It’s a sad day for sugar daddies as a new study reports that the older a man is at conception, the dumber his baby will be. This may explain some sugar daddy/gold digger offspring and may be just one more reason to shake heads at the relationship between Anna Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall. There is also evidence that older moms bear more intelligent children, which puts a whole new spin on the biological clock.

Emily Nussbaum reports in New York Magazine :

PLoS Medicine analyzed data from a study of over 50,000 pregnant women and came to a simple but stunning conclusion: Older fathers have dumber kids. The more geriatric the dad, the dimmer the progeny, on measures including “thinking and reasoning, concentration, memory, understanding, speaking, and reading.” (Luckily, geezer offspring had no problems with motor skills, making them ideal for wheeling around their elderly dads.)

It was another unsettling addition to the growing pile of evidence that men have their own biological clocks, with older fathers also producing higher rates of schizophrenia and autism. But what really caught my eye was the secondary finding, which was that older mothers were associated with smarter children.

From a purely reproductive standpoint, this means that cougars may be on to something after all. Of course, when you factor in the difference in maturation between men and women, this just may mean that older mothers may have more babies on their hands to coddle than the ones that they conceive, just one more Catch-22 to add to gender relations.

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