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 Ouze wrote:
Putting aside the fact that you're expanding government to issue a dictate that serves no medical purpose, there are 4 million babies born in this country every year. If DNA testing is 99% accurate, congratulations: you've introduced 40,000 false results a year, every year. And I'm not talking about the tests themselves, I'm talking about the labs, which have had plenty of high profile mistakes in more serious situation.

it's a national fiasco in search of a problem.

This needs more emphasis. Mandatory paternity tests are a profoundly stupid idea that can only have been invented by someone who doesn't understand the science of DNA testing and statistics. A non-zero failure rate is acceptable for a DNA test that is only used when there is already a reasonable belief that the test is going to reveal something. It's not ideal, of course, but to hurt an innocent person you'd have to have a failure in the DNA test AND a simultaneous failure in whatever other source of information you're trying to confirm with the DNA test. But when you indiscriminately use a test with a non-zero failure rate you are effectively guaranteeing that false positives will happen, and because there is no other information to help counter the false positive you've suddenly got large numbers of people scrambling to defuse an accusation of cheating/murder/whatever.

This, btw, is why a criminal case built on nothing but a piece of DNA evidence is extremely weak and DNA tests aren't used until the police have a suspect identified.

I think it could work providing all men are mandatorily tested and their DNA signature recorded, so that the real father can be found out and made to pay maintenance.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I think it could work providing all men are mandatorily tested and their DNA signature recorded, so that the real father can be found out and made to pay maintenance.

See above. A DNA registry just means that instead of a false negative merely creating a massive crisis for a couple it gives some random stranger the bill for child support.

I would like to point out that the article provided by the MOD is not the original article I read this morning. That was in an analog (paper) format, and thus unable to link to. I just posted what I could find in a 5 minute google search.

While full-on DNA tests could very well be cost prohibitive, simple blood typing tests would not be. They can actually be done for literal pocket change. Blood from babies is all ready tested for disorders they have a 1 in 150,000 chance of having.


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 Kilkrazy wrote:
I think it could work providing all men are mandatorily tested and their DNA signature recorded, so that the real father can be found out and made to pay maintenance.

If a man that is tested is negative, the mother likely has an idea of the identity of the biological father. Outside of Maury Povitch that is.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I think it could work providing all men are mandatorily tested and their DNA signature recorded, so that the real father can be found out and made to pay maintenance.

You get single fathers too, we seem to put this whole thing on the Mother being one left. Yet it can happen other way too.
So fairer both are recorded and if father raising, the mother can be asked to pay.

If you want true equality, you treat the genders equally, and support both kinds of single parent, regardless of gender, they have equal rights, and responsibility in regard to child support.

Surely that is not fairer for all..

 LordofHats wrote:
And maybe a stats heavy person can explain this, but how does the study go from 1% to 30% of men might not be the father, a massive range which tells me this is an extremely loose study we're dealing with, to 1 in 25?

The study is a meta analysis of a very large number of papers across many years that have between them reported between 1% and 30%. They've probably then weighted the data from each based on quality of data, methodology or bias, and created an aggregate score to get the more likely average of 4%.

LordofHats wrote:Nothing in medical care is cheap.

Loads of it is. Just no in the US.

Thargrim wrote: I don't trust any living being...let alone women.

Jesus.


Genetics =/= Fatherhood. This thread is very silly.

I was thinking something similar. As humans, it is more important to transfer our cultural memes (in the Richard Dawkins sense) to our children than our genes.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I was thinking something similar. As humans, it is more important to transfer our cultural memes (in the Richard Dawkins sense) to our children than our genes.

I think a lot of the time the guy would have a bigger problem with the lying woman to whom they'd be raising the child with (or paying money to in order to raise the child) than the child themselves.

People knowingly and happily raise children that aren't biologically theirs all the time, but it cuts deep when it's a child you think is yours but isn't.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
And maybe a stats heavy person can explain this, but how does the study go from 1% to 30% of men might not be the father, a massive range which tells me this is an extremely loose study we're dealing with, to 1 in 25?

The study is a meta analysis of a very large number of papers across many years that have between them reported between 1% and 30%. They've probably then weighted the data from each based on quality of data, methodology or bias, and created an aggregate score to get the more likely average of 4%.

That makes sense.

 cuda1179 wrote:
The state all ready has a history of diving into someone's personal records to prevent a possible abuse of a third party. This isn't exactly a radical concept. There are literally THOUSANDS of men paying child support for children that are not theirs. Many times they are still paying even when they KNOW they are not they father. In some cases they haven't even met the mother. Some pencil pusher thinks, " Well, the father is supposed to be John Smith, who is the first John Smith in the phone book, I'll just say it's him." If the article I read is even remotely accurate, that's one in 15 births that could be effected. Probably a pretty decent public policy maker.

The article you read isn't remotely accurate. It's based on an old work that was a self-admitted limited first step in addressing the problem, that has been misunderstood and misrepresented for years. When the studies first began genetic tests were very expensive, and so quite limited and only made on request by people who were worried about something enough to hand over a lot of cash. Now, not every request was due to doubts over parenthood, but that was a very common reason, and so the population sample for the early work included a lot of people who were already suspicious about the parenthood of the child. In other words, the sample was nowhere near representative of the general population, and no-one was pretending it was. Unfortunately that doesn't make for much of a story so that part somehow got left out of the reporting..

In subsequent years, as genetic testing has become a lot cheaper and more widely used, there has been efforts to get a clearer idea. Those surveys have found the number somewhere between 1/110 and 1/150. 0.6% to 0.9%. So yeah, the 6.7% figure you gave was off by somewhere up to a factor of 10 times. And even that number is still suspected to be high, because it still isn't based on a fully representative population.

Thing is, I don't think you'd consider yourself a gullible kind of guy, cuda1179. But in this case you saw that number, and while you didn't take it as God's own truth, you bought in to it enough to start a thread about it here, and to suggest a national screening program to solve this problem. So you certainly bought in to it to some extent. You could have gone with a simple google search and found a debunking within a few links. I didn't because I've seen this number bandied about before and so remembered the debunking from those instances, but there's no reason you couldn't have checked.

But you didn't. Its not a hanging offense by any means, it isn't that big of a deal. And it is hardly a mistake you are unique in making. But it is an opportunity to think about how we all process information that comes our way. For instance, if you instead read a newspaper article that said that woman are extremely faithful and 99.9% of the time when a father requests a paternity test it is shown that his concerns are false*, would you post that here, and talk about what kinds of policy responses we should have to that? Or would have been a lot more likely to go and check out the reliability of that number before you go and double it before starting a thread on it? Or would you maybe just read that number, doubt it was true and then just keep reading the paper, soon having forgotten all about it?

Point is, we are at a stage where we all have close to absolute information available to us. But hardly any of us use it to question our existing beliefs. We instead use it to build a collection of claims to better argue what we already decided was true.

Now, you might argue this seems a bit harsh, because the number seemed true to you, and you did claim you didn't know if it was true. But that's the exact point. The number seemed true to you, it fit with what you already believed, so you didn't dismiss it, and then even while you accepted it wasn't certain, you then went on to think about the issue as if the number was true.

It's something we all naturally do. It's natural to accept things that fit with our pre-existing beliefs. But if we just accept the statements that fit with what we already believe, we never actually learn anything, It isn't easy to spend time doubting and challenging as much as we possibly can, but if we're not really trying to figure out how stuff actually works, then what's the point of learning about anything?



*That's a stat I just invented for the point of the conversation, which is of course way higher than the real figure would. I have no idea what the real number would be, or even if such a number could be measured.


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 Nostromodamus wrote:
I can see both sides. I'm not sure where I stand.

As an aside, I wonder if this would affect abortion rates?

They don't test in utero just for paternity. Full genetic testing in utero is possible, and they will do it if there are indications of serious issues, but they don't do it before the because it's quite expensive and can cause miscarriages. Testing is done after birth for this reason. So it wouldn't impact abortion rates.

Yeah no. Mandatory DNA testing is just all kinds of wrong. You'd wind up with loads of families getting utterly destroyed that didn't need to.

Plus if you start creating a national DNA databank, you wind up with some other potential problems down the road. Like say you implement mandatory genetic testing for certain genetic diseases and predispositions so everybody knows what health risks they might have. The problem with this is that you could then potentially have some stupid people start clamoring for laws preventing certain people from having children so they don't have children predisposed to health problems. It's a slippery slope down to outright Eugenics. You'd also have the problem of people having abortions just because they don't want a baby who has a predisposition to a certain disease. All kinds of morally wrong.

I'd love to see what magazine it originally came from. It was a paper hard-copy and a co-worker, not a random guy, so it should be possible to at least get the name of the thing in the next week or so. Maybe a link to the magazine's webpage or, if they lack one, hotocopy the thing and stick it up for a read.

Because it sets off a dozen warning bells in my head and I'd lik eto be sure that I'm still properly calibrated.

gakky article making conclusions based on a gakky study? What a surprise.

You don't even have to read the article very far to realize that the study is trash:

Their review of estimates of so-called paternal discrepancy over more than 50 years suggests the father was not the natural parent in between 1% and 30% of cases.

That sentence tells you everything you need to know about the study, which is that it is garbage.

If you want to actually find out why the study is junk science, you could read the rest. And you just need to read the next paragraph:

The team from Liverpool John Moores University agreed that the figures, drawn from studies of men and women seeking proof of paternity, might be exaggerated because uncertainty over fatherhood is usually the reason for tests.

Turns out that if people do a test because they think they may not be the father, a totally surprising number of times they may be the father. What a shocker. The premise isn't even really worth talking about unless someone has the original research paper handy.




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 cuda1179 wrote:
I would like to point out that the article provided by the MOD is not the original article I read this morning. That was in an analog (paper) format, and thus unable to link to. I just posted what I could find in a 5 minute google search.

Someday we will develop a handheld device that has a camera and an ability to link to a network where information is freely shared so that a picture of the article can be posted.

Or maybe the name of the article, the journal, the date, and the authors, so that the members of the forum with access to journals may look for it and post it?

 Grey Templar wrote:
Yeah no. Mandatory DNA testing is just all kinds of wrong.

Note that DNA testing isn't necessary to checking paternity, there are several other pretty reliable testing methods - not as reliable as DNA testing, but reliable enough that it will rule out basically everyone who isn't related to the supposed father.

You'd wind up with loads of families getting utterly destroyed that didn't need to.

Debatable. Someone cheating on their spouse is also responsible for destroying the family. OTOH, asking for a paternity test is seldom going to end well for the father (i.e. it's telling the mother that he doesn't trust her), unless the parentage of the child is already questionable. Mandatory paternity testing dictated by the government sidesteps that, as the father has no choice in the matter, but it's horribly parochial to have the government mandate that women can't be trusted.

Plus if you start creating a national DNA databank, you wind up with some other potential problems down the road.

Absolutely, especially given that the DNA will be tested and those test results retained by a private company. I can't believe people actually send their DNA to Ancestry.com, pay for the privilege so that Ancestry.com can have a database full of hundreds of thousands of unique DNA.

I don't see why it's morally wrong not to want to have a baby with a genetic disease.

Genetic testing for Down's Syndrome is a pretty common procedure for older mothers, and the purpose is to inform the parents so they can decide to have an abortion if the foetus is affected. Not everyone finds this acceptable, of course, but it's generally considered ethical and legal in western countries.

Isn't it perhaps more immoral to deliberately risk passing serious genetic diseases to the next generation? I'm thinking of cases where two potential parents know they have a high probability of passing such a disease to their potential children. Ought they to take that chance on behalf of their children?

Hopefully genetic engineering is going to find cures for these sorts of conditions.

The problem is, on top of the whole moral black hole that is voluntary abortion, that if you mandate people test themselves for genetic diseases you might end up with the government telling someone ''hey, you two can't have kids together because there is 35% chance any offspring will have X disease''. Or at least these people will feel heavily pressured into not having kids.

If two people want to get checked for diseases that is fine. But it isn't something you should mandate.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I don't see why it's morally wrong not to want to have a baby with a genetic disease.

Genetic testing for Down's Syndrome is a pretty common procedure for older mothers, and the purpose is to inform the parents so they can decide to have an abortion if the foetus is affected. Not everyone finds this acceptable, of course, but it's generally considered ethical and legal in western countries.

Isn't it perhaps more immoral to deliberately risk passing serious genetic diseases to the next generation? I'm thinking of cases where two potential parents know they have a high probability of passing such a disease to their potential children. Ought they to take that chance on behalf of their children?

Hopefully genetic engineering is going to find cures for these sorts of conditions.

Please keep in mind that even in western countries there is a large segment of the population that views abortions as immoral, and that abortions can be done for reasons those society considers unethical regardless, like aborting a fetus simply because it's female.

Eugenics is also a hot button topic, given how it was proposed to be applied (and applied!) in the 20th century (forced sterilizations of undesirables). Designer babies might seem desirable via genetic engineering, but the costs lead to an effective genetic upperclass where the rich are genetically superior in every way to the rest of humanity. Which means these things have to be broadly applied, possibly even mandated, which is an ethics problem in and of itself.

Yeah. Genetic engineering means that we literally would have a master race. Those who could afford genetic enhancement would lord over those who couldn't.

Meh I don't see why not, it could help with a lot of things. Organ donors, blood type ect ect.

If your child needs a organ then you find out nope not you wifey is a hoe. Then everyone suffers.

It was too much to hope that this could be discussed intelligently, wasn't it?