Who's the daddy?
| 12 May, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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In all the excitement, you might have missed another paradigm being overthrown. Faculty Member (and Open Access advocate) Etienne Joly of the CNRS writes about the myth of paternity. It’s generally believed that a considerable proportion of children are not the biological offspring of their legal fathers. Estimates range from 10% in the UK to 30% in the US. The actual evidence for that number is somewhere between ‘shaky’ and ‘non-existent’. But Etienne managed to track down a paper, published in the little-known People & Place, that puts the number at no more than 3% and probably around 1%.
Talking of parentage, there have been big changes at The Scientist, recently. The magazine is now published by Faculty of 1000, and you’ll see more F1000 content in it as time goes by. The old F1000 blog is now defunct, replaced by Naturally Selected. We’re also moving the more ‘bloggy’ content from The Scientist’s main site to here, as you may have noticed already.
We’re very fortunate to have a friend in Andrzej Krauze. Andrezj has designed a cartoon to celebrate this blog, and we’ve had it printed on sweatshirts, as demonstrated by Eva (who is never going to forgive me for this):
And here’s Georg:
And the good news is that you can have one too! Although we’re saving the bulk of these highly desirable items for our FMs, I’m going to give one away each month to what, in my opinion, is the best comment posted here on Naturally Selected.
How can you resist that?
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Hm, interesting article… I remember hearing “about 5% of families” which, for an average family size of two kids, would be 2.5% (if I did that calculation correctly).
Regarding the sweatshirts – very nice. I was slightly confused until I realized it’s not *that* Eva, it’s *another* Eva. Puzzling.
There can only be one.
So… the article is a bit narrative and certainly not a rigorous examination… but the author freely admits that hard data are distinctly lacking. What’s required, obviously, is a very large population-based study – but of course it’s unlikely that (a) anyone would fund it (certainly not conventional funding agencies, nor the stakeholders in the paternity testing business who would stand to lose business if the true rate really is low), and (b) any Research Ethics Board would approve such a study.
Easy to derive such information from any number of large familial disease studies, of course, but those are selected populations anyway, and the ethical considerations still apply (maybe even more so).
None of this speaks to an important aspect of this myth, which is, do the fathers KNOW their children aren’t biologically theirs? And if so, do they care? I can think of a multitude of circumstances in which legal fathers aren’t biologically connected to their offspring that have nothing to do with being deceived by the mother (which is to a certain extent the implication of the urban myth – that cheating is rampant among mothers). Adoption of the mother’s biological children from a previous relationship is one such case; adoption of an unrelated child by either a straight or gay couple is another (in the latter case, you have twice as many unrelated fathers); male infertility in a couple desirous of bearing their own child is another, if donor sperm is the solution. In all three cases the children are accepted and raised by these non-biological fathers without any questions or concerns. It’s also possible for women who meet a new mate after the biological father has left the scene (but before the baby’s birth) to come to an agreement with this man to allow him to become the baby’s “real” father in lieu of a man who has no interest or ability to be a parent. So I don’t really see what the fuss is about.
I’ve never added it up but in our linkages studies we see ~1% where the claimed paternity doesn’t match. There are exceptions to the rule, we had one lady with three children with three claimed fathers and none of the guys who thought they were dads actually were, it was three other guys. Charming lady. The other thing we have noticed is the youngest child is the most common sibling to show non-paternity. Again no statistics just what we have seen & remember over the last couple of decades.
Need to be careful about not comparing apples to oranges! The 30% number in the US comes from years of paternity testing at the level of programs such as “aid to families with dependent children”. In these cases potential fathers named have the opportunity to request paternity testing. 30% of these men turn out not to be the fathers. This is well documented at the county and state level in the US.
In the general population the number 10% comes from work done by geneticists in families with inherited genetic diseases where non-paternity is discovered as part of the clinical diagnostic work up. This number is more anecdotal but if you look at the literature particularly around families with autosomal recessive diseases it is somewhat supportable. Hope this helps!
Whenever I read anything about paternity or think about it, I am taken back to my college days. I was a three letter athlete, good looking and tested in the top 1% tile of aptitude and IQ.
Naturally, sperm banks wanted me. I thought about doing it as an easy way of making money but I had second thoughts. I could have thousands of offspring “out there” but I reasoned, and still reason, “what is the point?” (No pun intended.)
I think my case and many others who didn’t contribute to sperm banks goes a long way to prove that it doesn’t really matter.
I raised a daughter of another man knowing what I was doing and I think environment trumps heredity every time. I love my grand kids a lot more than the natural grandfather does, also. And, quite naturally, they return my love.
Did Hugh Hefner really have the happiest life? (Or the most children?)
Paternity labs, utilized by various courts, for example, probably have broad data. As an attorney working in family and foster care law, I find the 1 to 3% estimate to be feasible.
i want a t-shirt…..