The cost of N=1

As if the marriage failure rate for women with moderate sexual experience weren't bad enough, now genetic science has revived the possibility that merely being a non-virgin may be sufficient to taint a woman's subsequent genetic line with her first lover's DNA:

Telegony is the belief that the sire first mated to a female will have an influence upon some of that female's later offspring by another male. Although the reality of telegony was acknowledged by such authorities as Darwin, Spencer, Romanes and many experienced breeders, it has been met with scepticism because of Weismann's unfavourable comments and negative results obtained in several test experiments. In this article, alleged cases of telegony are provided. A search of the literature of cell biology and biochemistry reveals several plausible mechanisms that may form the basis for telegony. These involve the penetration of spermatozoa into the somatic tissues of the female genital tract, the incorporation of the DNA released by spermatozoa into maternal somatic cells, the presence of foetal DNA in maternal blood, as well as sperm RNA-mediated non-Mendelian inheritance of epigenetic changes.

This could have severe societal repercussions if telegony turns out to have a solid basis in genetic science. It should be fairly easy to confirm too, by comparing the DNA of a woman's children to that of the man to whom she lost her virginity but was not the father of her children. It would certainly renew the value of a woman's virginity.

I suspect there will be tremendous pressure to not explore these hypotheses due to those potential repercussions, but the concept is too fundamentally interesting and important to remain unexplored for long.

Posted in: Science