…but every sperm may not be great. Sometime last week I posted on the observation that older men are more likely to father kids who will go on to have problems with a variety of ailments. This observation is not all that surprising when you think about how sperm get made.

If you are a college graduate, it is very likely that you learned (or at least sat through a lecture on) how sperm get made. This would have happened in a biology course that you were forced to take as one of  your “general education” requirements.  “Wait a minute”, you may be saying, “I don’t remember that”. No. You don’t. Because in that lecture a professional biology professor, such as myself, demonstrating our professionability, used terms like “chromatid” and “telophase” and “centromere”, terms that made it sound like we were talking about equipment used during the Mars landing, and your eyes rolled up in your head and you passed out just about the time that we got to the money shot that made it all clear. And then you got that question wrong on the test. (It was question 25. The answer was “C”.)

Anyway, we won’t do that here. We’ll just stick to the essentials.

The subject of Henry the Eighth came up yesterday, and my husband was forced to explain to our six year old, Adam, that he (H8) was a guy who got married six times, but cut all his wives’ heads off when he got tired of being married to them. Then, being the conscientious modern parent that he is, my husband noted that this, of course, was not a good way to deal with someone who you were tired of, or weren’t getting along with. “No,” said Adam, thoughtfully. “I would have poisoned them.”

Demonstrating conclusively that even small children instinctively understand the nuances of social behavior.

Well, that was a refreshing break. However, prodded by the excellent and virtuous Kent over at Uncommon Ground, I’ve decided to get off my keister over here…..

For those of us who have already produced all the kids we are going to, it’s too late, but there’s news you can use if you are still considering whose sperm to use when making babies. Or whether to use your own, should you be a man. Swedish scientists this week added to the growing body of evidence that older fathers are more likely to produce babies who will eventually be taxed with the kind of troubles you wouldn’t wish on anyone’s kid, much less your own. Earlier studies showed that children sired by older men are more likely to be stillborn; if born live, they are more likely to eventually endure autism, schizophrenia, and cancer. The Swedish study added bipolar disorder to the list.

Every parent I know who is over the age of 25 likes to joke that they are too old for the physical labor of caring for children (the sleep loss, oh my god the sleep!), but this is not funny. How old is too old? Menopause puts a clear dividing line down for women (capable of producing babies before/not capable of producing babies after) but men are famously capable of producing working sperm until very late into old age. (We are assuming that women do not cheat on their older husbands with younger men, right?)

90 year old Nanu Ram Jogi with his latest child

Understanding how and why aging in a prospective father increases the likelihood that his child will be somehow unhealthy depends on understanding how men make sperm. It also involves something I think of as the Photocopy Principle. Next up: Where Do Sperm Come From?

As I may have mentioned before, I have two sons. Lovely, affectionate boys; they kiss me even when I don’t ask, even the 10 year old. And yet, daily, I am forced to ask myself: why the hell can’t they keep their hands off each other? The whacking, the shoving, the tackling, the kicking …. it drives me around the bend. (Anybody else got this going on? I am collecting data with which to test the idea that boys are even capable of keeping their hands to themselves. Preliminary results: NO.) Not infrequently just the decibel level causes me to teeter close to behavior not sanctioned in your better parenting books (such as roaring “SHUT UP and get away from each other!” Not that I would actually ever do that. Ahem.). On those days, I take deep cleansing breaths, and remind myself that if they were herons, one of them would likely already be dead. And not in the figurative sense. Dead dead. Actually dead.

If your kids are as caught up in the present round of Pokemon madness as mine are, then Christmas will have been one big Poke-fest, as it was at our house. Pokemon cards, Pokemon books, Pokemon figures, Pokemon video games — Pokemon have secret powers of marketing. Fortunately, my irritation at all the poke-ness eased when I noticed that Pokemon are largely embellishments of real animals. The whole deal is just a taxonomy game, just like real scientists play, complete with elements of pedantry, obsessive-compulsiveness, and covetness for the rare and undiscovered.

Good news! Scientists reported last week that women’s backs are different than men’s, and in a way that makes pregnancy plausible for those of us who walk upright. If only I’d known when I was pregnant: I could have crawled less.

So, what’s with this messy, painful business of giving birth to 7 lb babies through 1 lb body orifices? Examples of less strenuous forms of birth abound in nature. It turns out that the human form of birth lies at the end of a side road that starts with him putting his whatsis inside her yaya as a way of keeping the kids from getting eaten before they even have a chance to look like mom or dad.

Has it ever occurred to you to wonder, say in the middle of labor, why we humans don’t have an easier means of reproducing? Bacteria just split themselves in two, fish lay eggs and swim away. Even birds dump their babies in the outside world long before the point when they will require an 8 week class in breathing, and possibly some excellent drugs, before birth can occur. Why is it so hard to be a human parent?

This blog is dedicated to the proposition that everything about parenting is more interesting, and makes more sense, if you understand the biology of the way humans make babies and raise them to adulthood. I was a biologist before I became a parent, and I find that I think about my children as a biologist would any animal. They are particularly precious animals, but I still notice that their sibling rivalry is very similar to that observable in any bird nest. I intend to share this view of parenthood with you. If you are not careful, you might learn a thing or two about biology, too.