Wrong Baby Daddy?

It's Not
Likely, Science Says
by Rachael Rettner, Senior Writer | April 05, 2016 01:57pm ET

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Contrary to what daytime talk shows might have you believe, men are rarely
hoodwinked into raising children who aren't their own, according to several recent
studies.
In fact, the studies suggest that the rate of misattributed fatherhood has remained
low at around 1 to 2 percent for hundreds of years.
The findings challenge the evolutionary idea that "women 'shop around' for good
genes" for their children by having sex outside a monogamous relationship, said
Maarten Larmuseau, a researcher at the Belgian university KU Leuven who wrote a
review article on the topic, published today (April 5) in the journal Trends in Ecology
& Evolution.
Previously, researchers estimated that 10 to 20 percent of children are raised by
men who are alleged to be, but are not actually, their biological fathers.
Researchers have theorized that, from an evolutionary perspective,cheating has
advantages for both men and women. For men, it provides an opportunity to have
more children (and thus, further the spread of their genes in the gene pool). And
for women, cheating may allow them to have children with a man who is more
"genetically fit" than their long-term partner, or who can help ensure that they will
have children if their partner is infertile.
But in 2013, Larmuseau and his colleagues found that the rate of misattributed
fatherhood in the region of Flanders, Belgium, was only about 1 percent in each
generation for the past 500 years.
At the time the study was published, the researchers didn't know whether their
finding would hold true in other parts of the world. But more recently, studies in

South Africa, Italy, Spain and Mali have had similar results, with rates of
misattributed fatherhood ranging from about 1 to 1.7 percent per generation in
those areas. [The Sex Quiz: Myths, Taboos and Bizarre Facts]
One way that these studies estimated the rate of misattributed fatherhood was to
compare the Y chromosomes of men who supposedly shared a common paternal
ancestor, to see how often their genes said they were related and how often there
was a mismatch. (Men inherit their Y chromosome from their father.)
"The surprising result of these new studies is that human [rates of misattributed
fatherhood] have stayed near constant, at around 1 percent, across several human
societies over the past several hundred years," Larmuseau and his colleagues wrote
in their new study.
The findings also suggest that the supposed advantages of cheating for women are
offset by the costs for example, if a man finds out that he is not the father, he
(and his relatives) may reduce their involvement in the child's life, the researchers
said.
"The (potential) genetic benefits of extra-pair children [or offspring outside a
monogamous relationship] are unlikely to be offset by the (potential) costs of being
caught, particularly in such a long-lived species as humans, with heavy offspring
dependence and massive parental investment," the researchers said.
Future studies will allow researchers to look in more detail at the rates of
misattributed fatherhood among people with various ethnic and socioeconomic
backgrounds, the researchers said.