Paternity test without DNA
Eye on DNA links to this online paternity calculator, which takes into account blood group, eye color, and earlobe type to determine whether a guy’s traits are consistent with paternity. Kind of cool. Someone actually asked me whether this was possible the other day, and the earlobes thing was the only one I could come up with. Eye, skin, and hair color are all kind of tricky; I doubt they get much precision from their eye color measure.
Any trait with fairly simple inheritance should do the trick; the problem is that most aren’t easily visible. Ability to roll your tongue could be a marker, for example. Anyone else got thoughts?
Labels: Genetics
well, PTC taste. kind of not external, but stick the paper in a kid’s mouth and you’ll know. itz recessive for non-taste. tasters and super-tasters always freak out.
and of course, if you are “phenotypically rare,” no worries ;-) the probability that your lady will cheat with a phenotypically rare male is low….
From here: The gene product that gives rise to this phenotype is unknown, and its characterization would provide insight into the mechanism of bitter taste perception. Although this trait is often considered a simple Mendelian trait, i.e. one gene two alleles, a recent linkage study found a major locus on chromosome 5p15 and evidence for an additional locus on chromosome 7. The development of methods to identify these genes will provide a good stepping-stone between single-gene disorders and polygenic traits.
How about dental patterns? At least some of that (whether you get wisdom teeth, whether there are teeth missing, whether the teeth you have fit into your jaw) is apparently genetic.
razib: What if you’re worried about your brother?
razib: What if you’re worried about your brother?
the united states is a big county. not implausible that you live far and rarely see each other.