Beyond issues of unexpected ancestry, I’ve also found anecdotal examples of negative feedback resulting from customers unhappy with the results they receive from companies like Teloyears.
Teloyears measures the length of telemeres that may be an indication of genetic aging(as opposed to chronological aging).
Before I had the test done I checked on Teloyears feedback and reviews and most negative reviews consistently included people upset that their Teloyears estimate of genetic aging coming in higher than their chronological age.
I’m guessing people just want to be told what they want to hear.
Saying “this is science” alone as an answer to the validity is really doing science a disfavor. Not only are these consumer grade tests, but there’s been a lot of evidence of the fallibility of DNA testing (particularly for crime scene analysis) in recent years, let alone the fact that everything they show is based on models that are constantly updated and effectively best guesses. I really wish they’d be more upfront but it’d probably be too big a challenge to sweeping in new customers.
For ethnicity results, yes it's based on models and reference samples that are often updated. You should be taking them with a large grain of salt. For the matching with other people it's useful and accurate and is a great way for doing further genealogical research to back up the paper research.
Relatedness testing is pretty trivial with modern chip/sequencing tech so this stuff does actually tend to be pretty cut and dry. The big worry is sample swaps but those should hopefully be the exception and not the rule.
If ask Reddit is anything to go by this is slowly becoming normal. You have to wonder if 20-30 years from now mores will have shifted to reflect the reality that there are often familial buried secrets of every kind out there.
edit: So I checked, what happened is that Germany banned genetic tests where there is no consent from the party a sample was taken from. In the case of a paternity test where the father, mother or child is unwilling, a court can instead force the test as knowing paternity has been decided to be a constitutional right.
Auf Antrag eines Klärungsberechtigten hat das Familiengericht eine nicht erteilte Einwilligung zu ersetzen und die Duldung einer Probeentnahme anzuordnen.
Upon a right-of-clarification request, the family court may substitute for consent not given and order submission to a test sample.
> 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. Crossculturally, paternity confidence (a mans assessment of the likelihood that he is the father of a putative child) is positively associated with mens 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 are(excluding studies of unknown methodology) typically 1.9%, substantially less than the typical rates of 10% or higher cited by many researchers. Further crosscultural investigation of the relationship between paternity and paternity confidence is warranted.
I’m pretty sure the historical rate has been around 4%. Depends on the population, Wikipedia cites 2-12%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-paternity_event. Wouldn’t be surprised if that study had some kind of confounding variable
No way, 1-2% is more like the range. For the western world, for serious studies e.g. tracking surnames vs Y chromosomes. Most much higher figures come from counting only disputed cases, which are obviously going to be skewed.
Indeed the Sykes data is long-term history, and I think of a middle-class sample. But it does teach us that received wisdom was badly wrong there, which should make us less confident of the same wisdom elsewhere.
The bone marrow study was 2012, and no class has a monopoly on Leukemia. I would not be surprised if there were a class gradient, but an average of under 2% doesn't leave room for a very big underclass to be scoring 20% or 30%.
These are England and Germany, things could be different elsewhere, I don't know whether there is good data.
IIRC that might have been a convenience sample of families where non-paternity was suspected. Most estimates of historical non-paternity in Europe yield low single digits.
I hope so because my more is “who cares” and apparently thats not the popular thought right now
But what does it really change
The rapport you built or didnt is the same, with the people you grew up with
Whatever they taught you about infidelity is still to make your life more convenient
Find out whatever diseases you are actually predisposed to, or dont
If you have a decent life already, probability is your “real” family lived in an overpopulated bottom rung of society. If not, its still unlikely you get to be part of anything now that the secret is out. Send a note for kicks, but why create the drama?
I read somewhere that paternal uncertainty is the leading cause of male violence in every culture in the world, from aboriginal Australia to New York. You wonder, if evolution (cultural or biological) has not allowed any variance in this trait - it must be necessary for reproduction. It would mean that men who don't get angry at the prospect of raising another man's children, inescapably raise another man's children.
Are you surprised? I'm not condoning violence but paternal uncertainty is pretty horrible. I split from my ex-wife due to her involvement with a past lover during our marriage and for years I wasn't sure about my youngest. It literally would eat away at me but I didn't want to test. Eventually, I did a DNA test and the test confirmed he is mine.
I could adopt children. I could become a stepdad. I could never raise a child that was born through my partner cheating on me. It's basically a partner saying "I want your resources but I don't want my kids to be like you".
Really glad the test came back positive. Sorry to hear about your ex.
I totally get last paragraph. If you venture into something it’s totally possible to love others’ children as your own. But to have it thrust upon you is horrid. You sacrifice not only your life - the money, the labor, the freedom, etc., but you inevitably sacrifice your ability to propagate. And that’s not an uncertainty any human should face. But of course women have 100% certainty a child is theirs (minus hospital switching schenanigans of course) so it’s really only an issue a man has to endure.
Guess this comment is a bit winding. I really don’t like to dwell on the subject I guess...
>The most thorough analyses are from Canada, where data in a national archive of all homicides known to police indicate
that children under 5 years of age were beaten to death by their putative genetic fathers at a rate of 2.6 deaths per million child-years at risk (residing with their fathers),
while the corresponding rate for stepfathers was over 120 times higher at 321.6 (Daly&Wilson, 2001).
I wouldn't attribute this entirely to "my kid vs not my kid". I live in a western country and it's typically lower socio-economic groups that split and recouple with really young kids (i.e <5). The most at-risk groups for violence in these early years tend to also have uncoupled parents who are constantly seeing new men.
If you split these statistics through 10th percentile socioeconomic groups I'm sure it wouldn't be as significant as 120 times. This paper is 10 years old and references Sweden as having less than a 10x increase.
Thinking aloud: that's about 1/7 of Canada's murder rate, and if I guess that under-5 children are 7% of population, such things would make up 1% of all murders, which does not sound crazy to me.
If step-dads are 100x more dangerous, and 10% of kids have one (just a guess) then step-kid murders would be 10% of all murders. That sounds high but perhaps not crazy? 321.6 / million is about 20x the whole country's murder rate.
In education there is the issue of teaching mendelian genetics without causing a massive stink when some of the kids show traits they couldn't get from both parents.
This is often solved by intentionally avoiding real examples and using contrived examples that are not mendelian like eye color.
A friend of mine caused a huge stink in her village when she pointed out how two siblings had blue eyes but all parents and grandparents had brown eyes. There was much chaos.
Let's analyse that. Suppose the frequency of the blue eye gene and the brown eye gene are the same in the general population, and suppose the prior probability of cheating is 10%. Then we can simulate this:
from random import random, randint
p_blue = 0.5
p_cheat = 0.1
def randbool(p): return random() < p
def randgenes(): return randbool(p_blue), randbool(p_blue)
def mate(mother, father): return mother[randint(0,1)], father[randint(0,1)]
def blueeyes(p): return p[0] and p[1]
n_cheat = 0
n_faithful = 0
for i in range(0,1000000):
mother = (True,False)
grandfather = randgenes()
grandmother = randgenes()
husband = mate(grandfather, grandmother)
lover = randgenes()
cheated = randbool(p_cheat)
if cheated:
kid1 = mate(mother, lover)
kid2 = mate(mother, lover)
else:
kid1 = mate(mother, husband)
kid2 = mate(mother, husband)
if blueeyes(grandmother) or blueeyes(grandfather) or blueeyes(husband) or not blueeyes(kid1) or not blueeyes(kid2): continue
if cheated: n_cheat += 1
else: n_faithful += 1
print(n_cheat)
print(n_faithful)
We get 4619 times cheated and 14226 times faithful. The probability of cheating went up substantially relative to the prior of 10%, but it's still below 30%. I'd say that the chaos wasn't justified.
Blue eyes are recessive and brown eyes are extremely dominant though. With parents having brown eyes, there could still be up to theoretical 50% chance that the children could have them.
However, if both parents had blue eyes, then it's near impossible for the kids to have brown eyes if they're genetically related to both parents.
I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but I'd always heard the same thing happened in the 50s when blood typing became widely available. So I don't think anyone in that industry should be exactly surprised at this particular result.
When a sick child needs a transplant, the parents are the first to be checked for compatibility. Sometimes the results are impossible. The policy in such cases simply to inform the putative father that he's not a match and leave it at that.
This has to be a really tough call center job. People don't want to trust what you're telling them. Who is going to believe their father/brother/sister isn't?
At the end of the day, what difference does it make? You can't change the past. Also I'm pretty sure knowledge like "he's not my real father" will stay in the back of your mind and pop up from time to time, making things awkward for a long time.
Well it's always up to you if you consider your genetic parent, your "real father" - sperm donors, adoption, hospital mix-ups, affairs, early death, re-marriage blah blah. No shortage of reasons why you one of your 'parental figures' might not be 50% genetically related to you - and conversely I'm absolutely fine with anybody who rejects a genetic parent as they're an arsehole.
Taking all of that in, you get to pick who cared for you and you choose to reciprocate with the parental nominative.
Genetic stuff is just some nice to have information, along with what's more likely to kill you than average and how friendly your progenitors were with the local neanderthals.
I think maybe it boils down to some people always wanting to know (me) and others who don't (whatever it is) - and you've probably self-selected when you clicked all the boxes as you spat into a tube.
> Well it's always up to you if you consider your genetic parent, your "real father"
Exactly the situation I'm in, with both a parent and a grandparent, and it's always boiled down to these people have had a significant impact on my life, and these people have not. I don't understand the obsession with genetics - the thought "he's not my real father" has never once crossed my mind.
Somewhat off-topic: Instead of dealing with these companies, what equipment and software would I need to do my own DNA testing at home? Has anyone written any open source applications that can interpret this data?
I really wish this article provided some insight on how much these people are being paid. 95% of the job may be lightweight customer service but providing emotional labor ot people in distress if quite demanding on the provider, regardless of how much training they're given.
My experience of Hollywood therapy is that it’s nothing like that, and in fact tends to be either highly confrontational, or involves magical insights from the therapist which have an almost immediate effect, and are invariably accepted with little resistance. The reality that therapy is mostly one person talking while another listens, nudging them make their own insights and helping people process difficult emotions and experiences.
Of course that’s not the whole practice of psychology or psychiatry, but it is most of what “therapy” (i.e. talk therapy) is.
The Hollywood part is focusing on the conversation.
Journaling for example is a common technique that’s part of therapy and outside of what you’re describing. Talking without actions outside of therapy is mostly an expensive hobby. And those nudges are critical for people to actually have direction as to how to attempt to make change.
You do bring up the other issue I have with Hollywood therapy. Therapists don’t need deep incite into how you think to come up with some unique solution tailored to you. It’s more like a dentist convincing you that you really do need to both brush your teeth and floss. Rather than a doctor giving you some antibiotics for a week and everything is fine again.
Teloyears measures the length of telemeres that may be an indication of genetic aging(as opposed to chronological aging).
Before I had the test done I checked on Teloyears feedback and reviews and most negative reviews consistently included people upset that their Teloyears estimate of genetic aging coming in higher than their chronological age.
I’m guessing people just want to be told what they want to hear.