for the purpose of mating explains somewhere around 95% of what you see in humans. But human sexuality is complicated and to get to an explanation that encompasses 100% of what you observe requires vastly expanding your model of what's going on. So what's going on now with evolution is that we are discovering all the little ways in which evolution is complicated.
- CryoLogic 9y agoBut thats how all economic models work. The reliability of the model depends on how many standard deviations you go out to the left or right from the center. So I don't think it's anything really new.
- whatshisface 9y agoA slight mismatch in your analogy is that G&S studies doesn't explain anything, they just categorize it. They aren't proposing any mechanisms.
- shbm 9y agoHow do you even define smart? Is it quantified by the IQ tests? Does smartness include the factor of social skills(EQ) and how someone may present himself or herself in a social situations. How do you decide what's smart and what's not smart?
- lostmsu 9y agoWhy do social skills have any preferred treatment over any other skills? I'd say smart is best measured by IQ.
- Kevin_S 9y agoThey should both be important is his point. And measurements for IQ (and EQ frankly) aren't very reliable. His point seems to be that "smart" is not really measurable as we don't include EQ and our measurements of IQ are poor as well.
- shbm 9y agoWhat do you exactly measure by comparing IQs? A person who does not do well on math test can become much more "successful" than a person who does. How does IQ really correlate with success?
- lostmsu 9y agoIt correlates a lot, actually. It even may be one of the best predictors (if not the best, I dunno honestly).
- Jolter 9y ago"They also hope in future animal studies to tease out the individual effects of running from those of playing with toys and being otherwise mentally engaged, he says." How can they not have done this yet still draw the conclusion that the exercise was the important factor? I wouldn't be surprised if the "sedentary" individuals would have been diagnosed with depression, had they beem humans. What would make an interesting study is epigenetic effects of depression on human patients.
- m3kw9 9y agoSmarter in which area and would be be at expense of other traits?
- chiefalchemist 9y agoThe lack of exercise is a historical abnormality. In that context, which feels more accurate, the title should be: "Do fathers who don't exercise have less intelligent children?"
- LinuxBender 9y agoCould a correlation factor be: Fathers that exercise have more active children? Meaning, less to do with sperm and more to do with the development of and interaction with the infant? If I am a sloth, my child is likely sitting in a cradle watching TV with me.
- zeofig 9y agoDo smarter babies know how to make daddy hit the gym??
- trumped 9y agoThey should also test fathers/kids who put vinegar on their pizza...