Moms get best service at home

06 April 2016 - 02:42 By Shaun Smillie

Once it was believed that women shop around for a man who will pass on the best genes to their children - some resorting to adultery to achieve that - but the truth is that most of them make do with what they have.The belief was that as many as 10% of husbands were unknowingly looking after children they had not fathered."Popular and even some scientific literature claim that many men are being cuckolded and are raising children that are not biologically their own," says Maarten Larmuseau, of the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium.But the reality is that the figure is between only 1% and 2%, he believes."Any potential advantage of cheating in order to have children that are perhaps better endowed is offset for the majority of women by the potential costs. Those costs likely include spousal aggression, divorce, or reduced paternal investment by the social partner or his relatives," the researchers say.Larmuseau and his colleagues published their findings in the latest issue of Trends in Ecology & Evolution."Several recent studies estimating cuckoldry came up with equally low estimates in South Africa, Italy, Spain and Mali."Roughly one third of the DNA samples taken from babies and fathers did not a match in paternity tests done by a major laboratory service in South Africa. On average they conduct about 250 family tests a month across Sub-Saharan Africa, with spikes at certain times of the year.Usually the people coming in to do paternity tests have a question or dispute to settle which means the non-paternity rate among them is likely to be higher than the general population...

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