Yesterday the NY Times reported on rising paternal age in the U.S., which on average "has increased over the past 44 years from 27.4 to 30.9 years," according to a new study out of Stanford.
The Times article also cites a 2016 study in Nature Genetics that finds no evidence for the hypothesis that advanced paternal age causes schizophrenia and autism in offspring because of de novo mutation. My colleague Jennifer Roff and I wrote about a related set of results in 2010, where we found that family economics appeared to explain the negative correlation observed between paternal age and children's neurocognitive outcomes. The Nature Genetics study argues that older dads are genetically different; we argued that they are phenotypically different.
