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I know it's kind of an old thread, but I'll post this article that proves my point exactly:
And a recent genetic study made by Dr. Maarten Larmuseau at KU Leuven in Belgium also confirms that Cuckoldry is pretty much an old age tale that is centuries old, and that the average rate of cuckoldry or as what scientists call "extra-pair paternity" is around between 3 to 1% only, and the old and previous studies that claim that the extra-pair paternity is over 30% is based on unreliable data as explained in the article above.Five days a week, you can tune into “Paternity Court,” a television show featuring couples embroiled in disputes over fatherhood. It’s entertainment with a very old theme: Uncertainty over paternity goes back a long way in literature. Even Shakespeare and Chaucer cracked wise about cuckolds, who were often depicted wearing horns.
But in a number of recent studies, researchers have found that our obsession with cuckolded fathers is seriously overblown. A number of recent genetic studies challenge the notion that mistaken paternity is commonplace.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Maarten H.D. Larmuseau, a geneticist at the University of Leuven in Belgium who has led much of this new research.
The term cuckold traditionally refers to the husband of an adulteress, but Dr. Larmuseau and other researchers focus on those cases that produce a child, which scientists politely call “extra-pair paternity.”
Until the 20th century, it was difficult to prove that a particular man was the biological father of a particular child.
In 1304 a British husband went to court to dispute the paternity of his wife’s child, born while he was abroad for three years. Despite the obvious logistical challenges, the court rejected the husband’s objection.
“The privity between a man and his wife cannot be known,” the judge ruled.
Modern biology lifted the veil from this mystery, albeit slowly. In the early 1900s, researchers discovered that people have distinct blood types inherited from their parents.
In a 1943 lawsuit, Charlie Chaplin relied on blood-type testing to prove that he was not the father of the actress Joan Barry’s child. (The court refused to accept the evidence and forced Chaplin to pay child support anyway.)
It wasn’t until DNA sequencing emerged in the 1990s that paternity tests earned the legal system’s confidence. Labs were able to compare DNA markers in children to those of their purported fathers to see if they matched.
As the lab tests piled up, researchers collated the results and came to a startling conclusion: Ten percent to 30 percent of the tested men were not the biological fathers of their children.
Those figures were spread far and wide, ending up in many science books. But the problem with the lab data, Dr. Larmuseau said, was that it didn’t come from a random sample of people. The people who ordered the tests already had reason to doubt paternity.
Dr. Larmuseau and other scientists developed other methods to get an unbiased look at cuckoldry.
In a 2013 study, Dr. Larmuseau and his colleagues used Belgium’s detailed birth records to reconstruct large family genealogies reaching back four centuries. Then the scientists tracked down living male descendants and asked to sequence their Y chromosomes.
Y chromosomes are passed down in almost identical form from fathers to sons. Men who are related to the same male ancestor should also share his Y chromosome, providing that some unknown father didn’t introduce his own Y somewhere along the way.
Comparing the chromosomes of living related men, Dr. Larmuseau and his colleagues came up with a cuckoldry rate of less than 1 percent. Similar studies have generally produced the same low results in such countries as Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as agricultural villages in Mali.
The scientists got the same results after trying a different tack. They studied men in Flanders, a part of Belgium to which French people emigrated in the late 1500s.
The Y chromosomes in Flemish men with French surnames, the researchers found, had the same genetic markers found in men who live today in the region of France where their ancestors originated. Had there had been a lot of cuckoldry over the centuries, the link between genetics and surnames should have been weaker, or disappeared altogether.
In a commentary in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Dr. Larmuseau and his colleagues argue that it’s long past time to toss out frequent cuckoldry as a myth. Studies relying on different methods in different cultures all point to cuckoldry rates of about 1 percent.
And because many of those studies are based on genealogies that reach back many generations, he argues, these rates must have been low for at least several centuries.
Beverly I. Strassmann, a University of Michigan anthropologist who gathered the data on paternity rates in Mali, agreed that widespread cuckoldry “was an urban legend. It seemed to have a life of its own.”
The evidence of low rates of cuckoldry comes not just from gene studies, she noted. In species where females mate with many males, the males tend to evolve sperm that are good at competing for fertilization. The males may produce large amounts of sperm, for example, and a high percentage swim well.
Humans, however, don’t rate in the sperm department.
“It’s of amazingly low quality,” Dr. Strassmann said. “Half the sperm can be duds; they can have two heads; they can be defective in all sorts of ways.”
The only way for men to have evolved comparatively ineffectual sperm, she added, was for them to have experienced high rates of paternity over time.
It’s not that widespread cuckoldry doesn’t exist in some cultures, Dr. Larmuseau said. Some South American tribes with high rates share a belief that more than one man can contribute to the formation of a fetus.
But Dr. Larmuseau suspects that these populations are the exception, not the rule. Humans have evolved to avoid cuckoldry, he said, because of our peculiar biology.
Human infants are born quite helpless, compared with the newborns of other animals, and they need a lot of food over a long period to fuel the growth of their calorie-hungry brains. Mothers needed fathers to help find the food.
“Babies really need good investment from the fathers,” Dr. Larmuseau said, “and the paternity has to be very sure in order for them to make those investments.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/s...ists-find.html
People who spew the idea that women should always be doubted until proof otherwise is what people who have deep hatred against women like to advocate for men to be.In the 19th century, poorer families living in cities in Europe had a higher rate of children who weren’t biologically related to their legal fathers. This is according to a genetic study that looked at how this rate differs for different socio-economic groups.
It is widely assumed many men aren’t the biological fathers of their children. The rate of extra-pair paternity, as this is called, has been claimed to be as high as 30 per cent today. “They look just like the milkman,” goes the popular joke that no parent finds funny.
However, over the past two decades DNA studies in several countries have shown the average rate is low – around 1 per cent. Maarten Larmuseau at KU Leuven in Belgium, who authored one of these studies, wondered whether there was a difference between groups.
He suspected, for example, that the rate was higher among aristocrats in the 17th century, as there was often a large age gap between husband and wife. Extra-pair paternity is depicted in the 1664 painting Celebrating the Birth by Jan Steen, which shows a wealthy Dutch father holding his newborn child. But behind him a man is making the sign of the “cuckold’s horns”, meaning the child was fathered by another.
Cuckold’s horns
Larmuseau’s team identified 500 pairs of men in Belgium and the Netherlands where, according to genealogical records, each pair descended from the same male ancestor through a male lineage. Half of these ancestors were born before 1840 and the oldest was from 1315.
The men in each pair should have inherited their shared ancestor’s Y chromosome, as it comes from the father. When DNA testing revealed a mismatch, the team tested other male descendants to narrow down when a son had been fathered by someone other than the husband. All the men were volunteers and the team didn’t test close relatives to avoid uncovering recent cases.
“What we found was completely the opposite to what we expected,” says Larmuseau.
The rate of extra-pair paternity among farmers and more well-to-do craftsmen and merchants was about 1 per cent, rising to 4 per cent among labourers and weavers and nearing 6 per cent among working class people who lived in densely populated cities in the 19th century. This was in comparison to a rate of around 0.5 per cent among the more well-off.
Read more: The dizzying diversity of human sexual strategies
What the study cannot reveal is why people were more likely to be in this situation. “We cannot give an explanation,” Larmuseau says. “We cannot interview them.”
One possibility is that poorer women in cities were more vulnerable to male sexual violence and exploitation.
The overall rate was still low, at 1.6 per cent per generation. But that still means a very large number of people alive today may not be aware of their biological parentage. Larmuseau says 30 million people worldwide have done ancestry tests, which suggests up to 500,000 could have made a shocking discovery about their father. Companies offering these tests don’t provide any counselling, he says.
https://www.newscientist.com/article...-in-the-1800s/
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