FATHER'S FEATURES? Most studies find that babies resemble both parents in approximately equal measures.
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Does junior really have his father's nose?
A common bit of parenting folklore holds that babies tend to look more like their fathers than their mothers, a claim with a reasonable evolutionary explanation. Fathers, after all, do not share a mother's certainty that a baby is theirs, and are more likely to invest whatever resources they have in their own offspring. Human evolution, then, could have favored children that resemble their fathers, at least early on, as a way of confirming paternity.
The paternal-resemblance hypothesis got some scientific backing in 1995, when a study in Nature by Nicholas Christenfeld and Emily Hill of the University of California, San Diego, showed that people were much better at matching photos of one-year-old children with pictures of their fathers than with photos of their mothers. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
Case closed? Hardly. "It's a very sexy result, it's seductive, it's what evolutionary psychology would predict—and I think it's wrong," says psychologist Robert French of the National Center for Scientific Research in France. A subsequent body of research, building over the years in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, has delivered results in conflict with the 1995 paper, indicating that young children resemble both parents equally. Some studies have even found that newborns tend to resemble their mothers more than their fathers.
In a 1999 study published in Evolution & Human Behavior, French and Serge Brédart of the University of Liège in Belgium set out to replicate the paternal-resemblance finding and were unable to do so. In a photo-matching trial with pictures of one-, three- and five-year-old children and their parents, subjects identified mothers and fathers equally well.
A more recent study in the same journal employed a larger set of photos than were used by either Christenfeld and Hill or Brédart and French in their studies and still concluded that most infants resemble both parents equally. "Our research, on a much larger sample of babies than Christenfeld and Hill's, shows that some babies resemble their father more, some babies resemble their mother more, and most babies resemble both parents to about the same extent," says Paola Bressan, a psychologist at the University of Padova in Italy who co-authored the 2004 study. Bressan added that, to the best of her knowledge, "no study has either replicated or supported" the 1995 finding that babies preferentially resemble their fathers.
Two other studies in Evolution & Human Behavior, one in 2000 and one in 2007, found that newborns actually look more like their mothers than their fathers in the first three days of their lives, as judged by unrelated assessors. But the babies' mothers tend to say just the opposite, emphasizing the child's resemblance to the father. That, too, has a possible evolutionary explanation, according to D. Kelly McLain of Georgia Southern University and his co-authors of the 2000 study. "The bias in how mothers remark resemblance does not reflect actual resemblance and may be an evolved or conditioned response to assure domestic fathers of their paternity," the researchers wrote.
McLain and his colleagues even speculated that evolutionary pressures may have actually reduced the amount of paternal resemblance in newborns, thus ensuring that a putative father will care for a child even if the father has been cuckolded. That both high and low degrees of paternal resemblance have ready explanations highlights one of the challenges in linking subtle human features to changes that played out over millions of years of evolution. "It's kind of hard to distinguish 'just-so' stories from things that are really a product of evolution," French says.
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21 Comments
Add CommentIt may be weird - but my child resembles the postman...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn evolutionary bias for babies to look like their fathers makes no sense. How many years have there been mirrors? At most a few millennia. Maybe 100 or so generations. How would such a short time be explained by evolution pressure?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have the hunch that the more closely the parents are related, the more the children resemble the parents... it's rather obvious & makes good genetic sense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@GusGus The presence or absence of mirrors should have minimal effect. Reflections were always available to be viewed on the side of shiny objects or in the water puddle when drinking. With humans being a social creature ,being told of a resemblance would have had a strong influence on him as well, irrespective of whether he could see that for himself or not.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere have always been puddles...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf babies resembled both parents equally, I would expect a study to find that the children resemble their mothers more, because some fraction of the children will be illegitimate and thus have no resemblance to the legal father. A proper study would have to do paternity tests on the children.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf biology dictated that children resembled both parents equally, I would expect these studies to find a bias in favor of maternal resemblance, since some fraction of the children would be secretly illegitimate. A proper study would have to be backed up by paternity tests on the children.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislalawawa has made the most salient point so far. If you don't control for known paternity, and there is even a small amount of "cuckolding" as the article puts it then even 50-50% perception in the test, lends itself to babies looking more like their fathers, because for those instances where the male present is not the father, it makes sense they won't look like him at all. It would be interesting to see the data on that and if they controlled for it. Also there is more examples of it today then probably even 10 and definitely more than 20-30 years ago, so if it is not controlled for, it will destroy the validity of the conclusions
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHm. Was it also not concluded that partners choose someone that looks like them? They choose someone with the same nose? So of course the baby will look like the father/mother. They look alike. So what are we researching here?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSons or daughters with schizophrenia resemble the mother more then the father. The study showed nine of twelve people with this feature, bone structure, finger length and facial features.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisandrewflocchini@aol.com
most of research of medicine found for the program of food for women pregnant cause select species baby.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn intimacy of marriage in long run many couple faces are look similar.Same may be true babies resemble with mother some time with father.There is no strict law of resemblances.I marked some time babies bring height from parent side of mother.There lot of varieties babies bring with her from both parenthetical genes. may be back of two three generations
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes yes I know it sounds so very sciencey and hard headed and ever so 'I am a secular humanist' to use natural selection to explain everything people do, or in this case, don't do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCultural does play a part in human behaviour and it makes infinite scientific sense to use this level of explanation where it is warranted.
I grew up in an Anglo family that was not given to machismo. I had a friend who was from a southern European background, however, who married a man of Italian descent.
When they had their first baby I pointed out the obvious: that he strongly resembled his mother. My friend went white and said 'Don't tell my husband that! He'll think that you are telling him the baby isn't his!'
In such a situation, where the consequences for a woman could be dire, people know better than to put her well-being at risk, so all babies are found to look like their dad.
When I married a man of Anglo background but from a more macho family his family discovered the our boy looked like him and our daughter looked like me, when to the rest of the world the reverse was the case.
My theory is that first children look like father (observation only). Any data upon which I can test it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf babies resembled both parents equally, I would expect a study to find that the children resemble their mothers more, because some fraction of the children will be illegitimate and thus have no resemblance to the legal father.<a href="http://www.audiopopo.com/monster-beats-in-ear-c-87.html">Monster Beats in ear</a>
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't believe that the studies were designed correctly. All of the studies that were done included children of a minimum of one year of age and above. The original hypothesis, and the theory that has been discussed for many years is that NEWBORNS look more like their father than mother, and as a child gets older, even at six months of age, begins to develop features that also look similar to his/her mother. It makes sense that by one year, many infants will have some features that resemble both parents. At birth, however, it would seem to follow the logic that the newborn would more greatly resemble the father. Circumstantially, I have many female friends and family members that have been slightly upset when their baby(ies) are first born, because they don't feel the newborn looks much like them, but as they age and develop, they do resemble the mothers more as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom an evolutionary standpoint, that would make sense, as the need to confirm paternity is right after birth, for the first few months of a babies life. After that, once the father is assured paternity, then who the child resembles matters less.
Cuckoldry is the second most heinous fraud a person can commit. Yet this fraud that affects a MINIMUM of one percent of all births is legal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCuckoldry should be criminalized and paternity testing mandatory for all births.just as non-consensual sex with one's wife has been so declared.
Adopted children and children from sperm donors have the right to know their geentic dad but not a cuckolded child. The two men also have dramatic alteration to their life's course due to this fraud. Doesn't a male have the right to know the child he is loving and rearing is his genes? Doesn't the genetic father have a right to this child?
Why is cuckoldry not only legal but not even discussed and debated in our society? A man gets into serious trouble today if he, like Bob Hope did to my mom, grab a bit of tit in the work place in a joking manner. So why are women allowed to commit the much more dastardly sexual abuse of cuckoldry?
One percent of all births is the absolute minimum. Imagine the action society would take if one percent of all people aged over 70 were being robbed of their life savings by men committing fraud on them?
In a VERY informal study I have done ,I noticed the firstborn resembles father the second resembles mother .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a Hypothesis that the first born resembles father for the reason he will stay around and provide for the child .In chimpanzee society the alpha kills the kid he thinks isn't his ..
I would GUESS that in Prehistoric times this happened in humans ,thus the genes that survived passed on the trait .
Yeah, well mine are the 'spittin image' of the mailman because he's my husband. But it's always funny to joke about it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI know I'm late to the party here, but let me just state that the research disproving it seems to be a bit flawed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst off, the original Christenfeld and Hill study is not the only one to come up with these results. A 2003 study in the Journal of Evolution and Human Behavior replicated the results.
Also, Christenfeld and Hill surveyed infants, children aged 10, and 20-year olds. The 1999 Bredart and French study surveyed infants children up to age 5, so it's not shocking the results could be different.
The Bredart and French study was also carried out in Belgium, a country with notoriously high infidelity rates. As in, infidelity isn't even considered a big deal and 10% of the population is a member of one dating site alone exclusively catering to spouses looking to cheat (I am not making this up). Unless they performed paternity tests on the children involved, then they may have even gotten the wrong fathers as part of the survey.
In browsing a few blogs, I saw this question asked, and what seemed like a slight majority of mothers responded that their baby did at one point resemble the father, but that they quickly changed, sometimes in a matter of months. So just using one picture per infant may also not be the way to go.
On a side note, I recall reading in one of the studies that show mothers make comments on how the child looks like the father, that in the presence of the father, 87% of mothers said the kid looked like dad, but otherwise, 60%. While it proved moms make these comments, it also showed a majority of children do look like the father.
Finally, a 2009 French study proved that there are evolutionary advantages to looking like the father. A French research team in Senegal confirmed that fathers invest more in children that look and smell like them.
(to be continued)
In short, a proper study would perform paternity tests on all the children involved, and follow them around for a bit rather than relying on a single picture.
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