My sister and I both look like our mother and almost nothing like our father. There’s no doubt about paternity, but it feels strange to look at my father and see almost no resemblance. Although I suppose it’s not all that unusual. I look a little like his father. Maybe I have a few traits that skip a generation.
Yep. I have a girlfriend who’s daughter is adopted. They really look alike. My son is Korean, and you can see his Dad in him (and probably some of me as well). We know genes aren’t shared in these relationships, but proximity makes human beings adapt behavior similarities - and we are pattern recognizers as human beings. In most of the adoptive families I know, the kids share physical similarities that everyone grabs on - even transcending race.
For years I saw very little of my husband or I in our bio daughter - but she did look like my sister. As she gets older (she is five) she is looking more and more like me.
Both of my kids look like me. My SO jokes that I didn’t even need him to conceive our son, because that baby is a little carbon copy of me. I could have just cloned myself.
The only thing my older son has that resembles his father is brown eyes. And that trait resembles about half the white males in the world, I’d guess.
Somebody mentioned that I must have “strong genes,” whatever that means. At least now I know what I’d have looked like if I’d been a boy.
I am the image of my Dad, feminized. My brother looks like our mother’s father.
My Dad does not think that my brother is not his son…seems to me that if this is an issue for speculation (not idle speculation), that some serious talking and testing needs to occur.
When we took our newborn first-born for her very first visit to the pediatrcian, the doctor looked at me, then my wife, then my daughter, then looked at us all again and finally said, “She has a very interesting blend of genes.”
One of my twin sons looks nothing like me. I mean, NOTHING. He has a long, lanky frame, dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin. There are absolutely no facial similarities. If he weren’t left-handed, I’d swear there was nothing from my genetic pool in there.
In fairness, he looks nothing like his mother, either. Except for the ears (Mrs. Kunilou’s family has very distinctive ears.)
The Maury Povich show has become dedicated to examining this very issue. Constantly.
“That ain’t my kid Maury, look at his ears! My ears ain’t that big Maury, that ain’t mine nawww”
1 hour of paternity/appearance case studies twice a day 5 days a week. That’s a lot of research, and I’m pretty comfortable saying no, there’s not always that similarity in appearance. As can be seen in the infamous “2 white parents with a totally black baby” case, in which HE WAS ACTUALLY THE FATHER. OH MY GOD!
I love the Maury show
I’ve an odd set of “ring” toes, which appears to be a genetic condition, and has been passed through my Mother’s family. All of the relatives I have that are blood related through her have this odd set of toes. Described in this thread.
I keep joking (it’s really just a joke) with Mrs. Butler that if the baby doesn’t come out with crooked toes, off to the testing lab it goes. She replies that if it doesn’t have them, she’ll fix it with a hammer. All good natured banter, but a pretty good indicator of paternity in my case.
As for me, there is no doubt that I’m my father’s son. Match up a photo of him at any age from about 13 onwards with a photo of me at the same age, and you have a near identical match.
Thankfully, I’ve not inherited some of his health issues from what we can see so far.
I have custody of my three sons. The oldest child my ex-wife told me before he was born that she cheated on me and that he was likely not mine biologically. He doesn’t resemble me but does resemble his mother. However he acts like me. I haven’t taken a paternity test. Unfortuantely last year some a$$ on my exes side of the family took it upon themselves to tell him. We had a conversation where I told him I was the only father that mattered but if it was important to him we could take “The Test”, he hasn’t mentioned it since.
The other two are vitual clones of me. Stuffy2 so much so that his last school picure looks exactly like one of mine. The youngest is darker but still obviously mine, in fact when they were younger everyone thought Stuffy2 and the youngest were twins despite there age difference.
My daughter looks a lot like my husband. She has his blue eyes, his stubby little nose, , and there is a picture of her sitting on his knee where it looks almost like I shrunk his face, removed the bearda nd put it on a little girl body she resembles him so much. Her hair is lighter than mine like his was in his childhood pictures. Strangers tell us how much she looks like him.
She does not share his DNA.
Now that is excellent parenting. [little hijack] I’ve read some of your threads about your ex and your kids, and I think you set quite the high standard for fatherhood. Good job. [/little hijack]
It seems like it would be an evolutionary disadvantage if the lineage of all offspring could be easily determined by physical examination. If Early Woman was catting around on Early Man and got knocked up by someone else on the sly, she would stop getting support from Early Man the minute he could see that the kid wasn’t his.
Isn’t it theorized that this reproductive deception is also why human women don’t have visible estrus?
A very close friend of mine has three boys. He’s divorced now, but he married the woman after she told him she was pregnant. They had been casually dating, but broke up, and like a week later, she comes to him saying she was pregnant, so they end up having a shotgun wedding.
Anyway, they had two more kids and they are 5, 7 and 9 now. I recently looked at pictures of them for the first time. The two younger boys look exactly alike and look just like their dad (tannish skin, brown hair, brown eyes, etc.) The oldest, however, has bluish eyes, reddish hair, light skinned and freckles. He does not resemble his dad at all or his siblings at all.
I really think that the oldest boy is not his. If he only had the one son, I might not think that, but considering the other boys look just alike, and look like their dad, it makes the oldest boy stick out like a sore thumb.
When you have several siblings and one doesn’t look like the others or like the father, it definitely raises red flags.
My dad is Irish-and you can tell, black hair, blue eyes and skin that doesn’t so much tan as turn pink and blister. He weighed under 120lbs until he was 40 and middle-aged spread set it.
My mother is half jewish- and you can tell, dark, curly hair, olive skin, almond eyes. She has a beautiful, curvy figure.
My sisters and I have darker skin and hair than my mum, we all have brown eyes and her figure-dad’s wiry frame and high metabolism skipped us all out. I have my dad’s ears and nose (which make me look even less Irish for some reason). Neither of my sisters resemble him at all, except in temperament and their ability to drink me and my mother under the table.
My sisters and I don’t really resemble our dad that much. One sister and I resemble my mom’s side of the family so much that at least one person that we didn’t know (but who knew our mom and her family) came up to us and asked if we were related to our mom. There is some small and subtle physical resemblance to my dad’s side of the family, but that’s it.
Most of the resemblances we share with our dad’s side of the family are other things—we inherited his side of the family’s need for glasses, some minor allergies, tendency towards acne, that sort of thing. We’re also all a bunch of geeks—definitely comes from his side of the family.
I looked a bit like my dad when I was a kid, but not very much. I looked a bit like my mom, but not very much. The older I get, though, the more I look like my mother and grandfather. If my dad met me for the first time from the age of 15 on, he could make a reasonable argument that I wasn’t his because I looked nothing like him. Really, the only physical characteristic I share with him is the color pattern of my eyes, which is distinctive but by no means unique. My brother, otoh, looks just like Dad (except for the eye color, which is all Mom’s family) and always has. We have brown hair in common. That’s it.
I’d have to argue with nyctea’s position that one kid who doesn’t look like the others is a warning sign. I don’t know many siblings who look much alike at all, really, and given the truly staggering size of the human genome and different ways those genes can be recombined that makes perfect sense. The only truly strong resemblence I can think of is my mother and her younger sister, who both mostly take after Grandma. (But Mom has Grandpa’s chin, nose, and height, which made them look much less alike when they were kids.) Her older sister doesn’t look anything like them, except for having the dark hair, and the only relative she resembles is Grandpa’s mother.
Lack of physical resemblance does not equal lack of parentage. My older daughter does not look anything like me. At all. And yes, I know she’s really mine; I’m her MOTHER, after all. I was there at the time. Awake.
Judging only on physical characteristics is risky and isn’t always accurate. However, there has never been any doubt that mom is my mom and dad is my dad. The adoption argument never worked for me. 
My mom has reddish brown hair ( dark) and hazel eyes, and my dad has brown hair and blue-green eyes. My brother and I both have dark brown eyes, his are practically black, so is his hair. My hair is identical to my mother’s, and my eyes are eerily the same color as my hair.
When it comes to body structure, I’m a female version of my dad, and I have a button version of his nose. However, both my brother and I share my mother’s facial features and expressions. Especially our glare. 
My brother is definitely my mother’s son - both on looks and personality. I however, am a mix. When I was a kid, I looked much more like my dad than my mom, but when I hit my teens I started to look more like her. I definitely got my bustiness from my her.
I am such a mix though. I’ve been told I have my moms independence and determination, and my dads sense of humor and relaxed attitude. When I stand next to my mom, I look a lot like her. When I stand next to my dad, I look a lot like him.
It all depends, its a different formula for every person.
I don’t have any of my bio-dad’s features, but I have the same body build as his sisters.
When I was out with my stepfather, people who didn’t know I was not biiologically his would comment on how much I looked like him, which I found insulting because I hated the abusive, controlling assgasket.
My sister is his biologically. Even though we only have one parent in common, we look incredibly alike. I’m shorter and stockier, but our features so strongly resemble each other that anyone looking at us would think we had both the same parents instead of just one. We both also strongly resemble our mom and maternal grandfather, facial feature-wise.
So, I would say no, physical resemblance is not an indicator of paternity.
I think if DNA testing were not a possibility, it would be better to look at whether a child who had no resemblance to the father shared any physical traits that ran in his family (like me sharing my Aunts Jane and Jennifer’s stocky build, or maybe a boy would have ears like Uncle LeRoy’s, something like that).