The language usage is a bit weird.
It seems that caring at all if your child is yours is "obsession" and "fixation".
Quite judgemental word choice for something rather normal.
Quite judgemental word choice for something rather normal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.