The Universe of Discourse

Do infants resemble their fathers more than their mothers?
Back in 1995, Christenfeld and Hill published a paper claimed to have found evidence that infants tended to resemble their fathers more than they resembled their mothers. The evolutionary explanation for this, it was claimed, is that children who resemble their fathers are less likely to be abandoned by them, because their paternity would be less likely to be doubted. The pop science press got hold of it—several years later, as they often do—and it was widely reported for a while. Perhaps you heard about it.

A couple years ago, while looking for something entirely unrelated, I ran across the paper of French et al. titled The Resemblance of One-year-old Infants to Their Fathers: Refuting Christenfeld & Hill. French and his colleagues had tried to reproduce Christenfeld and Hill's results, with little success; they suggested that the conclusion was false, and offered a number of arguments as to why the purported resemblance should not exist. Of course, the pop science press was totally uninterested.

At the time, I thought, "Wow, I wish I had a way to get a lot of people to read this paper." Then last month I realized that my widely-read blog is just the place to do this.

Before I go on, here is the paper. I recommend it; it's good reading, and only six pages long. Here's the abstract:

In 1995 Christenfeld and Hill published a paper that purported to show at one year of age, infants resemble their fathers more than their mothers. Evolution, they argued, would have produced this result since it would ensure male parental resources, since the paternity of the infant would no longer be in doubt. We believe this result is false. We present the results of two experiments (and mention a third) which are very far from replicating Christenfeld and Hill's data. In addition, we provide an evolutionary explanation as to why evolution would not have favored the result reported by Christenfeld and Hill.

In the first study done by French, participants were presented with a 1-, 3-, or 5-year-old child's face, and the faces of either the father and two unrelated men, or the mother and two unrelated women. The participants were invited to identify the child's parent. They did indeed succeed in identifying the children's parents somewhat more often than would have been obtained by chance alone. But the participants did not identify fathers more reliably than they identified mothers.

The second study was similar, but used only 1-year-old infants. (The Christenfeld and Hill claim is that one year is the age at which children most resemble their fathers.)

French points out that although the argument from evolutionary considerations is initially attractive, it starts to disintegrate when looked at more closely. The idea is that if a child resembles its father, the father is less likely to doubt his paternity, and so is less likely to withhold resources from the child. So there might be a selection pressure in favor of resembling one's father.

But now turn this around: if a father can be sure of paternity because the children look like him, then he can also be sure when the children aren't his because they don't resemble him. This will create a very strong selection pressure in favor of children resembling their fathers. And the tendency to resemble one's father will create a positive feedback loop: the more likely kids are to look like their fathers, the more likely that children who don't resemble their fathers will be abandoned, neglected, abused, or killed. So if there is a tendency for infants to resemble their fathers more than their mothers, one would expect it to be magnified over time, and to be fairly large by now. But none of the studies (including the original Christenfeld and Hill one) found a strong tendency for children to resemble their fathers.

But, as French notes, it's hard to get people to pay attention to a negative result, to a paper that says that something interesting isn't happening.

[ Addendum 20061206: Here's the original Christenfeld and Hill paper. ]

[ Addendum 20171101: A recent web search refutes my claim that “the pop science press was totally uninterested”. Results include this article from Scientific American and a mention in the book Bumpology: The Myth-Busting Pregnancy Book for Curious Parents-To-Be. ]

[ Addendum 20171101: A more extensive study in 2004 confirmed French's results. ]

[Other articles in category /bio] permanent link