There is a show on television that plays fives
times a week called “Paternity Court”. It brings couples onto the show over
paternity disputes. Many people find this is a source of entertainment, which
however, dates back hundreds of years to Shakespeare’s time where he would
write about cuckolds, often depicted wearing horns. Cuckold is defined as the
husband to an adulteress. Despite all the cases shown on television and common
belief, cuckolded fathers are completely blown out of proportion. Maarten H.D.
Larmuseau is a geneticist leading new research on the topic at the University
of Leuven in Belgium and believes it is absurd that people believe that
mistaken paternity is so common. Up until fairly recently, paternity cases have
been very hard to solve. There have been many legal cases pertaining to
paternity that have taken place with controversial outcomes. It was discovered
in the 1900’s that blood types are a distinct and clear way to determine the
father of the parents. It wasn’t until the 1990’s that DNA sequencing was
accepted in courts as being precise.
Lab tests began to pile up and surprisingly 10
to 30 percent of the men tested were not the biological fathers of their
children. However, the problem with this is that it was not a random sampling.
All of the tests came from people who already had reasonable doubt of
paternity. Dr. Larmuseau and his colleagues had developed a new study in which
they could get an unbiased look on paternity. Fathers pass down a nearly
identical Y chromosome to their sons. Dr. Larmuseau went back and sequenced
random families and their living ancestors. The result they found is that
cuckoldry had a rate of less than 1 percent. Some of the countries that were
tested were Spain, Italy, and Germany. There are some tribes in South America
that have high cuckoldry rates. These people also have beliefs that more than
one man can contribute to a child being born. These small populations are
exceptions to the rule.
I have always thought that paternity disputes
were a common controversy due to all of the television showing cases. Looking
more closely at this topic, I now believe that most of these shows do this strictly
for entertainment. Humans surprisingly have low sperm quality where there can
be many defects. Half of the sperm can be duds or there can be many defects
with the sperm itself such as having two heads. So a lot needs to go right in
order to have a child. This would show that cuckoldry is not as common as
believed. I do think that paternity tests are effective and should continue to
be used in legal cases. I also believe that more research needs to be conducted
on this topic to help further prove that cuckoldry is not as common as
believed.
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