> 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 got this reference indirectly from The Red Queen, an interesting book. It's packed away, so I can't give anything more specific.