How Previous Sexual Partners Affect Offspring

[Deleted]

http://time.com/3461485/how-previous...ect-offspring/

At least, if you’re a fly. But the research suggests that it may be time to take into account more than just DNA when it comes to our offspring

It’s a long-held belief among animal breeders that pure-bred progeny are best produced by females who have never mated before. Call it puritanical or ridiculous, but in breeding, it’s been a long-standing practice—even though there has never been much science to back it up. Now, however, researchers at University of New South Wales in Australia believe they may finally have some evidence to give that notion some scientific support.

Working with flies, Angela Crean, a research fellow at the evolution and ecology research center, picked up on her mentor’s work of looking at how male factors can influence offspring outside of the DNA in his semen.

“The genetic tests showed that even though the second male fertilized the eggs, the offsprings’ size was determine by the condition of the first male,” she says of her findings, published in the journal Ecology Letters. “The cool thing is that the non-genetic effects we are seeing are not necessarily tied to the fertilization itself.”

Cool, or really disturbing. The implications of the study are that any mates a female has had may leave some legacy—in the form of physical or other traits that are carried in the semen (but not the DNA-containing sperm)—that could show up in her future offspring with another mate.


While there’s a growing body of work showing that a mother’s diet, her smoking status, and other lifestyle habits can have an influence on her offspring, the data on similar factors on the father’s side is just emerging. With flies it’s known, for example, that males who eat a maggot-rich diet while they’re mere larvae, develop into larger than average adults, and on top of that, sire larger than average offspring as well. Males fed a meager maggot diet tend to be smaller have have smaller progeny.

Eager to learn how this was happening, Crean conducted a series of mating experiments with female flies when their eggs were immature. At that stage, the eggs are more receptive to absorbing factors in semen, but because they aren’t fully developed, they can’t be fertilized and won’t result in baby flies. When she and her colleagues “mated” these females with males who were larger, then allowed the females to actually mate with smaller males once they were mature, the offspring turned out to be large, just like the first males the females had sexual contact with. Genetically, they were the offspring of the second, smaller male, but physically, they resembled the larger males.

The same was true when they reversed the experiment and first exposed the females to smaller flies and then mated them with the larger ones.

To be sure that the was indeed due to something in the semen, Crean repeated the studies with an unfortunate group of male flies who had their genitalia glued down so they could not pass on any semen during their encounters. (“It’s horrifying but seemed nicer than cutting them off,” she says.) When these males, both large and small, were the first “mates” for females, their size did not have an effect on the offspring when the female mated with her second mate and had offspring. In other words, those offspring were large if the second male was large, and small if the second male was small.

Crean says the idea of a female’s previous mates having an effect on their offspring isn’t unheard of. In fact, this very idea, called telegony, was proposed by ancient scholars such as Aristotle but dismissed with the advent of genetics. But new findings about epigenetics — how our behaviors, such as diet, smoking and drinking — can affect our genes and how those changes can be passed on, make the idea of such non-genetic inheritance possible. “This could be seen as a maternal effect [such as diet or smoking] where the mother’s environment are her previous mating partners,” she says. “We have to realize that it’s not just DNA that gets passed on. It opens up the opportunity for all these other pathways that we had excluded.”

And while flies aren’t people, what are the chances that the same phenomenon is occurring in human reproduction? “It’s something we definitely don’t want to speculate about yet with humans,” she says. “There is no direct scientific evidence for that at all.” At least, for now.

What do you think? Could this be true for humans too? If so, could this be the reason why so many cultures value (or at least used to) virginity in women so much?

And if we can confirm that it does happen in people too, do you think there will be (or should be) any social changes in how we approach our sexuality?

The thought of my child not really being my child (only mine) terrifies me. We should conduct more research on this..

[Thoughtful Trolli]

Epigenetics. That's interesting.

They already said that a women's body rejects a male baby in some way, causing subsequent males to be ushered into homosexuality though androgen suppression. Then they officially stated that subsequent males are more likely to be homosexual. They also talked about how the youngest child, of any sex, has all the DNA information of everyone that came before, but the first children will NOT have the DNA of the youngest child, since the youngest was born after the first offspring left the mother's body.

The question here is: Does a man's sperm trigger a woman's resistance even if it doesn't generate offspring? Would be very easy to say yes.

A more appropriate approach would be to say: Can environmental factors affect a mother's offspring? The answer to that is a given yes. Then, are people a part of the environment? The answer to that is a given yes.

The interesting thing about that conclusion is that lesbian encounters will also change the condition of the offspring born from mothers later.

EDIT: This also means that beastiality encounters would change the offspring born from the mothers later.

EDIT: So if a male had a beastiality encounter a long time ago, then proceeded to father children with an untouched virgin female, the untouched virgin female's offspring would still be affected by the beastiality encounter of the father decades ago.

Anyone want to draw lines, or add more tangents?

[Deleted]

Rubbish... Just taps into people's insecurities about themselves, gives them false hope, makes them blame their flaws on someone else...

[Doomislav]

I find this research interesting. Just from a whimsical standpoint, I've wondered how environmental pressures alter the way genetic sequincing occurs. Do happy parents statically produce better offspring? Does.. The act of procreation (like different positions or duration) have a noticeable impact on how the 2 peoples genes combine?

[Thoughtful Trolli]

I find this research interesting. Just from a whimsical standpoint, I've wondered how environmental pressures alter the way genetic sequincing occurs. Do happy parents statically produce better offspring? Does.. The act of procreation (like different positions or duration) have a noticeable impact on how the 2 peoples genes combine?

If people have trouble going deep, which is my fancy way of saying I don't give a shit about any of this and its a joke to me, the best way out would be to tell someone that rubbing their genitals in holy water ethanol would wipe away all the lingering taint of the previous encounters, at least to a degree that the original reality power can flux back into their life during the conception and guide them to the reality where their offspring were never affected by the previous influence because not only is that just a memory from long ago but it literally exists only in another multiverse you've left through a cleansing ritual as natural as picking a road less traveled by.

So yah have some doctors fix your hymen, they know all da voodoo too so its not just physically fixed, its fixed on a genetic and "neutral bacterial" level too. And if you doubt it, its strong enough to resist your doubts, and if you endorse it, you've won and are free, etc.

[Sundreamer]

does that include male-to-male-then-to-female as well? if the male always had big schlong dudes plowing him - while he is an average size - and then fathers a son with a female, is the child more likely to grow up into a man with a big schlong himself?

[Thoughtful Trolli]

does that include male-to-male-then-to-female as well? if the male always had big schlong dudes plowing him - while he is an average size - and then fathers a son with a female, is the child more likely to grow up into a man with a big schlong himself?

there's another thread about freezing eggs, maybe if you freeze your eggs and sperm and then set them up in-vitro a while later, the offspring comes out unable to love like Voldemort.

[Yvaelle]

does that include male-to-male-then-to-female as well? if the male always had big schlong dudes plowing him - while he is an average size - and then fathers a son with a female, is the child more likely to grow up into a man with a big schlong himself?

The Chris Griffin effect, essentially?

Lois took a lot of big dicks in her youth, married Peter (tiny dick), gave birth to Chris (big dick)?

Family Guy suggests its true!

[Deleted]

Rubbish... Just taps into people's insecurities about themselves, gives them false hope, makes them blame their flaws on someone else...

I sure hope so, but what if it's not?

[Sundreamer]

The Chris Griffin effect, essentially?

Lois took a lot of big dicks in her youth, married Peter (tiny dick), gave birth to Chris (big dick)?

Family Guy suggests its true!

amazing xD

[Deleted]

Man what an excuse that could be, "No honey, I am just getting railed by this taller, more handsome and muscular guy, so we can have even better looking kids"

[Deleted]

Sacrifices have to be made

Ohhh, the female suffering, it simply never ends! What we don't have to do for our unborn children!

[Nitro Fun]

If this is true then that calls for way harsher penalties for rapists.

[Kaganfindel]

Man what an excuse that could be, "No honey, I am just getting railed by this taller, more handsome and muscular guy, so we can have even better looking kids"

The study suggests that the conditions of the male's life are pertinent as well, so there would be an argument to the converse.
"No, honey, I'm just sleeping around for the sake of our offspring!" I think at that point we just have to admit that we're a couple of polyamorous bonobos and open the whole thing up.

[Deleted]

The study suggests that the conditions of the male's life are pertinent as well, so there would be an argument to the converse.
"No, honey, I'm just sleeping around for the sake of our offspring!" I think at that point we just have to admit that we're a couple of polyamorous bonobos and open the whole thing up.

Could we call children from such a society the gangbang generation?

[Yvaelle]

Could we call children from such a society the gangbang generation?

Given that it's usually the prior generation who names the subsequent ones, and usually gives them vaguely derogatory names, I think that would be likely

[Deleted]

Unless they have good healthy genes, then lightened sentences since they did them a favor.

That's.. one way to look at it, I suppose.

[dextersmith]

This raises so many questions! Will women justify child support from multiple men for each child?? Will glued genitals replace prayer as teens' most popular form of contraception?? How did they accurately glue fly genitals?

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Epigenetics. That's interesting.

They already said that a women's body rejects a male baby in some way, causing subsequent males to be ushered into homosexuality though androgen suppression. Then they officially stated that subsequent males are more likely to be homosexual. They also talked about how the youngest child, of any sex, has all the DNA information of everyone that came before, but the first children will NOT have the DNA of the youngest child, since the youngest was born after the first offspring left the mother's body.

Who's they? All very interesting, do you have references?

[anyaka21]

So I guess this means that Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps need to get busy and do a bunch of virgins?

[Regia]

Don't worry guys, you're safe! You're all virgins