I just read in an academic paper (Macintyre and Sooman, Lancet, 1991) that in modern populations, the cuckoldry rate–i.e., the rate at which men are deceived into raising offspring that are genetically not their own–is 10 to 15 percent. This would make genealogy and family reunions a moot point. What’s the straight dope? –Curious, via e-mail
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Perhaps for this reason, some possibly iffy statistics on cuckoldry–or nonpaternity, as the killjoy experts more often call it–have wound up with an outsize place in discussion of the matter. In fact, that’s the real point of the article you read. Sizing up the conventional wisdom on nonpaternity before the advent of widespread DNA testing, the authors find that though societywide nonpaternity rates of 10 percent and higher have routinely been cited in studies and textbooks, these numbers prove to have scant solid data behind them. Among the estimates they found:
a 20 to 30 percent–from another aging and unpublished UK study; and
Such a figure squares a lot better with other recent surveys than those double-digit rates do. In a 2005 paper Australian sociologist Michael Gilding reads available evidence as suggesting a nonpaternity rate for Western countries of between 1 and 3 percent; another comprehensive study of international data agrees we can’t yet draw any conclusions about across-the-board rates but says that minus paternity-dispute cases the overall rate looks to be about 3.7 percent.
