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In the musical My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins, an archetypal male intellectual bully, complains: 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' The anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's [...]

We examine the demographic correlates of paternity confidence, or men's assessment of the likelihood that they are the genetic father of a particular child. Evolutionary theory predicts that men will provide less parental investment for putative genetic offspring who are unlikely to be their actual offspring, but confidence of paternity has not been as extensively examined as its importance would merit. Using self-reported data on paternity confidence in 3,360 pregnancies reported by men living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we find that low paternity confidence is more common among unmarried couples and for unplanned pregnancies. We also find that men are more likely not to state paternity confidence (i.e., they refuse to answer the question) if a pregnancy is unplanned. We additionally examine the pregnancy outcomes associated with confidence of paternity. We find that low paternity confidence pregnancies are significantly more likely to be aborted, and pregnancies for which paternity confidence is unstated are more likely to be aborted or to miscarry. Both abortion and miscarriage are associated with unmarried couples, with unplanned pregnancies, and with couples who have fewer children together. KEY WORDS paternity assessment; abortion; miscarriage; life-history theory

This article analyzes the paternal politics underlying contemporary welfare reform in the United States. Current research on U.S. welfare reform tends to focus on the redefinition of women's responsibilities and social conceptions of motherhood. We contribute to this scholarship by explicating the ways in which reform politics also advance powerful conceptions of fatherhood. Through a discourse analysis of national-level policy debates surrounding new fatherhood legislation, we deconstruct policymakers' views on what constitutes fatherhood. We then compare their discourses to those articulated in interviews with 51 low-income, African American women. From the comparison, we argue that these groups' conceptions of fatherhood diverged in critical ways. Policy-makers' constructions prioritized the form of men's paternal relations over the content of those relations--defining fatherhood in terms of men's biological institutional or financial connection to their children. By contrast, the low-income women we interviewed prioritized the content of men's paternal relations over their form--conceptualizing fatherhood in terms of men's identification with and participation in paternal activities. By juxtaposing these discourses of fatherhood, our analysis complements feminist research on how ideologies off motherhood influence welfare policies. And by theorizing the differences between these groups' conceptions of fatherhood, we hypothesize about the policy implications of this conceptual divergence.

AN ANCIENT and enduring cross-cultural mythology explores what the texts generally perceive as a paradox: the birth of white offspring to black parents, or black offspring to white parents. This [...]

This article examines child support enforcement practices and the hospital's role in paternity establishment in several cities. Findings indicate that unwed fathers are often willing to establish paternity soon after the child's birth and that hospitals with effective paternity establishment services and adequate staffing significantly increase rates of voluntary paternity acknowledgment.

Historically shifting patterns of nonmarital fertility are particularly difficult to explain, partly because so many interacting variables were at play and partly because the assessment of individual motivations is all [...]

Child support and establishing paternity for children born out of wedlock figure importantly in the Family Support Act of 1988 and in other proposals aimed at reforming the welfare system and reducing the incidence of child poverty. Noncooperative behavior among custodial parents and interorganizational conflicts are thought to be impediments to the paternity establishment process. Subsequent research has identified the limits in various approaches for establishing paternity and the tensions that arise between the goal of an expedited paternity establishment process and concerns with due process and openness. This research points to human services-based child support systems as the model best suited for limiting the adverse effects of interorganizational conflicts associated with paternity establishment.

Results from a pilot project in four Denver hospitals offer insights for policymakers. The United States has experienced a dramatic rise in births to unmarried women. Although recent evidence shows [...]

A SURVEY HAS IDENTIFIED SOME PROMISING APPROACHES. Paternity establishment, the legal process that gives parental rights and responsibilities to men who father children outside of marriage, is one of the [...]

Until recently, the social and reproductive unit in chimpanzees was assumed to be the same, with males employing a variety of strategies to secure mating opportunities. In 1997 Gagneux et al. suggested, based upon paternity analysis of 13 infants of the North community of Tai, that females frequently mate outside their social group and that half of the infants in the community are fathered by extra-group males. We have both extended and reproduced parts of the original study by genotyping, using microsatellite loci, some 90 individuals comprising the North, Middle and South communities. Potential fathers were tested for 45 offspring using a set of 9 highly variable loci with a combined exclusion power of 0.999. This study employed several approaches aimed specifically to detect extra-group paternity, such as sampling of neighboring communities and of unhabituated males outside the communities. Accuracy of results obtained using DNA from non-invasively collected feces and hair samples was checked both by extensive repetition and through use of a real-time quantitative PCR assay to measure the amount of amplifiable DNA in an extract. Assessment of the DNA content allows one to discriminate between reliable samples and those likely to provide spurious results, and represents a significant advance in the effective and accurate use of non-invasive samples. Preliminary results suggest that extra-group paternity plays an insignificant role as a reproductive strategy of the chimpanzees within the social groups studied.

Among nonhuman primates, behavioral interactions between adult males and infants range from intensive male caretaking to avoidance or aggression. Although models of kin selection and inclusive fitness have been proposed to account for individual variation in adult male-infant interactions, in most cases, paternity has been assumed or based on patterns of behavior and residence, rather than on genetic information. In this study we examine relationships between paternity, social dominance, and adult male-infant interactions in rhesus macaques. From June through July, 2000 data were collected on social interactions and spatial proximity in a group of 47 rhesus macaques. The study group consisted of 3 adult males, 14 adult females, 16 subadult females, 3 subadult males, 1 yearling, and 10 infants. These animals were housed in a 3600 square foot field cage at the LABS of Virginia, Inc. Nonhuman Primate Breeding Facility in Yemassee, SC. Data presented here represent 112.9 hours of adult male focal animal observations collected at 4 minute intervals. In addition, blood samples were obtained on group members, and paternity exclusion analyses were conducted using 14 human-derived primers. These primers provided a cumulative mean paternity exclusion probability of .99 in a previous study (Ely et al., 1996) Our results indicate a linear dominance hierarchy among group males. The alpha male's nearest neighbor was an infant in 51.1% of all observations. In contrast, infants were nearest neighbors of the beta (28.5%) and gamma (28.0) males significantly less often (p [is less than] .01). The alpha male also maintained closer proximity ([is less than] 1 m) to infants than did other males. In addition, each adult male was found to associate with particular infants more than expected (p [is less than] .05). In some instances these were the same infants. In the case of the alpha male, however, 2 of 4 infants in greatest proximity to him, were not found in close proximity to other males. Additional relationships between kinship, paternity, and male-infant interactions are discussed. Supported by grants from the Research Board and the Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois and NIH Grant R24 RR09983.

Current demographic patterns indicate that a significant number of children are living apart from their biological fathers, suggesting a structural fragility or vulnerability of men's connections with their children. In this article, we first explore whether fathers have concerns about possible disruptions of their relationships with their children and identify the nature of these concerns. Next, we identify those characteristics that distinguish the fathers with high levels of concern from those who are less concerned. The quality of the marital or partner relationship strongly predicts fathers' concerns. Fathers who have a history of living apart from their child, and who maintain a high level of involvement with that child, express the least amount of concern. In addition, we find that the salience of the father role predicts concerns but that this effect varies according to the fathers' current age.