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Genetic Studies Prove Cuckolded Fathers Are Rare In Human Populations
HughPickens.com writes: A common urban myth is that many fathers are cuckolded into raising children that genetically are not their own -- a fear fueled by the paternity tests that have become a standard staple of gossip magazines, talk shows, and TV series. Now, Carl Zimmer reports at the New York Times that our obsession with cuckolded fathers is seriously overblown as a number of recent genetic studies have challenged the notion that mistaken paternity is commonplace. It wasn't until DNA sequencing emerged in the 1990s that paternity tests earned the legal system's confidence. Labs were able to compare DNA markers in children to those of their purported fathers to see if they matched. As the lab tests piled up, researchers collated the results and came to a startling conclusion: 10 percent to 30 percent of the tested men were not the biological fathers of their children. There's only one problem with these previous studies: the results didn't come from a random sample of people. The people who ordered the tests already had reason to doubt paternity.
In a 2013 study, Dr. Maarten H.D. Larmuseau used Belgium's detailed birth records to reconstruct large family genealogies reaching back four centuries. Then the scientists tracked down living male descendants and asked to sequence their Y chromosomes. Y chromosomes are passed down in almost identical form from fathers to sons. Men who are related to the same male ancestor should also share his Y chromosome, providing that some unknown father didn't introduce his own Y [chromosome] somewhere along the way. Comparing the chromosomes of living related men, Larmuseau came up with a cuckoldry rate of less than 1 percent. Similar studies have generally produced the same low results in such countries as Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as agricultural villages in Mali. "The observed low EPP rates challenge the idea that women routinely 'shop around' for good genes by engaging in extra-pair copulations," concludes Larmuseau . "The (potential) genetic benefits of extra-pair children are unlikely to be offset by the (potential) costs of being caught, particularly in such a long-lived species as humans with heavy offspring dependence and massive parental investment."
In a 2013 study, Dr. Maarten H.D. Larmuseau used Belgium's detailed birth records to reconstruct large family genealogies reaching back four centuries. Then the scientists tracked down living male descendants and asked to sequence their Y chromosomes. Y chromosomes are passed down in almost identical form from fathers to sons. Men who are related to the same male ancestor should also share his Y chromosome, providing that some unknown father didn't introduce his own Y [chromosome] somewhere along the way. Comparing the chromosomes of living related men, Larmuseau came up with a cuckoldry rate of less than 1 percent. Similar studies have generally produced the same low results in such countries as Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as agricultural villages in Mali. "The observed low EPP rates challenge the idea that women routinely 'shop around' for good genes by engaging in extra-pair copulations," concludes Larmuseau . "The (potential) genetic benefits of extra-pair children are unlikely to be offset by the (potential) costs of being caught, particularly in such a long-lived species as humans with heavy offspring dependence and massive parental investment."
They have kids with the high testosterone alpha males, and then some of them go on to do menial work, turn out to be aggressive, or they simply grow tired of each other after some years. But their first choice is usually some animalistic notion of "good genes".
And then later when they're older and wiser they marry the type of beta male they had friendzoned before, because they're more peaceful, less risk-taking and often smarter and more successul.
Read: Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.
While that is idealistic and noble you will find that the vast majority of people care very much so. The thought of raising someone else's child typically has associations of infidelity. Society in general is monogamous even if most humans do cheat on a partners at least once at some point in life.
Perhaps all genetics have "bugs" yours might not be worse than the unknown and there is an advantage of knowing about such "bugs". Even if yours are severe the adopted might be worse. No real guarantees.
I believe that from inception humans are born to compete. To be better. From the fertilization of an egg to achieving anything in life. Sure there is a lot of bias and corruption and some unworthy humans have a head start in a position of privilege that it seems plain unfair.
So most humans, as vessels for our genes are often very precious about us and what is our and of our own. The way you live, where you live, who your parents and grandparents are (genetically) shapes you as a person and your offspring.
There are particular sets of difficulties when a child is known to be of a different parent. From social stigma to tendencies to biological/genetic differences that one parent's ego can find extremely challenging.
While many women would choose to adopt, especially if they cannot have children of their own many men will give serious consideration to changing their to one that is fertile rather than adopt or at least have a surrogate mother as they want the child's gene to be of their own.
We are not in the group because we love the group. We are in the group because we love ourselves. The group helps protect us, has economies of scale and sense of community. We would save our children first and foremost.
While you may not care and I applaud you for the often believed enlightened position I care. I believe the vast majority of people care.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
... your dna is broken.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Your DNA cares. You serve largely to pass it on, and if the kid isn't yours, and you pick up on the clues, you're probably hardwired to reject the little mite.
There is more to it, of course, but that would all seem to make sense from a DNA/evolution point of view.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
In the grand scope of things, your DNA is basically diluted to nothing after a couple of generations.
The ideas and values you imprint on the kids you raise have a much greater chance of surviving and creating a legacy for you.
That's not to say that you should ever accept your spouse banging other people without your consent, but the DNA argument is somewhat flawed.
Eat the rich.
Who cares if it ain't yours?
So you have no reservations about an alpha male copulating with a desirable female before you do, and then leaving you with the emotional and financial burden of his conquest (in the form of offspring)? I'm sure every guy who has ever ejaculated in a woman who wasn't his wife has at least once thought "This could cause complications.....but that's ok, some schmuck will come along and pick up the pieces." You're ok being that hypothetical schmuck?
That would be more accurate if you change the bolded parts to "Someone else's wife".
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Wow. I hope you have zero children in real life. You would be a disaster to society.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Adoption is a great example of a child having an upbringing that is likely superior to the one she would've had biologically, and it makes sense that a woman would seek the security of her best mating even after she was pregnant with the child of an inferior mate.
Most importantly, there are seven billion virtual copies of you and your gene set... your genetic outcome is not as special as your psyche may need it to be.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
As is often the case, it's the coverup that tends to be the problem.
The reward for 'successfully propagated genes, is a winner at evolution' is often pretty unimpressive from the perspective of the individual(in situations where dying horribly to save your children or other genetic kin is evolutionarily advantageous, often downright lousy); so 'yeah; but that's not an adaptive strategy!!' is largely irrelevant when choosing between plans. You'll be dead inside a century regardless of whether your genes find new hosts or not, so it just doesn't matter much.
Adoptive parents, cases of material-mixups at fertility clinics, and cuckolds are all in exactly the same situation in terms of genetic inheritance; but the first group explicitly chose that outcome; the second didn't choose it; but didn't suffer it because of malice(much less malice from their partner, which is usually a worse problem than incompetence by some random lab tech); and the third group is in that situation because they are being lied to, on a matter usually considered important, by a partner. The genetic 'problem' is largely irrelevant; but the 'substantial probability of deliberate deception by a trusted insider' problem is usually a pretty dire sign.
Lets put this awkward question to rest and do a paternity test on children immediately after they're born. If the mother lies on the birth certificate saying that the father is so and so and the test says otherwise then the husband is free to leave the wife. While taking the majority of the resources (and house) if he so desires
The crime of paternity fraud is on the same level as violent rape and should be prosecuted as such. There is no greater shame than knowing that the child you've been raising isn't yours.
You and your personal DNA would seemingly benefit from disseminating that seed as often and as widely as possible. The clear winner? Children from good homes and stable situations.
There are billions of near copies. Any individual's DNA, lost forever to humanity, is not a tragedy... no matter our inflated self-worth.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
the radical difference between these results and bloodbank studies - which have universally agreed with the results from paternity tests despite having a random sampling.
It also does not factor in Kinsey's findings about adultery and child-conception which strongly supports the idea that most children conceived from affairs would be conceived with somebody closely related to the legal husband, that is to say, somebody likely to share his Y-chromosome.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
That is incorrect. Paternity testing is legal in France. Permission must be obtained from the person being tested (or their parent in the case of a child), or it can be forced via court order. So the only real difference is that you can't legally just grab some hair follicle off your partner's hairbrush and get them tested without their knowledge or consent.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
In the grand scope of things, your DNA is basically diluted to nothing after a couple of generations.
The ideas and values you imprint on the kids you raise have a much greater chance of surviving and creating a legacy for you.
In the grand scope of things your ideas and values are also diluted to nothing in a few generations as well. The ideas and values of the society you live in probably have a much greater effect than you do on your great grand children and you can forget about much beyond that. But it doesn't really matter, unless you're someone especially famous (like king tut or a president), you'll be completely forgotten in about 5 generations and even if you are someone famous, you're still stuck on this little blue dot that is going nowhere fast and everything you are will disappear into nothingness and the universe doesn't care.
Submitter says cuckoldry is "rare" and "Larmuseau came up with a cuckoldry rate of less than 1 percent," with a link, but if you actually on the link it says 1-2% (from the abstract).
::sigh:: I can answer my own question here. In the "results" section it gives, "rate of 0.91% (95% CI: 0.41–1.75%)." Note to submitter: this does not mean less than 1%. This means 1-2%, as given in the abstract. This is part of why abstracts exist - to give results in an unambiguous manner, so that they're not misinterpreted. Maybe it's not a big deal here, but it can be sometimes.
"In many European countries, paternity tests are illegal"
That is what is technically known as bollocks.
The posting was misleading. Paternity testing is not illegal in France, but it's regulated and needs either the consent of both (presumed) parents or a court order (which seems to be the same as where I am, in the UK). If there's a dispute over child support payments then a court order would be the way to go.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
There is more to it, of course, but that would all seem to make sense from a DNA/evolution point of view.
Yup, there IS more to this.
The thing is, we didn't evolve as loners.
We did evolve living in small packs/tribes of more or less related individuals. (Or extended families a little bit later in history).
That adds a lot of complexity to the scheme.
- That's why we evolved altruism (the individual you're helping is most likely to be from your tribe, and you're likely to be related to it. By being nice to people, you *are* actually helping passing around more copy of your genes (including the genes that shaped said altruism behaviour). You just happen not to be the actual vessel passing around the genes).
- That's why adoption is a works very well with humans (the nearest child without parents is highly likely to be related to you. by raising the child, you increase the number of copies of your gene in the pool).
- That's why we evolved grand-mothers (in most species, genetic defect that manifest after the end of the reproductive life aren't much selected against: by the time the age-related disease sets in, copie of the gene have already been passed. In most speice of apes to which we are closely related, senility is the normal way of things, nearly all ageing apes get senile. Not so in humans: senility are some specific diseases, but lots of individuals age nicely without getting alzheimer's, parkinson's, etc. because then these ageing individuals can help taking care of their grand-kids, and again helping more copies of their genes survive (including the beneficial gene that help in late age) even if they are not anymore biologically able to pass themselves first-hand).
- That's saddly why we evolved "uncanny valley" (it also helps forming a genetic ground for xenophobia: if it looks almost like, but a little bit of what you've used to see while growing up, chances are that it comes from a different pack/tribe to which you aren't related to and is a competitor that you need to kill with fire).
(NOTE: I'm not condoning xenophobia in any way. I'm just giving explanation why we did evolve such a stupid behaviour and "uncanny valley" might be the mechanism supporting it. It only explain, not justify. We must understand these mechanism and adapt to the fact that modern highly mobile and interconnect civilisation has grown to the point where "pack/tribe" covers about a dozen billion individual spread on a whole planet surface, and we must all stick together if we want to have a chance at surviving as a specie at whole)
And countless other example of special behaviour in humans that might seem counter intuitive in the first place, but start to make sense once you look at them through the lens of small pack/tribes/extended families (situation in which we've spent most of our evolution time).
You can find other similar behaviour in other animals that live in groups, from cats (not very social animals, but still can live in colonies) all the way up to ants and bees (all these kind of behaviours turned up to eleven. to the point where only 1 single individual - the queen - actually passes here gene around actively, and every other last one in the colony is indirectly helping more copies of their genes indirectly by helping their siblings - which makes even more sense when your do the mendelian genetics maths on their peculiar reproductive cycle)
Your DNA cares. You serve largely to pass it on, and if the kid isn't yours, and you pick up on the clues, you're probably hardwired to reject the little mite.
On the other hand, if the kid isn't yours, chances are high (back in the pack/tribe era of human evolution) that it comes from another individual of the pack to which you're related. By raising the kid, you're still helping passing more copies of your genes around. You just happen not to be the actual individual who inserted these specific copies of the gene into your mate.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The unique traits that any single individual passes on are 50% diluted each successive generation, rendering them to hereditary noise within just a few hundred years. The general pool of humanity will produce a virtual double of you at regular intervals in case the environment calls for it as a survival advantage.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
There's some truth to the notion that monogamous species are attracted to two types of mates: alpha, and provider. This is due to monogamy evolving only when two parents are needed to care for the offspring in order for it to survive. There's also evidence that the female in the monogamy will often attempt to be seeded by an alpha in secret. If her provider mate finds out he will abandon the nest. Yes, I'm mostly talking about birds. While humans have evolved monogamy as well, we have this pesky little thing called "a high level of consciousness". This makes it very difficult to throw around generalisations and make assumptions.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I have, so far, not rejected my adopted child.
And if your argument is that adoption vs cuckolding is different because of consent, your DNA is far smarter and more sentient than mine.
Humans generally do serial monogamy.
Not entirely clear. I mean we certainly do to some extent, but the penis is kind of shaped like a cylindrical squeegee making it somewhat effective at removing other men's sperm, so it appears that non manogamy is in our very recent evolutionary history.
However it is only recently that societies stopped punishing infidelity
There's a reasonably good chance that from an evoloutionary point of view that it's only recently that it started being punished.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You're right, of course. Heck, I don't even know the names of my great-great-grandparents, not to mention what they did in life or even where they lived. We pass down some information through the generations, but it gets severely diluted.
Of course, you can either see this as reason to be the best person that you can while you live, or as a reason to be a hedonistic self-centered shitlord. In a hundred years, all will be forgotten.
Eat the rich.
The personal issue with being a cuckold is that child is not yours and could be taken away from you. Adoption, while not perfect, gives legal rights in the matter.
most humans do cheat on a partners at least once at some point in life
Cite?