It's been suggested that older men bearing children have more mutations in their sperm. This idea is a scale like IQ for someone's mutated age. It would be 100 - (the father's age when you were conceived).

Helps you know whether to copy someone's test or hold her hand during pregnancy tests.
-- 4and20, Sep 21 2012

[-] It would be a meaningless metric, though. Mutations relative to what? Your father's genome? But what if your father was only 30 when you were conceived, but he was conceived when /his/ father was 60? Would that be better or worse than two 40 year olds in succession? Even if you could determine that, since degradation of sperm is probably not linear with age, you couldn't sum the effects over more than one generation with this system, nor could you make direct comparisons between two different numbers.

Also, what's the point?
-- ytk, Sep 21 2012



random, halfbakery