Paternity Rate
razib | March 7, 2010The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 1:
Bizarrely, Jonathan Zittrain turns out to be my cousin -- which is odd because I have known him for some time and he is also very active in the online civil rights world. How we came to learn this will be the first of my postings on the future of DNA sequencing and the company 23andMe.
Just read the whole thing. This is really a matter of the humanities, not science. Specifically, the almost mystical significance people seem to put into the finding that they share genetic ancestry with people, even people who they knew and were friendly with…
razib | October 17, 2009In the comments of this post I mildly disagreed with Eric Michael Johnson that humans are "polygynous" and the relevance of the fact that "estimates range between 5-10% that all children have been sired by men other than a woman's partner."
The human monogamy vs. polygamy argument is long-standing, with anthropologists on both sides. Myself, I'm not sure what I believe, because I think binning into two categories is simplistic. In terms of evolutionary biology societal ideals matter less than the relationship of the distribution of reproductive output of males to females.
Rather, I want to…
razib | March 30, 2009A few years ago a paper came out, How Well Does Paternity Confidence Match Actual Paternity?:
Evolutionary theory predicts that males will provide less parental investment for putative offspring who are unlikely to be their actual offspring. Crossâculturally, paternity confidence (a man's assessment of the likelihood that he is the father of a putative child) is positively associated with men's involvement with children and with investment or inheritance from paternal kin. A survey of 67 studies reporting nonpaternity suggests that for men with high paternity confidence rates of nonpaternity…