From: acornish@imm.cnrs.fr   
      
   On 2019-11-15 14:50:57 +0000, Athel Cornish-Bowden said:   
      
   > The Guardian has an interesting article today entitled "Who's the   
   > daddy? Paternity mixed up in cities, study finds". I have opened the   
   > paper that it links to (it's open access). I haven't read it thoroughly   
   > but just skimmed through it, but I have the impression that it makes   
   > the same error Bryan Sykes made in his book Adam's Curse, of assuming   
   > that if a son has the same Y chomosome as his mother's husband then his   
   > mother's husband is the biological father. However, that overlooks an   
   > important point.   
   >   
   > In the past, and to some degree today, it was assumed that if a   
   > marriage didn't produce a child then it was entirely the woman's fault.   
   > However, if a woman finds herself married to a man who is impotent or a   
   > strict homosexual, how is she to keep up the appearances? Getting help   
   > from the milkman is very risky, but there are at least two other men   
   > with the right Y chromosome that can help, her father-in-law or a   
   > brother-in-law. In either case the man would probably be anxious to   
   > keep it secret to preserve the honour of the family.   
      
   My newsreader seems to have lost Ian Goddard's reply to the above, but   
   no matter: I can remember what it was.   
      
   Certainly, childless women before recent years would not have known   
   about Y chromosomes, but that wasn't my point. A woman in such a   
   situation in earlier centuries would be under a lot of pressure from   
   her in-laws to produce a baby, preferably a boy. If she was fertile she   
   could solve the problem by getting help from a fertile man. If she   
   chose her father-in-law he and everyone else would want to keep the   
   liaison secret. I realize that it's only recently that anyone has used   
   Y chromosomes to deduce whether many babies were assigned to the wrong   
   father, but in practice that can give wrong results.   
      
      
   --   
   athel   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)