Your Sperm and You

[FHwku]

..."By the time females reach their teen years, their eggs have already been formed—just one new egg matures each month. Men, on the other hand, produce millions of sperm cells every time they ejaculate. After each ejaculation, they must literally replicate those cells, and each replication multiplies the chance for a DNA "copy error"—a genetic chink in the sperm DNA. The more ejaculations a man produces, the greater the chance for chinks to arise, leading to increased point mutation and thus increased infertility and birth defects. While a woman's reproductive capacity halts more or less abruptly after all her eggs have been used up somewhere in their forties or fifties, men experience a longer, more gradual winnowing and disintegration. "We believe that something in men's DNA replication machinery keeps becoming less efficient and less accurate with age, and the problems accumulate."

-Ethylin Wang Jabs, professor of pediatric genetics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore

i tend to look for parallels between religious/spiritual views and genuine scientific reason (e.g. Scientific Adam & Eve.) the idea that it is a sin to waste your seed is found in taoist, hindu, christian, jewish and other traditions. maybe not so much a "sin" as it is wasteful to expend this precious treasure for reasons other than procreation.

i don't plan on having kids. so i'll continue sowing my wild oats. it's just something i thought was interesting.

here's one of the articles i where i was reading about degeneration in sperm cell DNA...

*on a side note, the professor's name i quoted at the top, Professor Ethylin Wang Jabs, could not have a funnier name for the purposes of this post.