FOURTEEN Read more at location 2374
Note: 14@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ I guai della troppa conoscenza... Premessa biologica: la famiglia tradizionale temperata dall'adulterio è il modo che l'uomo e gli uccelli hanno scelto x convivere. Tutto si basa sull'inabilità dell'uomo di nn riconoscere i propri figli. Col test di paternità molti matrimoni salteranno + contraccezione più diffusa + discriminazione tra i figli da parte dei padri... La discriminazione tra figli è pratica diffusa. La letteratura offre copiosi esempi. I crimini dei padri putativi sulla prole sono molto più frequenti... Congettura: se il matrimonio serve a garantire paternità certa con il TP il futuro sarà dominato dalla promiscuità. Tuttavia vivere insieme agevola l'accudimento cosicché il matrimonio di gruppo è la realtà favorita. Problema: ma la gelosia degli uomini è hardwired? Sè fosse così tutto sarebbe vano. Piccola evidenza di gelosia strategica: quando la compagna è incinta siamo meno gelosi. Altra ipotesi: le madri professioniste... Il mercato degli ovuli femminili è già prospero e spesso le mamme sono solo uteri in affitto. Ma il mercato del seme è molto più semplice e x le donne che nn devono affittare un utero tutto è più semplice. Resta il problema del genitore single. La ricchezza crescente attenua i problemi di genitorialità... Altri problemi creati dal PT: chi è il genitore responsabile del figlio adulterino? Il marito? Sarebbe aggiungere insulto ad ingiuria. Eppure il figlio nn ha colpe... PT rende + facile rintracciare il padre naturale anche nel caso in cui costui voglia svignarsela come nel caso delle inseminazioni artificiali. Prima bastava nn tenere registri... Genitore è una parola sempre + ambigua. Esistono tre madri (intenzionale, genetica, uterina) e due padri. Il caso californiano dei 5 genitori (gli adottivi si sono separati prima che nascesse). La corte decise che i responsabili fossero gli adottivi... La formula: "genitore è colui che dice di esserlo" risolve molti casi astrusi. Anche una SPA può fungere da genitore! Chissà, magari Microsoft intende clonare un nuovo Bill Gates... La Monsanto ha brevettato dei particolari semi di soia transgenica, perchè mai nn potrebbe brevettare degli esseri umani? Questi bimbi avranno il diritto a riprodursi?... A volte l'ignoranza è una benedizione: se la mia condanna a morte fosse iscritta nei miei geni? Oppure: certe malattie genetiche diverranno inassicurabili, o comunque a prezzi differenziati. Proibire i test delle assicuraziono? => adverse selection ed editi ancora più squilibrati. Altre soluzioni: proibire tout court il test (incentivo a barare ) o assicurare i futuri figli... Altro utilizzo della "mappatura": promessi sposi. La tendenza a tradire è in gran parte innata... Sessualità: a livello genetico le cose sembrerebbero ben definite: XY=>maschio e XX=>donna. Eppure neanche qui mancano le ambiguita ci sono anche donne XY e uomini XX così come ci sono individui con combinazioni diverse: es XYX o XXY. E se domani le ambiguità genetiche potranno essere costruite a tavolino? Non parliamo poi di quando ci si mette di mezzo la psicologia.… Edit
Human mating patterns have varied a good deal across time and space, but long-term monogamy is far and away the most common.Read more at location 2376
possibly because their offspring, like ours, require extended parental care.'Read more at location 2378
significant percentage - estimates range from about I in 100 to 1 in 3 - of the children of married women cohabiting with their husbands are fathered by someone else.' Read more at location 2381
Males play two different roles in human (and avian) reproduction. They contribute genes to help produce children and resources to help rear them. The latter contribution is costly;Read more at location 2383
So it is not surprising that males, whether men or ganders, invest substantial effort both in attempting to impregnate females they are not mated to and in attempting to keep the females they are mated to from being impregnated by other males. Read more at location 2385
A faithful female gets both genes and support from her mate, trading her contribution to producing offspring for his. But an unfaithful female can do even better. She pairs up with the best provider who will have her and then, given the opportunity, becomes pregnant by the highest quality male available, where "quality" is defined by whatever observable characteristics signal heritable characteristics that can be expected to result in reproductive success for her offspring - tail length in swallows, income and status in humans.Read more at location 2386
The obvious consequence is that some men would discover that their wives had been unfaithful and some marriages would break up as a result.Read more at location 2394
The still less obvious consequence - except to economists and evolutionary biologists - is that men would take better care of their children.Read more at location 2395
Readers who question the assumption that parents are biased in favor of their own children might want to look at the literary evidence.Read more at location 2401
Across a variety of cultures there is evidence from statistics on child abuse and child murder that the literature is right - judging by one study, stepparents are about forty times as likely to kill children as real parents.'Read more at location 2403
a common-law doctrine going back to the eighteenth century, a married man cohabiting with his spouse was legally forbidden from challenging the legitimacy of her offspring.Read more at location 2407
One function of the marriage institutions of most human societies we know of, past and present, is to give males a reasonable confidence of paternityRead more at location 2414
This raises some interesting possibilities. We could, at one extreme, have a society of casual promiscuityRead more at location 2415
It is easier for two parents to raise a child jointly if they are living together, and the fact that two people enjoy sex together is very weak evidence that they will enjoy living together.Read more at location 2417
An alternative that is both more attractive and more interesting is some form of group marriageRead more at location 2418
That in turn comes down to a simple question to which I do not know the answer: Is male sexual jealousy hardwired?"Read more at location 2421
Weak evidence for the latter explanation is provided by an anthropologist's observation that men spent less time monitoring their wives when the wives were pregnant, and hence could not conceive.) Read more at location 2423
Suppose that male sexual jealousy is hardwired. There still remains an interesting possibility: the professional mother. Consider a woman who likes children, is good at bearing and rearing them, and herself has characteristics that men would like in the mother of their child - healthy, intelligent, good looking.Read more at location 2427
Note: x E SE LA GELODIA ESISTESSE? POSSIBILITÀ DELLA MAMMA PROFFESS ANZICHÈ POLIAMORE. L AMORE È SOLO TRA GENITORI E FIGLIO Edit
The man fathers the child, whether by artificial insemination or more traditional means. The woman bears and rears the child.Read more at location 2430
One problem with this is that the ideal mother for your children is beautiful, brilliant, and healthy - and a woman like that may be able to find a more attractive career than being a surrogate mother.Read more at location 2431
professional mother could be only a host mother, bearing the better baby constructed by combining your sperm with the best egg money can buy.Read more at location 2433
What if we reverse the roles? Suppose it is the mother who wishes to build her own baby, combining her egg with the best genes she can find?Read more at location 2434
rising real incomes; it is easier for a single parent to raise a child the richer he or she is.Read more at location 2439
reproductive technologies are going to generate new problems for people in the future, they are already producing problems for the legal system and the social institutions in which it is embedded. Read more at location 2442
State welfare agencies and unmarried or no-longer-married mothers would like to find a man who can be made responsible for supporting the mothers' children. If their genetic father can be identified, he is the obvious candidate. But what if he cannot? Read more at location 2443
a man who has been cuckolded by his wife is already a victim of her betrayal; to make him responsible for supporting someone else's child only adds injury to insult.Read more at location 2447
The counterargument is that even if the mother is at fault her child is notRead more at location 2449
One possibility a little farther down the road is a genetic database that could be used to identify the genetic father and make him liable, bringing us back to the idea of paternity testing at birth.Read more at location 2450
Paternity testing could also create problems for men who, under current law, are not responsible for supporting children who, genetically speaking, really are theirs. In many states, if a woman conceives by artificial insemination using sperm from a sperm bank, she has no claims for support from the donor. Prior to paternity testing, that legal rule could be enforced by simply not keeping the relevant records.Read more at location 2453
making it easier for adopted children to locate birth parents, including ones who do not want to be located, some men may be in for a surprise.Read more at location 2456
"mother" has at least three different meanings. One is intentional mother: the woman who intended to play the social role of mother when the arrangements for producing the child were made. One is womb mother: the mother in whose womb the fetus grew. A third is egg mother: the mother who provided the egg.Read more at location 2459
Fathers still come in only two varieties. The intentional father is the man who intended to play the social role of father; the biological fatherRead more at location 2463
I described the (real, California) case of the child with five parents. All five were different people - and the intentional parents, John and Luanne, separated a month before the baby was born. The court decided that the intentional parents were the ones that counted.Read more at location 2466
The same legal approach could be used to resolve the issues of parenthood raised by cloning. The human clone gets all of his or her nuclear DNA from one donor. Genetically speaking, one might describe that donor as both parents.Read more at location 2468
since cells can be obtained from a donor without his consent, we have the possibility that a woman could bear the clone of a rich and prominent man and then sue him for child support on a scale appropriate to his income.Read more at location 2471
The definition established by the California court - parenthood determined by intention - provides a single rule to cover nearly all circumstances,Read more at location 2473
intentional reproduction could involve one male and one female, two males, two females, a partnership of four of each, or a corporation - say Microsoft, looking to breed a successor for Bill Gates.Read more at location 2476
What if Monsanto applies its new technologies not to soybeans but to people,Read more at location 2486
Considering the attitude our legal system takes to private ownership of human beings by anyone other than themselves, I doubt that Monsanto could get very far enforcing its intellectual property rightsRead more at location 2493
Of the ills that human flesh is heir to, some are entirely due to having the wrong genesRead more at location 2497
It is already possible to do a complete gene map of an individual for less than $1,000,000 and the cost is predicted to get below $1,000 in the not very distant future.Read more at location 2500
someone who knew he was, for genetic reasons, particularly vulnerable to alcoholism might choose to avoid the problem by never taking the first drink. Read more at location 2506
knowledge is not inevitably desirable. If I carry a death sentence in my genes, I might prefer not to know about it.Read more at location 2508
If insurance companies are permitted to insist on testing clients before selling them insurance, both those with and without bad genes will be able to buy insurance but at different prices.Read more at location 2513
The solution some have recommended is to make it illegal for insurance companies to require testing.Read more at location 2518
A standard example is the used car market. The ignorant buyers pay the same price for good cars (cream puffs) and bad cars (lemons), making the sale of your car a good deal if you have a lemon and a poor deal if you have a cream puff. Lemons sell and cream puffs, for the most part, do not. Buyers, anticipating that, make their offer on the assumption that if the offer is accepted the car is probably a lemon - and at lemon prices, few cream puffs are offered for sale. Read more at location 2522
the result is even worse than it would be with testing by the insurance companies.Read more at location 2528
One solution would be to somehow make it possible to prove that you have never been tested.Read more at location 2530
An alternative solution would be for parents to buy insurance for their children before the children are conceived. The price might still depend on the parents' genes,Read more at location 2532
Insurance companies are not, of course, the only people who might be interested in your genes. There is now some evidence that a tendency toward sexual fidelity - or infidelity - is in part genetic. Requesting genetic testing of your intended just before the marriage seems a bit crass but perhaps, in a future where the relevant technologies are well developed and fully exploited, the questions will be asked - of the online matchmaker - prior to the first date. Read more at location 2535
each of us is either male or female. For a long time that was quite a good approximation.'Read more at location 2537
Almost all men have an X and a Y chromosome and a male body; almost all women have two X chromosomes and a female body.Read more at location 2538
Some humans are XY but have female bodies: genetically male but morphologically female. Some are the reverse - XX with male bodies. And some humans are genetically XYY, with male bodies and a mild tendency toward aggressive personalities, or XXY, or.... Read more at location 2539
So far we are dealing with genetics and morphology, both fairly unambiguous even if the combinations are wilder than we thought. The situation gets more confused if you add in psychology. Some people who are genetically and morphologically male claim to be psychologically female,Read more at location 2541
in a way not yet clearly understood, such people have brains designed for the wrong gender.Read more at location 2543
If Deirdre marries a wealthy man and he later dies intestate, can his heirs successfully challenge her claim to part of his estate on the grounds that she was a he, hence could not contract a legal marriage with a man? That particular case - with a different transsexual - was recently litigated in Kansas. The wife lost. Read more at location 2548
