Continuing our Father’s Day discussion of the importance of involved dads, I read with interest that in a study of families in Senegal, mothers’ ratings of how invested fathers were in their children were highly correlated with observer ratings of how much a child resembled his or her father. These data are consistent with the predictions of evolutionary psychologists, who suggest that the worst case scenario for men is to end up providing resources for another man’s child, although that doesn’t explain the many stepfathers and adoptive fathers out there doing terrific jobs of parenting.
It’s sort of a running joke chez Freberg that my genes sort of got lost in the mix, with the exception that all three daughters have strong eyebrows, which is definitely not a paternal trait. When it comes to strength, the girls all take after their dad, who held the UCLA discus record for about ten years. My all-time best mark in the family shot put contests (25 feet) puts me as a distant last, far less than half of Karen’s school record at USC of 57-7.75 feet. So it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that Mr. F has always taken his daddy job very seriously.
The Senegalese study has further implications. If resembling your dad means you get more resources, I wonder if children objectively resemble their dads more than their moms. Are there some features where resemblance is more important? Or is it just overall similarity? Is this finding related to the matching hypothesis? If a woman marries a man who already resembles her, doesn’t that boost the chances that the children will look similar to him, too?
Sting and Wife Trudi Styler Epitomize the Matching Hypothesis
