Comments
The language usage is a bit weird. It seems that caring at all if your child is yours is "obsession" and "fixation".
Quite judgemental word choice for something rather normal.
By failingslowly 2025-03-0712:482 reply I agree with you. The article also attempts to minimize the importance of the issue, saying "stop panicking [...] it’s not the problem you think it is".
Let's assume that their figure of 1% is correct. In the UK in 2021 alone there were 694,685 live births according to Google. That means in one year alone nearly 7,000 children were from "EPP". That's an enormous number of people, mostly men, potentially wrongly pursued for child support, or battling through the courts to be given access to a child that's not theirs, etc.
That strikes me as a hugely important issue.
By crossroadsguy 2025-03-0714:06 In some countries even if the child is biologically not yours you are still supposed to foot the bills.
In the grand scheme of all social issues the UK is beset with, this is small potatoes. It's not hugely important, it's just hugely important to you because it's an emotional issue.
By failingslowly 2025-03-0715:06 Fair point, but then who are either of us to make that judgement? Who are you to say that it's small potatoes?
In my defense, I'd say that the suicide rate for men is 4x that for women, and that a large proportion of suicides come after divorce and loss of access to children. (Sorry for being hand-wavey, but I can't search for the research to back these claims from where I am currently.)
That alone at least backs the case for more research in this area.
By rachofsunshine 2025-03-0711:541 reply I think it's fair to say that there is a subset of people for whom this kind of thing does border on obsession. By analogy, it's normal to care about your weight, but it's still possible for that normal concern to become an anxious obsession that gets blown way out of proportion.
By londons_explore 2025-03-0711:572 reply In the modern world, I don't see how one can be obsessed about such a thing...
Do a DNA test, get answer. Obsession over.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-03-0712:012 reply >In the modern world, I don't see how one can be obsessed about such a thing...
Theres no obsession here, the author was being needlessly hyperbolical to twist the narrative as if the normal behavior of thinking about paternity makes one "obsessive". The way he phrased it makes it sound like it's normal for the paternal side not to care if he's raising his own kin or not.
>Do a DNA test, get answer. Obsession over.
DAN tests without your partner's consent or a court order, are not legal in several countries, like France for example. So you might never know if your partner doesn't want you to know or you don't have proof of adultery to show the court.
> DAN tests without your partner's consent or a court order, are not legal in several countries, like France for example.
I want to know the rationale behind this but I'm quite sure it's some "but think of the kiiids" catholic rhetoric.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-03-0714:491 reply The rationale is that apparently due to rampant adultery a lot more fathers than previously thought are raising another man's kids without knowing it (apparently about 10% last time I read about it, also on HN) and since raising kids to adulthood is very expensive and so if the men could easily find out their kids are not their own, then the man can legally opt-out of that financial responsibility then the French state/taxpayer has to pick up the tab for the mother's adultery.
So if you make it nearly impossible for men to ever find out, they'll be legally bound to pay for the upbringing of whoever their partner gives birth to, reducing the financial liability of the state.
But the official reason from the state is something along the lines of "we don't want to put kids/families through unnecessary stress". Basically men have to be cash cows regardless.
> then the French state/taxpayer has to pick up the tab for the mother's adultery
Why not the biological father? That would make sense.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-03-0716:001 reply How would the state force the mother to track down the men she slept with and get them to do paternity tests to prove they're the ones responsible to pay child support? Sometimes the father can be from a different country.
By hdjjhhvvhga 2025-03-0811:17 In theory, yes. In practice, it would mean finding and forcing all potential fathers to do the tests. Hard to imagine anyone would agree to that.
It is. But obviously people do it anyway:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/french-men-s-insecurity-over...
The only problem is, after you've done it, and it turns out the child is not yours, you have two problems.
By crossroadsguy 2025-03-0714:111 reply > In France, a country where infidelity is more often regarded as pleasure than sin, the percentage may be higher.
No wonder France decided to ban the tests
By FirmwareBurner 2025-03-0718:21 EU freedom of speech attitude in a nutshell: when the truth is uncomfortable, you just ban it. Problem solved.
By londons_explore 2025-03-0712:271 reply Those who would be obsessed would totally grab a bit of hair and mail it off to some country where such things are legal and get the answer in an email...
By FirmwareBurner 2025-03-0712:571 reply Of course you can, but how many courts will side with you based on unlawfully obtained evidence?
By Thiez 2025-03-0716:17 At least if you turn out to be the father you can put the issue to rest. If not, you can pursue parallel construction somehow.
By rachofsunshine 2025-03-0712:12 > In the modern world, I don't see how one can be obsessed about such a thing...
The version of this I've seen most often has been certain Very Online groups who are convinced that if they have kids they'll turn out to secretly be someone else's.
They can't test that hypothesis because it's directly interfering with the conditions that would enable them to test it.
By 123yawaworht456 2025-03-0713:041 reply to those people, "normal" is abhorrent. desiring normalcy means you are a (insert an appropriate accusatory pejorative). expressing opposition to any degenerate behavior inevitably draws ire from the bourgeois folx.
By benterix 2025-03-0713:42 I understand what you mean but there are multiple issues with that statement: it assumes there is a homogenous group of "those people", that they all react in this way (I find this vocal always-offended-by-anything minority equally irritating), that "normalcy" is something defined or even defineable, and that it is static.
These all are important issues but need e very balanced approach. Skewing things both left and right will have negative consequences to the society as a whole.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-03-0711:39 [flagged]
It may be normal, but is it productive? What will you do? Stop loving your child, punish the mother? You may be better off not knowing the answer and being OK with that.
By Zealotux 2025-03-0712:16 It is reasonable to know if your partner can be trusted, yes.
I can't imagine stopping loving the child, even if it's not "mine" because the nature of fatherly love is more based on a common bond that starts from zero and rises slowly, developing more once the child starts speaking and they can have a more meaningful relationship.
As for your partner, the State saying you cannot verify whether they have been cheating to you or not is a huge step in the wrong direction. because you can easily check it anyway, but you can not use this knowledge to assert your rights.
By zombot 2025-03-1013:37 The a-hole convention here disapproves of such leniency.
By krisoft 2025-03-0713:01 > Stop loving your child
They are not your child. They are someone else's child. Maybe you keep loving them the same. Maybe you don't.
> punish the mother?
That would be barbaric. You wish your former partner all the best, and you part ways. Or you don't. But if people can divorce over "nothing" then that level of dishonesty certainly qualifies for one.
By thefz 2025-03-0713:34 > What will you do? Stop loving your child,
Not your child.
By 123yawaworht456 2025-03-0712:421 reply there's a four letter word to describe this mentality. I'm not going to say it, but you know what it is.
By 123yawaworht456 2025-03-0714:001 reply it's "cuck".
By AlexeyBelov 2025-03-095:49 This is not what this word means.
What's "normal" for you isn't for others. Compared to these others those labels are quite appropriate.
By BiteCode_dev 2025-03-0711:511 reply The selfish gene states quite well why this happens and is normal in the statistical sense.
I don't think a lot of people today would challenge dawkins on that.
Are you kidding? It's a political pamphlet, many scientists have aimed criticism at it.
In my headcanon the downvotes are from dudes that read The Selfish Gene in high school and got some feeling of epiphany, and now did a bit of web searching that angered them.
Dawkins is a radical genetic reductionist, this book is his defense of this position. In the face of criticism he has moved on from the conclusions he presents in it towards a focus on phenotype reminiscent of older biological paradigms.
One obvious critique is that if he was correct in the book, evolution would have played out much differently and most likely not moved on from single cell organisms. This is why his loyalists over time has moved from studying animals to find something that seems like evidence to preserve the conclusions, to studying bacteria.
Another is that the most well known expression of genetic selfishness in humans would be cancer, which is clearly not the dominant mode of cellular reproduction.
There are more cleanly scientific objections, famously locusts, i.e. epigenetics.
He wrote at a time when the last remnants of aristotelian views of animals withered away, leaving an ideological vacuum. Previously the entire animal was thought to be the evolutionary atom, similar to an aristotelian form, against which Dawkins proposed his radical genetic reductionism.
The main reason that the book has been as influential as it has, is that it is aimed at laypeople and cherrypicks and frames things to drive home a political view that is much easier to understand and accept than the mess we're actually in.
Can you please edit out swipes and putdowns from your posts here? Your comment contains some interesting information and would be much better without that first sentence.
We've had to ask you this more than once recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42605019
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42554816
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Back when I used to do pedigree analysis, the general rule of thumb was 1/10 chance that the father wasn't what was stated in the pedigree.
You would run the analysis and get absolute nonsense results, and then you'd swap a father for an uncle, or a mother for her daughter, and the alleles would all just suddenly line up.
We would never tell the families, and since the pedigrees were anonymized before being published there was no need to. Some secrets are just best kept buried.
What is nuts is that in some countries, its illegal for the father to unilaterally have a paternity test done. I know for France that if you have it done unilaterally and thus illegally you are still on the hook for child support until a legal test is done, which either the mother needs to agree to or needs to be agreed on by the court.
IMO a paternity test should just be mandated to be done immediately at birth (or earlier even?). It avoids the tinge of distrust of "oh wow, how could you even think that of me?!" from the mother, whilst giving certainty to the man.
In most countries, including France, you are on the hook for child support if you named yourself as a parent. In France you may contest it by applying to court during the first five years, after that only a prosecutor can take the steps to revoke that status. Between the unfairness of making an adult pay for a child who isn't theirs, and that of throwing an innocent child into financial distress, protecting the child takes priority everywhere I know of.
By swat535 2025-03-0721:26 >Between the unfairness of making an adult pay for a child who isn't theirs, and that of throwing an innocent child into financial distress
As others have stated above, this isn't really about protecting "family harmony" / "saving the child", it’s about cost.
If paternity tests were easily accessible, many men would easily contest child support and if successful, they would opt out. The state benefits from keeping paternity disputes out of court because it ensures that private individuals, rather than government welfare programs, remain responsible for child support.
If too many men successfully challenged paternity, the state would be forced to provide financial aid for more children, increasing costs. Restricting paternity tests shifts the burden away from taxpayers and onto unwitting fathers, all while claiming it’s about social stability.
By 123yawaworht456 2025-03-0714:421 reply >Between the unfairness to make an adult pay for a child who isn't theirs and the unfairness to throw an innocent child into financial distress, protecting the child takes priority everywhere I know of.
I wonder how would you react if you received a notification that half your paycheck will be henceforth withheld to support some random kid.
this comparison is not entirely fair, because in this scenario, the kid's mother did not deliver a grievous, unforgivable insult to you - which is the case with those poor souls who got scammed into paying child support for some whore's bastard whelp.
the state doesn't give a flying fuck about the child's 'financial distress'. the state simply doesn't want to support it.
That's where French law actually makes sense: after 5 years, it's your kid, even if not biologically, not a random kid. I don't think I would be chuffed, but I understand it's not the kid's fault, too, and I'm not so narcissistic as to think that them having my genes is so important. My anger at the mother should not reflect on the kid.
By 123yawaworht456 2025-03-0714:501 reply [flagged]
A human being is not a car, and your reference to 'emasculation' is very worrying.
By 123yawaworht456 2025-03-0714:582 reply [flagged]
This 'random kid' stuff is absurd. The child is five or older. For all these years you have been calling it 'my son' or 'my daughter', and it has been calling you 'papa' or 'dad'. You've changed its diapers, sang it to sleep, fed it, clothed it, played with it, taught it words, hugged it after a bad dream. You are its world.
If after all that time it turns out to be not genetically yours I'm sure that hurts. Probably hurts a lot, if it's a betrayal by your partner.
But to pretend that it is in any way the same thing as the government assigning you 'a completely random child' is an absurd hyperbole. Five+ years is a decently long time to be (or think to be) someones father, but for the child that is literally its whole life.
So tell me, if it turns out after 5 years your child isn't biologically yours, you would just abandon it? It's been a nice few years but now it's over, leave to buy cigaretes and never return? And you think remaining its father is the un-manly thing to do? That sounds completely insane to me.
By 123yawaworht456 2025-03-083:531 reply [flagged]
By asacrowflies 2025-03-0919:28 >my brother in Christ, people abandon their biological children all the time without anyone clutching their pearls about it
I'm pretty sure a father abndoning a child like that is one of the most taboo social nonos a human can commit I'm almost any culture? Where I am from in rural america physical vigilante violence is reserved for such types. So yes very pearl clutching
By lores 2025-03-0715:06 I hope you find peace.
I disagree here. Blood tests done at birth are done specifically for the benefit of the child (and with minimal risk to the child). A paternity test has no benefit for the child (it doesn't tell you who the father is, simply who the father isn't) and a ~1% risk of harm to the child.
The period immediately after birth is one of the most dangerous times for children, and we (should) specifically take action to protect them in a moment where they are at risk and have no agency. A paternity test would increase the risk of harm to the child (either through violence, deprivation, or neglect). We didn't even get to the subject of possible violence against the mother either, which is likely.
By bitshiftfaced 2025-03-0716:111 reply Wouldn't the marginal risk from the blood test be zero, since they do a little blood prick on their foot anyway?
Also, there's a second order effect you're ignoring: a mandated paternity test would change expectant mothers' behavior leading up to the birth. You wouldn't try to dupe someone if you knew you'd be found out. Or, if you weren't sure, you'd more likely be transparent.
> Wouldn't the marginal risk from the blood test be zero, since they do a little blood prick on their foot anyway?
The source of risk isn't performing the test, the source of risk is the father getting upset and killing the mother and/or child.
By bitshiftfaced 2025-03-0718:51 I did some looking, and it's so rare that there aren't any go-to statistics to cite. There are some reports of men committing murder after a paternity test, but it's unclear to me how what you're saying is anything more the speculation.
It might actually be that mandatory paternity tests reduces the background rate of familicide. All of the reports that I could find were only after the father had invested considerable time into raising the child as their own. The stakes of the deception are much higher. But if they know the day the baby is born (or earlier), then it's much easier to walk away. It also makes it pointless for the deception to happen in the first place.
By jurenbert 2025-03-0712:41 [dead]
By gggtttkkk88 2025-03-0712:422 reply [flagged]
The internet is truly a wild place. You can say something like "We shouldn't do mandatory paternity tests at birth because they bring no benefit to the child" and someone responds with "So you're saying we shouldn't stop wife beaters?"
No bitch, that's a whole different sentence. What the fuck are you talking about.
By gggtttkkk88 2025-03-0713:161 reply No chance, bucko.
The essence of your comment is that paternity testing should be avoided because there is no benefit to children and there is potential harm to women. Your focus was not on the mandatory nature of any such testing.
And I believe you understand my analogy in spite of your faux confusion and outrage.
That’s not even my argument though? I was very clear that specifically immediately post birth is a high risk time and that mandatory paternity tests at birth increase those risks with little to no benefit to anyone. I did not say anything about forcing a man to raise a child. You’re deliberately misreading my point to argue against a straw man.
By gggtttkkk88 2025-03-0716:56 Are you gaslighting? Your comment is just above, you can reread it as many times as I have trying to extract any other argument with as little success.
The benefit is to the "father", obviously, in confirming paternity or alerting him of infidelity and fraud. It's either peace of mind or potentially life-changing. The benefit is incalculable.
Your only arguments for why immediately post-birth is a poor time are that it would be convenient for everyone else (including the perpetrator of the fraud) if the victim was unaware and continued to be exploited for some time (how long? when would be a convenient time for the reveal?). That is outrageous.
A stronger argument in line with the "benefit of the child" thinking would be that slight domestic violence should no longer be grounds for divorce since divorce rarely benefits the child.
Which is obviously a crazy line of thinking, but so is "let's force a man to (financially) raise a child that isn't his".
That’s not even my argument though? I was very clear that specifically immediately post birth is a high risk time and that mandatory paternity tests at birth increase those risks with little to no benefit to anyone. I did not say anything about forcing a man to raise a child.
By jorvi 2025-03-0715:31 .. you do realize a paternity test can happen with just a cotton swab? And aside from that, they already get a heel prick / blood spot test to check for a bunch of things. Drawing a tiny bit of extra blood from that in no way presents any extra danger to the baby.
By cindyllm 2025-03-0713:01 [dead]
Thanks, that answers my questions about how pedigrees were preprocessed for a study like this:
1. Isn’t there a very high chance any particular male’s result is true for both father and uncle?
2. For young teen mothers, sometimes a family of older mother and two assumed siblings is really grandmother, mother, child. Paternity and slightly maternity are secretly, generationally obscured. So two assumed female siblings might share less than half-sibling measures of autosomal DNA.
It's been a while and I was always a bit shaky on the actual genetics, so hopefully an actual expert can weigh in here, but as far as I remember -
For 1 it depends on the penetrance model (a score on whether all individuals with the disease allele(s) express the disease phenotype: 1=all, 0.5=some, etc.) along with whether the allele's mode of inheritance is recessive/dominant, X-linked or not, and how consanguineous/inbred the pedigree is.
If I remember it right, if a father/son combo always express the disease allele, then the pedigree is x-linked recessive. If you see an uncle/son combo, and test for it, and the linkage score for the region of interest (the likelihood that the disease travels with the ROI computed over all individuals) goes up, then it's pretty suspect.
For 2, you could see the distribution of alleles without much computation. Siblings are expected to share X%, relatives Y%, unrelated Z%. By fitting to these bands, you could already see if the distribution of alleles was suspect. We never tested for mtDNA though, I don't think there were many chipsets for it back then.
Awesome, I appreciate that. Ok so my question for the researcher would be:
1. Circumstances where both mtDNA and Y chromosome are shared between biological father and pedigreed father. I think the Biblical term is Levirate marriage.
2. Circumstances without Y where maternity is secretly disputable and paternity uncontentious. I think the researcher called this secret adoption.
At distances longer than several generations, is there noise in the measure of autosomal matches such that you cannot detect these?
By tetris11 2025-03-0715:48 I'd argue that after 5 generations your descendants only have (0.5^5) no more than 3% of your genetic material, and if there's some ambiguity to one of your founders (say who has a 50% similarity to the one stated in the pedigree) then that drops to 1% (rounding down).
1% of the human genome (3billion bp) is still 30M bases, which could easily contain 1 or 2 genes which you may have genotyped, depending on the resolution of your genotyping chip (usually 10M markers spread out over the entire genome, and usually clustered around variants/genes of interest).
So yeah, even 5 generations down these differences could be detected at the variant level. Even at 10, you could still _theoretically_ find differences.
I stress theoretically, because the chance of you having all the individuals from a pedigree genotyped at the same time using the same tech (and thus the same subset of common genotypes to compare) is slim to none.
I'd say 5 generations is a rough rule of thumb where the signal is not that much higher than the noise.
By tetris11 2025-03-0713:32 linkage, haplotype, and variant analysis
By BiteCode_dev 2025-03-0711:531 reply Same with blood types.
Clearly lots of people never listen in biology class.
By pandemic_region 2025-03-0711:541 reply As one of the referred 'lots', care to explain a bit more?
By BiteCode_dev 2025-03-0711:57 Some combinations are impossible.
E.G: both biological parents cannot be A and the kids be AB
By cm2187 2025-03-0712:01 I remember a surgeon who does a lot of transplantation (and where they have to check DNA for compatibility), telling me that it also depends a lot on which child. The first child is almost always from the father. Second child a bit less. Third child is where there is a significant percentage of outside interference. To the point that they discourage same family donors as it creates a lot of drama.
