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How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

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Re: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

#31

There's lots of variations across cultures. You could make the (lazy) generalization that men do not want to invest in propagating genes belonging to another man. 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 fat…

Sometimes it helps to just remember that we're talking about people.

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.

Re: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

#32

There's lots of variations across cultures. You could make the (lazy) generalization that men do not want to invest in propagating genes belonging to another man. 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 fat…

Are the Himba known for high investment in their offspring? Do they send their children to school and college for two decades? Or do they put them to work immediately?

Re: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

#33
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The selfish gene states quite well why this happens and is normal in the statistical sense. I don't think a lot of people today would challenge dawkins on that.

Are you kidding? It's a political pamphlet, many scientists have aimed criticism at it.

In my headcanon the downvotes are from dudes that read The Selfish Gene in high school and got some feeling of epiphany, and now did a bit of web searching that angered them.

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.

Re: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

#34
post #28
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is nuts is that in some countries, its illegal for the father to unilaterally have a paternity test done. I know for France that if you have it done unilaterally and thus illegally you are still on the hook for child support until a legal test is done, which either the mother needs to agree to or needs to be agreed on by the court. IMO a paternity test should just be mandated to be done immediately at birth (or…

I disagree here. Blood tests done at birth are done specifically for the benefit of the child (and with minimal risk to the child). A paternity test has no benefit for the child (it doesn't tell you who the father is, simply who the father isn't) and a ~1% risk of harm to the child. The period immediately after birth is one of the most dangerous times for children, and we (should) specifically take action to protect…

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Re: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

#35
post #28
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is nuts is that in some countries, its illegal for the father to unilaterally have a paternity test done. I know for France that if you have it done unilaterally and thus illegally you are still on the hook for child support until a legal test is done, which either the mother needs to agree to or needs to be agreed on by the court. IMO a paternity test should just be mandated to be done immediately at birth (or…

I disagree here. Blood tests done at birth are done specifically for the benefit of the child (and with minimal risk to the child). A paternity test has no benefit for the child (it doesn't tell you who the father is, simply who the father isn't) and a ~1% risk of harm to the child. The period immediately after birth is one of the most dangerous times for children, and we (should) specifically take action to protect…

[flagged]

Re: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

#36
post #25
post #7

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.

It may be normal, but is it productive? What will you do? Stop loving your child, punish the mother? You may be better off not knowing the answer and being OK with that.

there's a four letter word to describe this mentality. I'm not going to say it, but you know what it is.

Re: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

#37
post #7

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.

I agree with you. The article also attempts to minimize the importance of the issue, saying "stop panicking [...] it’s not the problem you think it is".

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.

Re: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

#38
post #6

Back when I used to do pedigree analysis, the general rule of thumb was 1/10 chance that the father wasn't what was stated in the pedigree. 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…

Thanks, that answers my questions about how pedigrees were preprocessed for a study like this: 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…

It's been a while and I was always a bit shaky on the actual genetics, so hopefully an actual expert can weigh in here, but as far as I remember -

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.

Re: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

#39
post #23
post #6

Back when I used to do pedigree analysis, the general rule of thumb was 1/10 chance that the father wasn't what was stated in the pedigree. 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…

What is nuts is that in some countries, its illegal for the father to unilaterally have a paternity test done. I know for France that if you have it done unilaterally and thus illegally you are still on the hook for child support until a legal test is done, which either the mother needs to agree to or needs to be agreed on by the court. IMO a paternity test should just be mandated to be done immediately at birth (or…

In most countries, including France, you are on the hook for child support if you named yourself as a parent. In France you may contest it by applying to court during the first five years, after that only a prosecutor can take the steps to revoke that status. Between the unfairness of making an adult pay for a child who isn't theirs, and that of throwing an innocent child into financial distress, protecting the child takes priority everywhere I know of.

Re: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the modern world, I don't see how one can be obsessed about such a thing... 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. D…

Those who would be obsessed would totally grab a bit of hair and mail it off to some country where such things are legal and get the answer in an email...

Of course you can, but how many courts will side with you based on unlawfully obtained evidence?
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