How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?
science.org
science.org
Quite judgemental word choice for something rather normal.
I don't think a lot of people today would challenge dawkins on that.
Dawkins is a radical genetic reductionist, this book is his defense of this position. In the face of criticism he has moved on from the conclusions he presents in it towards a focus on phenotype reminiscent of older biological paradigms.
One obvious critique is that if he was correct in the book, evolution would have played out much differently and most likely not moved on from single cell organisms. This is why his loyalists over time has moved from studying animals to find something that seems like evidence to preserve the conclusions, to studying bacteria.
Another is that the most well known expression of genetic selfishness in humans would be cancer, which is clearly not the dominant mode of cellular reproduction.
There are more cleanly scientific objections, famously locusts, i.e. epigenetics.
He wrote at a time when the last remnants of aristotelian views of animals withered away, leaving an ideological vacuum. Previously the entire animal was thought to be the evolutionary atom, similar to an aristotelian form, against which Dawkins proposed his radical genetic reductionism.
The main reason that the book has been as influential as it has, is that it is aimed at laypeople and cherrypicks and frames things to drive home a political view that is much easier to understand and accept than the mess we're actually in.
We've had to ask you this more than once recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42605019
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42554816
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Do a DNA test, get answer. Obsession over.
Theres no obsession here, the author was being needlessly hyperbolical to twist the narrative as if the normal behavior of thinking about paternity makes one "obsessive". The way he phrased it makes it sound like it's normal for the paternal side not to care if he's raising his own kin or not.
>Do a DNA test, get answer. Obsession over.
DAN tests without your partner's consent or a court order, are not legal in several countries, like France for example. So you might never know if your partner doesn't want you to know or you don't have proof of adultery to show the court.
I want to know the rationale behind this but I'm quite sure it's some "but think of the kiiids" catholic rhetoric.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/french-men-s-insecurity-over...
The only problem is, after you've done it, and it turns out the child is not yours, you have two problems.
No wonder France decided to ban the tests
So if you make it nearly impossible for men to ever find out, they'll be legally bound to pay for the upbringing of whoever their partner gives birth to, reducing the financial liability of the state.
But the official reason from the state is something along the lines of "we don't want to put kids/families through unnecessary stress". Basically men have to be cash cows regardless.
Why not the biological father? That would make sense.
The version of this I've seen most often has been certain Very Online groups who are convinced that if they have kids they'll turn out to secretly be someone else's.
They can't test that hypothesis because it's directly interfering with the conditions that would enable them to test it.
They are not your child. They are someone else's child. Maybe you keep loving them the same. Maybe you don't.
> punish the mother?
That would be barbaric. You wish your former partner all the best, and you part ways. Or you don't. But if people can divorce over "nothing" then that level of dishonesty certainly qualifies for one.
Not your child.
As for your partner, the State saying you cannot verify whether they have been cheating to you or not is a huge step in the wrong direction. because you can easily check it anyway, but you can not use this knowledge to assert your rights.
Let's assume that their figure of 1% is correct. In the UK in 2021 alone there were 694,685 live births according to Google. That means in one year alone nearly 7,000 children were from "EPP". That's an enormous number of people, mostly men, potentially wrongly pursued for child support, or battling through the courts to be given access to a child that's not theirs, etc.
That strikes me as a hugely important issue.
In my defense, I'd say that the suicide rate for men is 4x that for women, and that a large proportion of suicides come after divorce and loss of access to children. (Sorry for being hand-wavey, but I can't search for the research to back these claims from where I am currently.)
That alone at least backs the case for more research in this area.
These all are important issues but need e very balanced approach. Skewing things both left and right will have negative consequences to the society as a whole.
You would run the analysis and get absolute nonsense results, and then you'd swap a father for an uncle, or a mother for her daughter, and the alleles would all just suddenly line up.
We would never tell the families, and since the pedigrees were anonymized before being published there was no need to. Some secrets are just best kept buried.
Clearly lots of people never listen in biology class.
E.G: both biological parents cannot be A and the kids be AB
IMO a paternity test should just be mandated to be done immediately at birth (or earlier even?). It avoids the tinge of distrust of "oh wow, how could you even think that of me?!" from the mother, whilst giving certainty to the man.
The period immediately after birth is one of the most dangerous times for children, and we (should) specifically take action to protect them in a moment where they are at risk and have no agency. A paternity test would increase the risk of harm to the child (either through violence, deprivation, or neglect). We didn't even get to the subject of possible violence against the mother either, which is likely.
Also, there's a second order effect you're ignoring: a mandated paternity test would change expectant mothers' behavior leading up to the birth. You wouldn't try to dupe someone if you knew you'd be found out. Or, if you weren't sure, you'd more likely be transparent.
The source of risk isn't performing the test, the source of risk is the father getting upset and killing the mother and/or child.
It might actually be that mandatory paternity tests reduces the background rate of familicide. All of the reports that I could find were only after the father had invested considerable time into raising the child as their own. The stakes of the deception are much higher. But if they know the day the baby is born (or earlier), then it's much easier to walk away. It also makes it pointless for the deception to happen in the first place.
I wonder how would you react if you received a notification that half your paycheck will be henceforth withheld to support some random kid.
this comparison is not entirely fair, because in this scenario, the kid's mother did not deliver a grievous, unforgivable insult to you - which is the case with those poor souls who got scammed into paying child support for some whore's bastard whelp.
the state doesn't give a flying fuck about the child's 'financial distress'. the state simply doesn't want to support it.
As others have stated above, this isn't really about protecting "family harmony" / "saving the child", it’s about cost.
If paternity tests were easily accessible, many men would easily contest child support and if successful, they would opt out. The state benefits from keeping paternity disputes out of court because it ensures that private individuals, rather than government welfare programs, remain responsible for child support.
If too many men successfully challenged paternity, the state would be forced to provide financial aid for more children, increasing costs. Restricting paternity tests shifts the burden away from taxpayers and onto unwitting fathers, all while claiming it’s about social stability.
1. Isn’t there a very high chance any particular male’s result is true for both father and uncle?
2. For young teen mothers, sometimes a family of older mother and two assumed siblings is really grandmother, mother, child. Paternity and slightly maternity are secretly, generationally obscured. So two assumed female siblings might share less than half-sibling measures of autosomal DNA.
For 1 it depends on the penetrance model (a score on whether all individuals with the disease allele(s) express the disease phenotype: 1=all, 0.5=some, etc.) along with whether the allele's mode of inheritance is recessive/dominant, X-linked or not, and how consanguineous/inbred the pedigree is.
If I remember it right, if a father/son combo always express the disease allele, then the pedigree is x-linked recessive. If you see an uncle/son combo, and test for it, and the linkage score for the region of interest (the likelihood that the disease travels with the ROI computed over all individuals) goes up, then it's pretty suspect.
For 2, you could see the distribution of alleles without much computation. Siblings are expected to share X%, relatives Y%, unrelated Z%. By fitting to these bands, you could already see if the distribution of alleles was suspect. We never tested for mtDNA though, I don't think there were many chipsets for it back then.
1. Circumstances where both mtDNA and Y chromosome are shared between biological father and pedigreed father. I think the Biblical term is Levirate marriage.
2. Circumstances without Y where maternity is secretly disputable and paternity uncontentious. I think the researcher called this secret adoption.
At distances longer than several generations, is there noise in the measure of autosomal matches such that you cannot detect these?
1% of the human genome (3billion bp) is still 30M bases, which could easily contain 1 or 2 genes which you may have genotyped, depending on the resolution of your genotyping chip (usually 10M markers spread out over the entire genome, and usually clustered around variants/genes of interest).
So yeah, even 5 generations down these differences could be detected at the variant level. Even at 10, you could still _theoretically_ find differences.
I stress theoretically, because the chance of you having all the individuals from a pedigree genotyped at the same time using the same tech (and thus the same subset of common genotypes to compare) is slim to none.
I'd say 5 generations is a rough rule of thumb where the signal is not that much higher than the noise.
But then the Himba have a high level of extra-pair paternity (EPP). How does this make sense evolutionarily? Maybe a high level of EPP means that more members of the community share your genes? Which gives you an incentive to care for offspring that are fathered by another man (you and that man may share genes to begin with).
Maybe this reduces violence between individuals, which in turn reduces violence more socially? A more peaceful kinship group may have a competitive evolutionary advantage in the long term.
Given the levels of gendered and sexual violence I've seen in many societies, I can see several advantages to the Himba way.
Of course I'm just speculating.
Like most people, Himba men mostly adopt the norms of their culture, and structure the way they think about the world through that lens. For a Himba man, it is normal to love children that were born via another father. Half of them were raised by fathers who were not their own bio-parents! It doesn't represent a threat to his masculinity, because his own father and every man he knows in his social groups has children this way, too. He never expected otherwise. And it doesn't even reduce his number of offspring, because he's having extra-pair children with other women, too.
In the west, on the other hand, the offense in cases of "extra-pair paternity" (to use the article's term) is not usually about genetics. It's a social violation. It offends the husband because his wife has broken an implicit or explicit promise of exclusivity. He can't go have kids himself outside the pair without committing another social violation. It's not normal or accepted in his world, so it makes cultural sense to react negatively to it.
You can ask why Western culture and Himba culture differ in how they think about these things, but then you're not really doing raw EvoPsych - you're doing cultural anthropology.
- Belgium and Netherlands: ~1.5%
- 19th century European city dwellers: ~6%
- Certain tribes in Namibia with cultural multiple partners: ~48%
City dwelling was always higher than rural in Western cultures.
Here's a thought: maybe it has to do with consent?
Oh, and unrealistic, idealising nurture due to unwillingness to look at nature. That nurtures problems, we do not deal with rational, instead we accumulate problems and shift the blame, until the buildup throws society on the side.
Oh, and if invisible nature, we pretend to nurture, then blame the failings on the individual.
Yes, im fun at parties.
Also the conclusion is that the rate of unrelated children is remarkably low not high.