Greg points to a summary of a study that looks at the average age of conception over the last quarter of a million years. The graph in the piece surprised me.
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"These mutations from the past accumulate with every generation and exist in humans today," Wang said. "We can now identify these mutations, see how they differ between male and female parents, and how they change as a function of parental age."
Children's DNA inherited from their parents contains roughly 25 to 75 new mutations, which allows scientists to compare the parents and offspring, and then to classify the kind of mutation that occurred. When looking at mutations in thousands of children, IU researchers noticed a pattern: The kinds of mutations that children get depend on the ages of the mother and the father.
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