Why Babies Resemble Their Dads

In 1995, in a study published in Nature magazine, aresearcher asked 122 people to try to match the pictures ofchildren they didn’t know with photos of their mothers andfathers. They correctly paired about half of the infantswith their fathers, but had a much lower success rate whentrying to match infants with photos of their mothers,proving that babies really do tend to resemble their dads.Scientists think this may be a natural paternity test, thatpredates current DNA tests.

Anahad O’Connor writes in the March 22 New York Times thatunlike the mother, a man who is told he’s a dad can’t besure he’s really the father of the infant. Paternity suitsreflecting this problem are in the news all the time. But ifDad can see that the baby resembles him, he’ll be morelikely to accept it as his and help care for it.

In another test, researchers took head shot photos of agroup of people and, using a computer, morphed them withphotos of baby faces. When men were shown the photo of ababy’s face morphed with his own, even though they didn’tknow this had been done, they responded much more positivelyto the photo of that baby. Women, however, showed no specialpreference for babies with their features.

Art Credit: http://www.freeimages.co.uk

We can take pictures of our babies, but can wephotographtheir souls? Leonore Sweet’s new book will teach you how todo just that.

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