From the first sentence: "because of random mutations that become more numerous with advancing paternal age".
From the sixth paragraph: "The research team found that the average child born to a 20-year-old father had 25 random mutations that could be traced to paternal genetic material. The number increased steadily by two mutations a year, reaching 65 mutations for offspring of 40-year-old men."
What? It seems that there is a mechanism proposed, that is increased mutations in older men.
Secondly, I think it's hardly useful to state that discoveries without mechanisms are useless. Certainly, having the mechanism is more useful, but having the correlation itself is valuable data. Or else the "law of gravity" would have been useless for a couple centuries.
This specific case, this specific correlation, is not really ready to go into the popular press as headlines for the general public to take home.
It is easy to do controlled experiments regarding gravity which are not completely loused up with confounds. Nobody needed to go data-fishing in order to find gravity - it's a very clear and strong phenomenon.
Are you sure that there are no possibly relevant systematic differences OTHER than age, between men who have children early and ones who have children late?
A 'proposed' mechanism cannot substitute for understanding of what is actually happening, in the context of popular publication of data suggesting that autism is caused by having babies too late... this is a month away from the women's magazines and two months from parents being blamed for their children's autism. It would be more responsible to actually demonstrate a causal link before running to the presses.
I believe that the complaint is that the mechanism is something of a dodge. To put it differently, the Barry Allen can run faster than the speed of light. If you asked my why he can violate special relativity, I'd tell you that he was in a lab accident. That's the mechanism by which he went into a state where he was able to travel at superluminal velocity. However, that explains absolutely nothing about why he's violating special relativity.
In the same way, increased mutations in the paternal DNA does explain why something weird would happen with the offspring. However, it does nothing to explain why that something weird manifests itself as autism.
