Many young people of today delay their marriage and child
rearing for the sake of their career and profession. Now, here is a paper in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (http://www.pnas.org/content/112/13/4021.full)
that questions the wisdom in this tendency.
They report that progeny of older
parents tend to have lower reproductive fitness in a sex specific manner: Sons of
older fathers and daughters of older mothers may end up having less children in
natural conditions.
The possible cause for this phenomenon is attributed to the
shortening of the protective repetitive DNA sequences at the ends of our
chromosomes. These ends, called telomeres, tend to shorten during one’s life
span. These modifications are passed down to the next generation...
