Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Who’s the daddy?

Paternity can now be verified by a simple test – but that doesn’t mean it should be

It’s a wise child, they say, that knows its own father. Nowadays, however, wisdom is hardly required; DNA tests can do the job with scientific certainty. For the entire course of human history, men have nursed profound, troubling doubts about the fundamental question of whether or not they were fathers to their own children; women, by contrast, usually enjoyed a reasonable level of certainty about the matter.

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