A friend of my Dad’s did a study of male patella syndrome when he was in college. I won’t name the town, or it’s religious and ethnic make-up, but let’s just say it was surprising that he discovered one in four children did not have their mother’s husband for their father. This was 35 years ago, but I’ve heard other studies have been done which show this pattern to be generally true. What’s the dope?
How did he acquire this information? I have seen criticism of these studies alledging that they refer to any child which does not have two parents with the last name on its birth certificate to be “illegitimate”. So, for, instance, if Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were to have a child, it would be “illegitimate” under this definition because Nicole did not take Tom’s last name.
The “data” for the pattern of the patella’s on a man’s finger nails is carried exclusively in the Y chromosome. I know you need to look at three generations to get all the required data but I forget why (no pun). I mean, generally, the father doesn’t know the kid is not his.
There was recently a show on TLC which had a few comments about this. They said that someone (the Janus sex study people I think) did a study in the 1950s that showed about 10% of children in the US do not belong to the husband of their mothers. In other words, the wife cheated on the husband and the baby was really the milkman’s kid. Anyway they repeated the study in the 1990s and got the same 10% result.
I found this rather shocking, and went to work and asked some of my coworkers about it. The men were shocked and didn’t believe that such a thing could be true. The women, all 5 that I asked, said “yea 10% sounds about right.” And I didn’t ask the women as a group. I asked them individually.
I’m assuming that you don’t want to mention race because the people in your fathers study were black. Either way, you should remember that all social problems are increased among poor people, and 50% of black americans live below the povery level, while only 10% of white americans live below the poverty level.
I was born in 1945. As soon as my mother found out that she was pregnant, she split and left the state (and husdand) they were living in and came to California. She divorced him “in absentia”, or what ever it was called. The divorce became final after I was born, but didn’t know about me. The rest of our family said he was a real butt. Never met the guy, but I believe them.
My real dad was my step-father, who my mom married while was still an infant. He was a good father.
Weird shit happened in the “Good Old Days” too.
So, I guess you could call me “illegitimate”. I hope so. 
Peace,
mangeorge
Hi, - I’m not responding to the intent of your post, only to the confusion therein. The patella is the kneecap. One does not have patellas on one’s fingernails. What I think you may have meant was lunule. That is a general term for lunar shaped marks, e.g. the half-moon markings on some people’s fingernails. There are some genetic connections to the presence and absence of these markings, and that’s possibly what your dad was investigating.
Well, heck. If I have to let the cat out of the bag, the population studied was mostly Italian and Irish Catholics.
And I’ll try to find out what the right word is. I must have heard it wrong – but you’ve got the basic idea CC.
I sure hope not, because I’m the fourth kid in my family! :eek:
I guess I misinterpreted the OP. I thought it meant that of all children, one fourth are illegitimate. But apparently it meant that of all children born to married couples, one fourth are not the child of their mother’s husband. The latter is much more surprising, and I find labdude’s figure of 10% much more believable. For one fourth to be the result of affairs, it would not be enough for one fourth of women to cheat on their husbands. Either one fourth of wives have sex only with their lovers, and never with their husbands, or half have sex with their husbands half the time, or all have sex with their husbands three fourths of the time, or some combination of these possibilities.
I had another thought last night. In the “olden days” there were no birth control pills, and no welfare state. Many poor married women engaged in occasional prostitution to get food or rent money. The two examples I can think of are BB King and Studs Lonagan (sp). BB King in his biography admitted that his mother occasionally turned to prostitution when his famlily needed money. Studs Lonagan is a book/movie that takes place in the 1930s. A central plot twist in the movie is when a woman prostitutes herself to get rent money, because she lost the regular rent money and didn’t want to tell her husband and get a beating.
I seem to recall reading in several texts the 1-in-4 statistic. Sorry- no cites: this was about 10 years ago when I was an anthrolopogy master’s student. I was researching female ovulation and how it is unique in animals in that it is “hidden.” The effects of hidden ovulation are quite profound once you start thinking about it. Anyway- in the course of my research I came across several studies that were similar to this one: not related to studying paternity, but were compromised/affected because the Daddy of the children was not the biological father.
Makes me want to go home and sift through my old papers…
A similar statistic was that one of five children born in the world are Chinese. That’s why my mom stopped at 4. :D:D
This 50% figure is out of date. I believe it was true back in the 70s. Currently, the poverty rate among blacks is about 25%.
As far as fatherhood rates, in some monogamous birds, as many as 30% of the chicks have a biological father who is not the mate of their mother. Here, for example, is a report on black-throated blue warblers, where they find that the reason for this high percentage is that the females all become fertile at the same time. So if a male is staying, he’s not guarding his own mate. This doesn’t apply to humans directly, since we don’t have a synchronous breeding season.
Straying, not staying. (I think I just made an inverse freudian slip…)
I think some of the wording is a bit vague. Does this include children of single mothers (who are certainly not the children of the mothers’ husbands)? Or does the 25%/10% figure look only at children of married couples? Also, it’s unclear that not being the husband’s biological father means: 1) born outside of marriage or 2) the result of an affair. Neither is a forgone conclusion.
As an aside, I really dislike the word “illegitimate” used to describe children of unmarried parent(s).
I meant as the result of the affair.
I’ve also seen this in News Of The Weird. Apparently in Florida, Judges are requiring men to continue to pay child support even though it turns out the child is not theirs, only because they either a) already started paying because they thought they were the father or b) the couple got divorced and the child was concieved during the marriage. The percentage there was 26%, IIRC.
Married or unmarried, what this basically means is a situation where women lie (or don’t know) who’s child they are carrying 1/4 of the time.