Babies tend to look like their fathers.
There is no evidence to support the claim of an enhanced resemblance between fathers and their children.
Junior might have his father's nose.According to some parenting folklore, babies tend to look more like their fathers than their mothers, a claim with a reasonable evolutionary explanation.Fathers don't share a mother's certainty that a baby is theirs, and are more likely to invest in their own children.Human evolution could have favored children that looked like their fathers, at least early on, as a way of confirmation of their father's identity.The paternal-resemblance hypothesis got some scientific backing in 1995 when a study by Nicholas Christenfeld and Emily Hill of the University of California, San Diego showed that people were better at matching photos of one-year-old children with pictures of their fathers than with photos.Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.Is the case closed?Hardly.Robert French is a psychologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France.The 1995 paper states that young children resemble both parents equally, but a subsequent body of research shows otherwise.Babies tend to look like their mothers more than their fathers, according to some studies.Serge Brédart of the University of Lige in Belgium was unable to replicate the paternal-resemblance finding in a 1999 study.In a photo-matching trial with pictures of one-, three- and five-year-old children and their parents, subjects identified mothers and fathers equally well.A more recent study in the same journal employed a larger set of photos than were used by either Christenfeld and Hill or Brédart and French in their studies and still concluded that most infants resemble both parents equally."Our research shows that some babies look more like their fathers than their mothers, while others look the same to both parents," says Paola Bressan, a psychologist at the University.To the best of Bressan's knowledge, no study has replicated or supported the 1995 finding that babies preferentially resemble their fathers.Two studies in Evolution & Human Behavior, one in 2000 and the other in 2007, found that newborns look more like their mothers than their fathers in the first three days of their lives.The mothers of the babies tend to emphasize the child's resemblance to the father.There is a possible evolutionary explanation according to D. Kelly McLain and his co-authors of the 2000 study.The researchers wrote that the bias in how mothers remark resemblance does not reflect actual resemblance and may be an evolved or conditioned response to assure domestic fathers of their paternity.Evolutionary pressures may have reduced the amount of paternal resemblance in newborns in order to ensure that a father will care for a child even if he has been cuckolded.One of the challenges in linking subtle human features to changes that played out over millions of years of evolution is that both high and low degrees of paternal resemblance have ready explanations.French says it's hard to distinguish "just-so" stories from things that are a product of evolution.
John is a former reporter and editor for Scientific American.
Understand world-changing science.The archive includes articles by more than 150 prize winners.