5 ms·

Why Fathers Really Matter

97 points by lambtron 14y ago

smoyer 14y ago
This article is clearly on the nature side of the "Nurture versus Nature" argument and clearly genetics can play a big part in how your child turns out. But why can't we just say "both" to the nature versus nurture argument? Who hasn't been either negatively or positively impacted by the role of their fathers once born?
- mtoddh 14y ago
  To me it seemed like the article was less about nature vs nurture and more about the author's resentment that men aren't held as accountable for their children's health as mothers are: From the article, Older mothers no longer need to shoulder all the blame: “It’s the aging man who damages the offspring."... The well-being of the children used to be the sole responsibility of their mothers. Now fathers have to be held accountable, too. Having twice endured the self-scrutiny and second-guessing that goes along with being pregnant, I wish them luck.
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    It's also a silly conclusion. The effect of paternal age on offspring is vastly smaller than that of maternal age.
    - Dn_Ab 14y ago
      From what is this based on? It is not congruent with literature I have read on the matter. For one, gametes from the aged father are vastly more likely to incorporate denovo (typically deleterious) mutations. PLoS Medicine: Contrasting Effects of Maternal and Paternal Age on Offspring Intelligence Evidence is accumulating that advanced paternal age may exhibit a wider range of effects on the health and development of the offspring than increased maternal age (which is largely confined to risk for Down syndrome). Advanced paternal age is a risk factor for childhood conditions such as cleft lip and palate; childhood cancers and congenital heart defects [1]; and neuropsychiatric conditions such as autism [4], schizophrenia [5,6], epilepsy [7], and bipolar disorder [8]. Advanced paternal age also appears to affect mortality, and an intriguing analysis of family history data from European nobility found that older age of fatherhood (greater than 45 years) is associated with a reduction of about two years in the life span of daughters [9]. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000042 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
      - yummyfajitas 14y ago
        This is based primarily on the fact that the risk of Down's Syndrome and pregnancy complications is easily observable, whereas the risk of various other things associated to paternal age are harder to see. For the most part, the bigger the risk, the easier it is to observe. However, if you have hard numbers (rather than a piece that is mainly speculative), I'd love to see them.
        Dn_Ab 14y ago
        Understand that I did not post that question for reasons of vanity. I really wanted to know what led you to that belief (I have not found much evidence supporting it) and am still interested in knowing, in order that I might update my beliefs if necessary. I at least cited something. I picked up the article I had read most recently. Speculative or not, it was published in a peer reviewed journal by those active in the area. I urge you to do your own research and come to your own conclusion. As these things are not known one can only give hypotheses on their causes. Statistics which are often not done well in the medical field are not necessarily stronger than reasoning from first principles. If you have access to any geneticist, autism researchers or biologist do ask them. And consider. De novo mutations are culprit for many rare diseases including those like autism (each particular case often to rare causes) with non-specific causes. In terms of the gametes which both parents provide, sperm cells unlike ova, have a vastly larger number of these errors with probability increasing with time. This is a stronger argument than something is hard to observe and does not assume that the researchers did not think of something fairly quite obvious. The reason for Down Syndrome and maternal age also has a solid biological hypothesis that is almost inverse (not new mutations but chromosomal damage, usually catastrophic -> miscarrying). I was actually interested in what made you come to hold this belief because it is not in line with much of what I have picked up in the literature. If you can give a solid counter reference, speculative or not I would be interested. A cursory search on my part did not find anything supporting your claim.
        yummyfajitas 14y ago
        First of all, I think my glib one-line response carried a lot more certainty than I should have expressed. My bad. The main reason I believe maternal age is a bigger issue is because of the absence of evidence about paternal age. It's pretty well established epidemiologically that maternal age is a problem, but there is far less evidence about paternal age. That suggests that whatever problems paternal age causes, they are harder to observe. The most common reason an effect is hard to observe is because it is small. That's the extent of it. It's more or less the same reason I take the media's latest "new study suggests XXX might cause cancer" stories with a grain of salt. I haven't looked into this deeply at all. If you have lots of info on it, you should probably not update your beliefs.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    The difference is that any Lamarckian epigenetic influence would still be passed on at conception, and is at any rate set throughout the father's entire lifetime. There's no actual period of time, like pregnancy, that presents itself as a particular opportunity for criticism.
    - azakai 14y ago
      Both sexes' lives before conception and pregnancy matter - in both cases, cumulative damage to reproductive cells is more likely the older they are. (Women in addition have pregnancy, during which there can be big affects on the embryo, for example if she binge-drinks.) The point of the article was that we knew little of the non-pregnancy effects before recent years. And while that information applies to both sexes, it is socially more significant for men, who previously were not considered relevant in this matter, but now are. Higher ages of conceiving babies in both sexes may be contributing to a rise in autism and so forth. But what is novel is that we already knew that was true for women, now the data shows it is true for men as well.
  - adaml_623 14y ago
    The author really seems to buy into the concept of a blame culture doesn't she. People don't seem to realise that there is a chance of 'bad' stuff happening and if they want the good stuff they need to take a risk. You might be able to minimise some risks but if you obsess over them you're going to go down the path of seeing only danger everywhere. Of course this blame culture develops and spreads through social networks where people talk behind the back of someone who doesn't have a perfect child and blames their genetics or parenting skills or lifestyle choices.
    - brc 14y ago
      The blame culture is a terrible problem. If nobody is responsible for anything because it's not their fault, and somebody else is to blame, how are people going to become self-reliant?
      - akldfgj 14y ago
        What does fault have to do with self-reliance? Fault is in the past, solving problems is in the future.
        brc 14y ago
        I'm assuming your question is genuine rather than rhetorical. If a person believes that their personal outcomes are largely or totally created by circumstances out of their control, they will have difficulties becoming self-reliant. Blaming other people and other things for personal failings and problems seldom leads to better outcomes.
  - antidoh 14y ago
    I took that undercurrent as slightly more firm than tongue in cheek. The overall description of the science and its implications were interesting enough to make the article worthwhile. Everyone has a bias, and a popular article is going to let that show through more than a scientific paper, to make it interesting. You may as well complain that comics are funny when they observe the human condition.
- johnernaut 14y ago
  That much is clearly clear.
- awakeasleep 14y ago
  There is something weird about how humans look to understand things in dualistic thought. We want to believe in Nature vs Nurture as if they are entirely separate, when the scientific details probably won't be so simple.
Claudus 14y ago
Supposedly: Children with older fathers and grandfathers 'live longer' (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152379 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152379) "Experts have known for some time that lifespan is linked to the length of structures known as telomeres that sit at the end of the chromosomes that house our genetic code, DNA. Generally, a shorter telomere length means a shorter life expectancy. ... However, scientists have discovered that in sperm, telomeres lengthen with age."
- Dn_Ab 14y ago
  Causal links cannot be drawn with that paper. This study was unique in showing that telomere length determination by paternal age was generationally additive. It was not designed to determine if older paternal age translates into longer lifespan.
JshWright 14y ago
It's an interesting article, but a horrible title... As if to say the impact fathers have after conception doesn't 'really' matter...
- philwelch 14y ago
  It's part of the casual misandry that permeates our culture.
  - winter_blue 14y ago
    I agree with you to an extent; fathers are often seen as incapable of raising children in American culture. However, do you know if there is any literature or articles/discussion on this? (In particular about how fathers are seen, and more broadly on the misandry.)
    - mtrimpe 14y ago
      A little tough to get a hold of and to read, but The Myth of Masculinity by Joseph Pleck [http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Masculinity-Joseph-Pleck/dp/0262660504 http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Masculinity-Joseph-Pleck/dp/0...] is by far the most thorough take on male masculinity I've ever read.
    - victorhn 14y ago
      Here is an excellent blog post: http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.h...
    - 001sky 14y ago
      Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil [1] --Way ahead of its time. _________ [1] "Supposing truth was a woman, what then..." Is the opening line. Not for the faint of heart, though.
  - s_baby 14y ago
    According to Warren Farrell NYTimes is systematic and deliberate in perpetuating misandry. This is coming from a man who was both a founding member in a major feminist organization(N.O.W) and a writer for the NYTimes. http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2003/0610farrell.html http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2003/0610f...
tokenadult 14y ago
"In the past decade or so, the study of epigenetics has become so popular it’s practically a fad." Well, that's the one statement in the article I can readily accept as true for purposes of discussion here. Much more debatable is the assertion further down, "Twentieth-century Darwinian genetics dismissed Lamarckism as laughable, but because of epigenetics, Lamarckism is staging a comeback," which includes a link to a low-quality source. Much better sources on epigenetics for our discussion here are "Epigenetics again: will it cause a revolution in evolution?" http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/epigenetics-again-will-it-cause-a-revolution-in-evolution/ http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/epigeneti... which is a follow-up to "Is 'epigenetics' a revolution in evolution?" http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/is-epigenetics-a-revolution-in-evolution/ http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/is-epigen... or "The Epigenetics Miracle?" http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/08/21/the-epigenetics-miracle/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/08/21/the-epigenetic... The scientifically careful study of gene regulation is NOT going to revive Lamarckian ideas, not at all. But speculation about this is probably in the popular literature again for years to come.
hsshah 14y ago
For a less biased still gentle introduction on epigenetics: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/epigenetics.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/epigenetics.html
kens 14y ago
Epigenetics is a very interesting area, and I expect it to increase in importance following the ENCODE project that just came out. The NYTimes article is a bit strange, though, trying to politicize epigenetics through the "mommy wars". The article also muddles the difference between genetic issues due to aging fathers and epigenetic issues. The recent Icelandic study links mutations in sperm from aging fathers to autism and schizophrenia, which is genetic (the mutations show up in genome sequencing), so it's basically irrelevant to the article's epigenetic thesis. The NYTimes article mentions a theory that maybe epigenetic regulation is reducing DNA repair and causing mutations, but that's a pretty tenuous connection. It's silly to turn this into a "blame game", but it is interesting that males and females contribute different types of genetic errors: females typically introduce chromosome errors, while males introduce DNA mutations. 20% of human eggs have the wrong number of chromosomes, compared with 3-4% of sperm. A cell has to split the chromosomes twice in meiosis to form a gamete, which is a difficult process where a lot can go wrong. Eggs sit around potentially for decades and then need to twice split properly, and this becomes much more error-prone with age. The first split happens at ovulation, and the second at fertilization (which is much later than I'd expect). These errors in chromosome separation are the leading cause of miscarriage and mental retardation. On the other hand, males are the main source of DNA mutations, since sperm are constantly being created, and each round of DNA replication has a chance to introduce errors. [Reference: Molecular Biology of the Cell, chapter 21, which is an interesting book] Last week I read the book "The Epigenetics Revolution", which I recommend as it gives a good description of epigenetics. http://www.amazon.com/The-Epigenetics-Revolution-Understanding-Inheritance/dp/0231161166 http://www.amazon.com/The-Epigenetics-Revolution-Understandi... (non-affiliate link)
- AutoCorrect 14y ago
  eggs don't sit around for decades. a study published recently discounted the theory that a female is born with her entire complement of eggs - to the contrary, like sperm, eggs are produced throughout the female's life. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120229-women-health-ovaries-eggs-reproduction-science/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120229-women...
markyc 14y ago
[..] a child’s genetic future is set for life. [..] Character: check Doesn't the author mean personality? I thought personality is in the genes and character is built throughout one's life.
andyl 14y ago
Misandry: alive and well at the NYT.
anuraj 14y ago
Does epigenetics qualify as a science. That needs to be established first.

97 points by lambtron 14y ago

This article is clearly on the nature side of the "Nurture versus Nature" argument and clearly genetics can play a big part in how your child turns out. But why can't we just say "both" to the nature versus nurture argument? Who hasn't been either negatively or positively impacted by the role of their fathers once born?

mtoddh 14y ago
To me it seemed like the article was less about nature vs nurture and more about the author's resentment that men aren't held as accountable for their children's health as mothers are: From the article, Older mothers no longer need to shoulder all the blame: “It’s the aging man who damages the offspring."... The well-being of the children used to be the sole responsibility of their mothers. Now fathers have to be held accountable, too. Having twice endured the self-scrutiny and second-guessing that goes along with being pregnant, I wish them luck.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  It's also a silly conclusion. The effect of paternal age on offspring is vastly smaller than that of maternal age.
  - Dn_Ab 14y ago
    From what is this based on? It is not congruent with literature I have read on the matter. For one, gametes from the aged father are vastly more likely to incorporate denovo (typically deleterious) mutations. PLoS Medicine: Contrasting Effects of Maternal and Paternal Age on Offspring Intelligence Evidence is accumulating that advanced paternal age may exhibit a wider range of effects on the health and development of the offspring than increased maternal age (which is largely confined to risk for Down syndrome). Advanced paternal age is a risk factor for childhood conditions such as cleft lip and palate; childhood cancers and congenital heart defects [1]; and neuropsychiatric conditions such as autism [4], schizophrenia [5,6], epilepsy [7], and bipolar disorder [8]. Advanced paternal age also appears to affect mortality, and an intriguing analysis of family history data from European nobility found that older age of fatherhood (greater than 45 years) is associated with a reduction of about two years in the life span of daughters [9]. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000042 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
    - yummyfajitas 14y ago
      This is based primarily on the fact that the risk of Down's Syndrome and pregnancy complications is easily observable, whereas the risk of various other things associated to paternal age are harder to see. For the most part, the bigger the risk, the easier it is to observe. However, if you have hard numbers (rather than a piece that is mainly speculative), I'd love to see them.
      - Dn_Ab 14y ago
        Understand that I did not post that question for reasons of vanity. I really wanted to know what led you to that belief (I have not found much evidence supporting it) and am still interested in knowing, in order that I might update my beliefs if necessary. I at least cited something. I picked up the article I had read most recently. Speculative or not, it was published in a peer reviewed journal by those active in the area. I urge you to do your own research and come to your own conclusion. As these things are not known one can only give hypotheses on their causes. Statistics which are often not done well in the medical field are not necessarily stronger than reasoning from first principles. If you have access to any geneticist, autism researchers or biologist do ask them. And consider. De novo mutations are culprit for many rare diseases including those like autism (each particular case often to rare causes) with non-specific causes. In terms of the gametes which both parents provide, sperm cells unlike ova, have a vastly larger number of these errors with probability increasing with time. This is a stronger argument than something is hard to observe and does not assume that the researchers did not think of something fairly quite obvious. The reason for Down Syndrome and maternal age also has a solid biological hypothesis that is almost inverse (not new mutations but chromosomal damage, usually catastrophic -> miscarrying). I was actually interested in what made you come to hold this belief because it is not in line with much of what I have picked up in the literature. If you can give a solid counter reference, speculative or not I would be interested. A cursory search on my part did not find anything supporting your claim.
        yummyfajitas 14y ago
        First of all, I think my glib one-line response carried a lot more certainty than I should have expressed. My bad. The main reason I believe maternal age is a bigger issue is because of the absence of evidence about paternal age. It's pretty well established epidemiologically that maternal age is a problem, but there is far less evidence about paternal age. That suggests that whatever problems paternal age causes, they are harder to observe. The most common reason an effect is hard to observe is because it is small. That's the extent of it. It's more or less the same reason I take the media's latest "new study suggests XXX might cause cancer" stories with a grain of salt. I haven't looked into this deeply at all. If you have lots of info on it, you should probably not update your beliefs.
- philwelch 14y ago
  The difference is that any Lamarckian epigenetic influence would still be passed on at conception, and is at any rate set throughout the father's entire lifetime. There's no actual period of time, like pregnancy, that presents itself as a particular opportunity for criticism.
  - azakai 14y ago
    Both sexes' lives before conception and pregnancy matter - in both cases, cumulative damage to reproductive cells is more likely the older they are. (Women in addition have pregnancy, during which there can be big affects on the embryo, for example if she binge-drinks.) The point of the article was that we knew little of the non-pregnancy effects before recent years. And while that information applies to both sexes, it is socially more significant for men, who previously were not considered relevant in this matter, but now are. Higher ages of conceiving babies in both sexes may be contributing to a rise in autism and so forth. But what is novel is that we already knew that was true for women, now the data shows it is true for men as well.
- adaml_623 14y ago
  The author really seems to buy into the concept of a blame culture doesn't she. People don't seem to realise that there is a chance of 'bad' stuff happening and if they want the good stuff they need to take a risk. You might be able to minimise some risks but if you obsess over them you're going to go down the path of seeing only danger everywhere. Of course this blame culture develops and spreads through social networks where people talk behind the back of someone who doesn't have a perfect child and blames their genetics or parenting skills or lifestyle choices.
  - brc 14y ago
    The blame culture is a terrible problem. If nobody is responsible for anything because it's not their fault, and somebody else is to blame, how are people going to become self-reliant?
    - akldfgj 14y ago
      What does fault have to do with self-reliance? Fault is in the past, solving problems is in the future.
      - brc 14y ago
        I'm assuming your question is genuine rather than rhetorical. If a person believes that their personal outcomes are largely or totally created by circumstances out of their control, they will have difficulties becoming self-reliant. Blaming other people and other things for personal failings and problems seldom leads to better outcomes.
- antidoh 14y ago
  I took that undercurrent as slightly more firm than tongue in cheek. The overall description of the science and its implications were interesting enough to make the article worthwhile. Everyone has a bias, and a popular article is going to let that show through more than a scientific paper, to make it interesting. You may as well complain that comics are funny when they observe the human condition.
johnernaut 14y ago
That much is clearly clear.
awakeasleep 14y ago
There is something weird about how humans look to understand things in dualistic thought. We want to believe in Nature vs Nurture as if they are entirely separate, when the scientific details probably won't be so simple.

Claudus 14y ago

Supposedly: Children with older fathers and grandfathers 'live longer' (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152379 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152379) "Experts have known for some time that lifespan is linked to the length of structures known as telomeres that sit at the end of the chromosomes that house our genetic code, DNA. Generally, a shorter telomere length means a shorter life expectancy. ... However, scientists have discovered that in sperm, telomeres lengthen with age."

Dn_Ab 14y ago
Causal links cannot be drawn with that paper. This study was unique in showing that telomere length determination by paternal age was generationally additive. It was not designed to determine if older paternal age translates into longer lifespan.

JshWright 14y ago

It's an interesting article, but a horrible title... As if to say the impact fathers have after conception doesn't 'really' matter...

philwelch 14y ago
It's part of the casual misandry that permeates our culture.
- winter_blue 14y ago
  I agree with you to an extent; fathers are often seen as incapable of raising children in American culture. However, do you know if there is any literature or articles/discussion on this? (In particular about how fathers are seen, and more broadly on the misandry.)
  - mtrimpe 14y ago
    A little tough to get a hold of and to read, but The Myth of Masculinity by Joseph Pleck [http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Masculinity-Joseph-Pleck/dp/0262660504 http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Masculinity-Joseph-Pleck/dp/0...] is by far the most thorough take on male masculinity I've ever read.
  - victorhn 14y ago
    Here is an excellent blog post: http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.h...
  - 001sky 14y ago
    Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil [1] --Way ahead of its time. _________ [1] "Supposing truth was a woman, what then..." Is the opening line. Not for the faint of heart, though.
- s_baby 14y ago
  According to Warren Farrell NYTimes is systematic and deliberate in perpetuating misandry. This is coming from a man who was both a founding member in a major feminist organization(N.O.W) and a writer for the NYTimes. http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2003/0610farrell.html http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2003/0610f...

tokenadult 14y ago

"In the past decade or so, the study of epigenetics has become so popular it’s practically a fad." Well, that's the one statement in the article I can readily accept as true for purposes of discussion here. Much more debatable is the assertion further down, "Twentieth-century Darwinian genetics dismissed Lamarckism as laughable, but because of epigenetics, Lamarckism is staging a comeback," which includes a link to a low-quality source. Much better sources on epigenetics for our discussion here are "Epigenetics again: will it cause a revolution in evolution?" http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/epigenetics-again-will-it-cause-a-revolution-in-evolution/ http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/epigeneti... which is a follow-up to "Is 'epigenetics' a revolution in evolution?" http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/is-epigenetics-a-revolution-in-evolution/ http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/is-epigen... or "The Epigenetics Miracle?" http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/08/21/the-epigenetics-miracle/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/08/21/the-epigenetic... The scientifically careful study of gene regulation is NOT going to revive Lamarckian ideas, not at all. But speculation about this is probably in the popular literature again for years to come.

hsshah 14y ago

For a less biased still gentle introduction on epigenetics: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/epigenetics.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/epigenetics.html

kens 14y ago

Epigenetics is a very interesting area, and I expect it to increase in importance following the ENCODE project that just came out. The NYTimes article is a bit strange, though, trying to politicize epigenetics through the "mommy wars". The article also muddles the difference between genetic issues due to aging fathers and epigenetic issues. The recent Icelandic study links mutations in sperm from aging fathers to autism and schizophrenia, which is genetic (the mutations show up in genome sequencing), so it's basically irrelevant to the article's epigenetic thesis. The NYTimes article mentions a theory that maybe epigenetic regulation is reducing DNA repair and causing mutations, but that's a pretty tenuous connection. It's silly to turn this into a "blame game", but it is interesting that males and females contribute different types of genetic errors: females typically introduce chromosome errors, while males introduce DNA mutations. 20% of human eggs have the wrong number of chromosomes, compared with 3-4% of sperm. A cell has to split the chromosomes twice in meiosis to form a gamete, which is a difficult process where a lot can go wrong. Eggs sit around potentially for decades and then need to twice split properly, and this becomes much more error-prone with age. The first split happens at ovulation, and the second at fertilization (which is much later than I'd expect). These errors in chromosome separation are the leading cause of miscarriage and mental retardation. On the other hand, males are the main source of DNA mutations, since sperm are constantly being created, and each round of DNA replication has a chance to introduce errors. [Reference: Molecular Biology of the Cell, chapter 21, which is an interesting book] Last week I read the book "The Epigenetics Revolution", which I recommend as it gives a good description of epigenetics. http://www.amazon.com/The-Epigenetics-Revolution-Understanding-Inheritance/dp/0231161166 http://www.amazon.com/The-Epigenetics-Revolution-Understandi... (non-affiliate link)

AutoCorrect 14y ago
eggs don't sit around for decades. a study published recently discounted the theory that a female is born with her entire complement of eggs - to the contrary, like sperm, eggs are produced throughout the female's life. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120229-women-health-ovaries-eggs-reproduction-science/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120229-women...

markyc 14y ago

[..] a child’s genetic future is set for life. [..] Character: check Doesn't the author mean personality? I thought personality is in the genes and character is built throughout one's life.

andyl 14y ago

Misandry: alive and well at the NYT.

anuraj 14y ago

Does epigenetics qualify as a science. That needs to be established first.