I agree with you. The article also attempts to minimize the importance of the issue, saying "stop panicking [...] it’s not the problem you think it is".
Let's assume that their figure of 1% is correct. In the UK in 2021 alone there were 694,685 live births according to Google. That means in one year alone nearly 7,000 children were from "EPP". That's an enormous number of people, mostly men, potentially wrongly pursued for child support, or battling through the courts to be given access to a child that's not theirs, etc.
In the grand scheme of all social issues the UK is beset with, this is small potatoes. It's not hugely important, it's just hugely important to you because it's an emotional issue.
Fair point, but then who are either of us to make that judgement? Who are you to say that it's small potatoes?
In my defense, I'd say that the suicide rate for men is 4x that for women, and that a large proportion of suicides come after divorce and loss of access to children. (Sorry for being hand-wavey, but I can't search for the research to back these claims from where I am currently.)
That alone at least backs the case for more research in this area.
I think it's fair to say that there is a subset of people for whom this kind of thing does border on obsession. By analogy, it's normal to care about your weight, but it's still possible for that normal concern to become an anxious obsession that gets blown way out of proportion.
>In the modern world, I don't see how one can be obsessed about such a thing...
Theres no obsession here, the author was being needlessly hyperbolical to twist the narrative as if the normal behavior of thinking about paternity makes one "obsessive". The way he phrased it makes it sound like it's normal for the paternal side not to care if he's raising his own kin or not.
>Do a DNA test, get answer. Obsession over.
DAN tests without your partner's consent or a court order, are not legal in several countries, like France for example. So you might never know if your partner doesn't want you to know or you don't have proof of adultery to show the court.
The rationale is that apparently due to rampant adultery a lot more fathers than previously thought are raising another man's kids without knowing it (apparently about 10% last time I read about it, also on HN) and since raising kids to adulthood is very expensive and so if the men could easily find out their kids are not their own, then the man can legally opt-out of that financial responsibility then the French state/taxpayer has to pick up the tab for the mother's adultery.
So if you make it nearly impossible for men to ever find out, they'll be legally bound to pay for the upbringing of whoever their partner gives birth to, reducing the financial liability of the state.
But the official reason from the state is something along the lines of "we don't want to put kids/families through unnecessary stress". Basically men have to be cash cows regardless.
How would the state force the mother to track down the men she slept with and get them to do paternity tests to prove they're the ones responsible to pay child support? Sometimes the father can be from a different country.
Those who would be obsessed would totally grab a bit of hair and mail it off to some country where such things are legal and get the answer in an email...
> In the modern world, I don't see how one can be obsessed about such a thing...
The version of this I've seen most often has been certain Very Online groups who are convinced that if they have kids they'll turn out to secretly be someone else's.
They can't test that hypothesis because it's directly interfering with the conditions that would enable them to test it.
to those people, "normal" is abhorrent. desiring normalcy means you are a (insert an appropriate accusatory pejorative). expressing opposition to any degenerate behavior inevitably draws ire from the bourgeois folx.
I understand what you mean but there are multiple issues with that statement: it assumes there is a homogenous group of "those people", that they all react in this way (I find this vocal always-offended-by-anything minority equally irritating), that "normalcy" is something defined or even defineable, and that it is static.
These all are important issues but need e very balanced approach. Skewing things both left and right will have negative consequences to the society as a whole.
It may be normal, but is it productive? What will you do? Stop loving your child, punish the mother? You may be better off not knowing the answer and being OK with that.
I can't imagine stopping loving the child, even if it's not "mine" because the nature of fatherly love is more based on a common bond that starts from zero and rises slowly, developing more once the child starts speaking and they can have a more meaningful relationship.
As for your partner, the State saying you cannot verify whether they have been cheating to you or not is a huge step in the wrong direction. because you can easily check it anyway, but you can not use this knowledge to assert your rights.
They are not your child. They are someone else's child. Maybe you keep loving them the same. Maybe you don't.
> punish the mother?
That would be barbaric. You wish your former partner all the best, and you part ways. Or you don't. But if people can divorce over "nothing" then that level of dishonesty certainly qualifies for one.
In my headcanon the downvotes are from dudes that read The Selfish Gene in high school and got some feeling of epiphany, and now did a bit of web searching that angered them.
Dawkins is a radical genetic reductionist, this book is his defense of this position. In the face of criticism he has moved on from the conclusions he presents in it towards a focus on phenotype reminiscent of older biological paradigms.
One obvious critique is that if he was correct in the book, evolution would have played out much differently and most likely not moved on from single cell organisms. This is why his loyalists over time has moved from studying animals to find something that seems like evidence to preserve the conclusions, to studying bacteria.
Another is that the most well known expression of genetic selfishness in humans would be cancer, which is clearly not the dominant mode of cellular reproduction.
There are more cleanly scientific objections, famously locusts, i.e. epigenetics.
He wrote at a time when the last remnants of aristotelian views of animals withered away, leaving an ideological vacuum. Previously the entire animal was thought to be the evolutionary atom, similar to an aristotelian form, against which Dawkins proposed his radical genetic reductionism.
The main reason that the book has been as influential as it has, is that it is aimed at laypeople and cherrypicks and frames things to drive home a political view that is much easier to understand and accept than the mess we're actually in.
Can you please edit out swipes and putdowns from your posts here? Your comment contains some interesting information and would be much better without that first sentence.
We've had to ask you this more than once recently:
Quite judgemental word choice for something rather normal.