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Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly a little worried about the social fracturing that could happen as genetic and paternity testing get increasingly cheap and ubiquitous.

My intuition is that infidelity and paternity fraud is wildly more common than anyone wants to believe, and old social orders will break down as it becomes impossible to ignore and trivial for even light suspicions to be validated.

I have to believe it's good in the long run, because I think any order built on the foundation of deception is inherently fragile and ultimately doomed. There's a stronger order on the other side, but potential chaos through the transition.

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There was a study that showed that cuckoldry was pretty rare, the rate was around 1-2%[0]:

"Reading the internet, or even perusing the scientific literature, you'd get the idea that people are constantly cheating on their spouses. Indeed, scientists have estimated that anywhere from 10-30 percent of men are unknowingly raising children who are not their own. This situation is referred to as cuckoldry, or scientifically as "extra-pair paternity." Now, however, it appears that our estimates of cuckoldry rates were way off.

A new survey published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution sums up a number of recent studies that show the actual rate of cuckolds in the general population, based on genetic testing and ancestor research, is 1-2 percent. This challenges evolutionary psychologists who have suggested that human women "routinely ‘shop around’ for good genes by engaging in extra-pair copulation to obtain genetic benefits." This idea came in part from studying socially monogamous songbirds, which mate for life but have roughly 1 in 10 babies as a result of "extra pair" matings."

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/cuckoldry-is-incredi...

It could be that modern birth control has reduced the rate of extra-pair paternity, as sexual impulses have (partially) decoupled from procreation.

From the above article...

> Scientists were so unwilling to believe that human women were different from songbirds that some suggested the discrepancy between expected and actual rates of cuckoldry was a recent development caused by birth control.

It would be quite interesting to do a study on modern social groups where birth control isn't yet ubiquitous. It could be fairly easy to do this kind of study covertly and anonymize the source so as to not risk throwing it into disarray if the results come back with high rates of cuckoldery.

> It could be fairly easy to do this kind of study covertly and anonymize the source so as to not risk throwing it into disarray if the results come back with high rates of cuckoldery.

Are you sure? A covert study seems likely unethical, and attempts at anonymization tend to show it's much harder than people think.

I'd love for this to be true, but it does conflict with various state policy decisions on the matter that seem to indicate at least a belief in the opposite. France's policy is particularly striking, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_paternity_testing#France

It is possible that state institutions make these policies based exactly on my assumption above, which seems like it could be incorrect. Or perhaps even 1-2% is still enough to cause significant social cost if easily exposed.

In France, when you get married or have a kid you get a family book and it is the official record of your family. If you don't put a kid in, they don't have the same rights and vice versa. Really leans into the "family is a social construct" angle

France is incredibly regressive and conservative when it comes to anything related to genetics. For example, for people doing IVF, it's not allowed to test the embryos for viability. The argument is that such testing is too close to eugenics, so instead women doing IVF cannot get any guarantees that the embryos are viable and it makes the procedure harder.

Doing a DNA test for yourself is also illegal...

Surrogacy is also not legal in France because “Any agreement, even if it does not provide for remuneration, whereby a woman agrees to conceive, bear and give birth to a child and then renounce it, is contrary to public order, the inviolability of the human body and the personal status of a natural person.”

So I wouldn't put much stoke into the policies of France on this matter

Maybe they are not incredibly regressive and conservative. Maybe they are different. You may not agree with their position but it is very imperialistic to suppose that any custom or law which is not exactly as it is in America must be considered backwards.

For the record, I'm French not American, voting for politicians to change those laws is one of my many deciding factors when choosing which politicians to vote for and I have a sister who had to do IVF so my close family was directly impacted by those nonsensical laws. My mum and her sister also broke the law by ordering two DNA test to confirm a long standing theory that my mum's father was not her biological father (her non-biological father had never hugged her and was always much colder towards her than towards her sister so having a confirmation of that was a relief for my mum)

Anyway, I do hope that I'm not being imperialistic when I criticize laws of my own country.

Surrogacy is perhaps not the best example of French conservatism.

Curiously, only the USA and formerly Soviet countries permit paid surrogacy, and even altruistic surrogacy is illegal in much of the EU, including Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy.

True, the main reason I talked about it is because

a) it's also part of the same discourse related to bioethics, the legal reasoning in France has the same component as the legal reasoning around euthanasia, paternity testing and dna test in that it doesn't recognize the rights of people to dispose of their own body.

b) When my sister was trying to do IVF and didn't get results for years, they were investigating the possibility of doing surrogacy abroad

c) I voted for Macron, among many reasons, because he was more open minded about surrogacy than his opponents.

I can see an argument against paid surrogacy but making altruistic surrogacy illegal is something I disagree vehemently.

But then again, I'm also very much in disagreement about the French legislation against prostitution (interestingly most organizations of sex workers or organizations that are implicated in helping sex workers are also against the law there too)

I don't see the conflict. Whether you're looking at 70M population or 10-15M kids, 1-2% of that is a lot of people.

Considering nobody ever considers it, 1-2% is huge! 1 in every 50-100 families. How many people from different families do you know?

Even if your family isn't one of affected, I'd bet you know several people from affected families.

There are about 120 million households in the US. Lets assume that approximately 100 million are parental households with children (either still dependents or grown and independent).

We're talking at least 1-2 million families that could be affected by paternity fraud in the US alone. That has the potential to be massively disruptive if exposed to these 1-2 million families.

Further, if those rates are similar across time and roughly evenly distributed among populations, it means that carefully-researched family tree your aunt (or whoever) has spent so much time working on gets unreliable (as far as biological parentage) fast, the more generations you go back. "Look, I'm distantly related to [famous person]!" Well... maybe.

> Further, if those rates are similar across time and roughly evenly distributed among populations

They’re not. Rates of extra paternity events vary a lot by social class[1]. I'd be shocked if that wasn’t true for different ethnic groups.

[1] A Historical-Genetic Reconstruction of Human Extra-Pair Paternity

Highlights

• Combining genetic and genealogical data illuminates our ancestors’ sexual behavior

• Gene-genealogy mismatches imply extra-pair paternity (EPP)

• Historical EPP rates were low overall (∼1%) but varied depending on social context

• EPP rates were highest (∼6%) among urban families with low socioeconomic status

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...

I would strongly expect it to be clustered in specific populations. I'd be very surprised if the rate among HN readers was equal to the rate among the general population.

I promise you HN is a statistical anomaly in a certain direction.

That's a massive number. It means that basically every time you go out to dinner you're in the room with someone who doesn't know that their father isn't their father.

Even so, 1-2% of 1 billion people is 10 million people...

Better to rip off the bandaid, honestly. Rather than old social orders breaking down, I think we'll see some of them strengthened, as the reasons for their institution in the first place get harder to ignore.

100% agree. Society is stronger if we don't build structures as important as families on a foundation of lies.

Hell, I personally believe paternity testing should be damn near mandated and routine for every birth before the father is allowed to sign the birth certificate. It would make every family stronger by removing any possible doubt of fidelity and responsibility.

"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" and all that.

Any time there's discussions of this kind, though, it feels like a slippery slope to Gattaca. If you think about it, in many ways the urge for your genes to be the ones that make it are one of the only things holding us back from a genetically engineered society and genetic discrimination.

If it is truly commoner than most think, wouldnt acceptance of it become common eventually?

Unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Those males who are psychologically ok with cuckolding will eventually fail to pass on their DNA, whereas those who have a strong aversion to it will be more likely to pass on their DNA.

Being ok with expending your limited time and resources raising unrelated offspring is a self terminating trait.

> Being ok with expending your limited time and resources raising unrelated offspring is a self terminating trait.

I don't know about that. I know at least one family that has six children, two of whom are adopted. That's somewhat rare, but not totally unique.

Still applies here in my opinion.

This family you know had 33% fewer biological children than they could have had. That means their DNA will be ever so slightly overwhelmed by families with the same desire and capacity for children who chose to have 100% biological offspring.

Having said that, there certainly is some debate on whether genes are actually greater than memes when it comes to this kind of psychology. It could be that the human brain is general enough to be loaded with this kind of DNA self terminating software (meme) such that it continues for longer than you might otherwise expect, because the unrelated offspring still inherit the memes that motivated the decision to not prioritize your own genetically related offspring.

However, given enough time and generations, there should still emerge a mutant human brain that is more immune to these kinds of memes, and that genetic lineage slowly out competes the one that is more accepting of raising unrelated offspring.

>This family you know had 33% fewer biological children than they could have had.

That's not necessarily true. It's possible - likely, even - that they adopted their last two because there would be issues conceiving a fifth. (Having a C-section limits the number of children a woman can have, for example - as does simply being above a certain age)

I disagree. Memes (as in, the culture/personal worldview that can be passed on to descendants) are an equally interested angle of looking at this situation. While the genetics lost this battle, the father's meme is still passed on to the offspring, even if such offspring isn't biological.

I agree to some degree, and expanded as much in a sub comment.

https://wearehostsformemes.com/

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