London: A new study has claimed that up to two percent of men in the UK may have become victims of paternity fraud after being tricked into raising another man’s biological child.
The analysis has run up a scary figure of 1 in 50 affected fathers but the writers of the study were expecting the final data to be five times higher, according to Britain’s Telegraph newspaper.
The newspaper quoted Dr Maarten Larmuseau, of KU Leuven University's laboratory of Biodiversity and the study’s lead author, who said the expectation was higher due to “high incidence of female infidelity in humans”, and the “sensationalist picture painted by reality television such as The Jeremy Kyle Show”.
“Media and popular scientific literature often claim that many alleged fathers are being cuckolded into raising children who biologically are not their own. Surprisingly, the estimated rates within human populations are quite low. Around one or two per cent,” Dr Larmuseau was quoted as saying.
According to the Telegraph, the study states incidence of paternity fraud is low because “any potential advantage of cheating in order to have children who are perhaps more genetically gifted is offset for the majority of women by the potential costs – e.g. spousal aggression, divorce, or reduced paternal investment by the social partner and his relatives”.
“The observed low cuckoldry rates in contemporary and past human populations clearly challenge the well known idea that women routinely ‘shop around’ for good genes by engaging in extrapair copulations to obtain genetic benefits for their children,” Dr Larmuseau was quoted as saying.
