UNLIKE women, men can continue having children into old age, but those kids may pay a small price – in intelligence.
Children born to older dads score lower on average on a range of tests, including concentration, memory, reasoning and reading, while the kids of older mothers score higher than those of younger mothers. That’s according to John McGrath at the University of Queensland in St Lucia, Australia, and colleagues, who analysed data on more than 33,000 US children taken at 8 months and again at 4 years and 7 years (PLoS Medicine, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000040).
One might expect the…
