I’ve heard about some statistics about a certain number of children being a result of the mother having cheated, without her partner finding out. How is that possible? Isn’t it in most cases really obvious who the father is? You have looks, personality traits etc…
I’m adopted and was constantly told throughout my childhood how much I resembled my (adoptive) father and had a similar personality.
Well, what if your mother was seeing her husband’s brother on the side? With normal genetic variation I’d say that certain instances of that might be hard to detect casually. You would still resemble the assumed father in some respects, and in real life there are plenty of times where traits skip generations or appear in seemingly random areas on the family tree. I actually look very very much like my father’s father’s father (no, really, if you saw a photo you could mistake him for me in historical costume). My brother looks more like my mother’s father.
Our older daughter is the spirit and image of her mother. No one sees much of me in her, except fo rthat bull-headedness which might be a learned behaviour.
Not all offspring are a smooth blend of their parent’s phenotypes, and families are large and diverse enough to find some relative with almost any given trait a child displays.
It’s sometimes obvious who the father is. I’ve 4 brothers, and none of thus looked much like our father when we were child (one does looks like him now that he’s much older). Frankly, I could have been the official son of about any adult I’ve known and nobody would have batted an eye. Children are almost never obviously looking like their father (or mother, for that matter), despite people searching for and eventually finding similar features.
In fact one of the rare children I remember who looked strikingly like his father was precisely an illegitimate child (and the guy he looked like was the second husband of his official father’s ex).
I get your points, especially if the real father is the husband’s brother. It just seems strange to me that it could happen so often. 1 in 25? So in every school class there is a kid who has another father without knowing it?
I just feel that there more often than not should be some kind of specific physical feature or personality trait that makes it very unlikely for him to be the real father.
Link: One in 25 fathers is not biological parent - study | Children | The Guardian
Why? Our children are individuals and continously surprise us with how different they are from us.
Yeah, this is a figure I’ve heard often. Actually on at least one occasion, I’ve heard a geneticist say that it’s as high as 1 in 5. I don’t think the exact figure is easy to show, but I think it’s pretty clear that it’s common enough.
Well, that’s the difference between science and guessing.
People are always commenting on how much I look like my two sisters, who do not look anything alike. I was raised to believe my father was my biological father.
My blood type indicates that my mother’s husband could not be my biological father. Go figure.
Did you ever suspect he was not your father?
He never wanted to have anything to do with me, but I never suspected that was the reason why.
Selection bias. You only hear about the cases where the differences are obvious and are noticed. You never hear about all the cases where the deception goes unnoticed. Life is like that .
From the English linked article:
Perhaps a more accurate statement might be, “One in 25 children in cases where paternity is suspect turn out to be founded in truth.”
Heh. My husband only slightly resembles his father - that is, I really only see a resemblance if I look closely. However, we were looking at old photographs, and one black-and-white photograph showed my husband, about 13, leaning up against a barn with his brother and sister. However, my husband only has one sister, no brother. The photograph was of his father, down on the farm he grew up at. The resemblance was uncanny - I knew that it was definitely not my husband in the picture, but it easily could have been. Easily.
Also, people tend to have a “type”. So if a woman marries a guy who is tall, thin, and has dark hair, chances are that the guy she cheats with will have similar physical characteristics. So if she had a kid, it will somewhat resemble both of them. It’s not too often that you see somebody cheat on Danny Devito with Shaquille O’neal.
I don’t resemble at all the rest of my immediate family, but look close enough to my brother-in-law that people assume we’re blood brothers. Determining genetics from looks is a crap-shoot.
Sometimes characteristics don’t become apparent until later in life. When we were kids, nobody would have guessed that my brother and I were in any way related, let alone brothers. Now, well into middle age, we look very much alike . . . and not very much like either one of our parents.
So the 1/25 is not a % applied to the general population, only to the subset of the population where people are suspicious about their paternity?
If so, then I would expect then that the % of the general population where paternity is proven to be mistaken, to be very small. If only 4% of those suspecting its wrong, it turns out to actually be wrong. What % of the general population actually suspects their paternity is wrong? Even if it’s 5% of the general population suspect it, then only 0.2% of the general population have an incorrect paternity.
My father had 8 children with three different women. One of his sons looks like him, except he has much paler skin and eyes. One of his daughters looks like him in drag. My “full sister” looks like my mother’s mother’s mother. I look like my mother’s brother (who didn’t look like either of his parents). My late “full brother” looked like a combo of my mom’s parents.
I knew a boy in high school who was of Spanish Sephardic descent. He had three older brothers who were “throw-backs” to a male ancestor who had red curly hair, blue-gray eyes, and pale skin with freckles. The boy I knew looked like his parents but he’s the one who was teased about the milkman and his mother.
My late brother married a woman from Taiwan and they had daughter. When she was born, she looked very Asian, including black spiky hair and the epicanthic fold. As she grew, she looked less and less Asian. Now, no one who hasn’t met her mom realizes she’s half-Taiwanese. Also, folks think her adoptive father, who is of Irish descent, is her bio-dad.
My daughter is an absolute carbon-copy of my wife – we have put pictures of her up against photos of my wife at the same age, and it’s like creating a timewarp. You can SEE very little of me in her physical appearance, aside from one thing – the tone of her skin is very much mine, as well as the way it reacts to the sun. My wife is very fair-skinned, and mine – thanks to a heritage that includes 25% Native American – is darker and more prone to rich Coppertone tans. As well, my daughter’s mannerisms, natural aptitudes, and attitudes are where my influences are most apparent, but those could be less physical and more learned behaviors.
It’s not exactly fair, but sometimes the genetic bouilliabaise grabs a little more from Column A than Column B. I’d be a little askance at the 1 in 5 figure as well.