Put your hands up if you have said: "the baby looks like dad" to parents of a new born baby. I have both of my hands up in the air and I am attempting to put my legs up as well ( don't laugh) , because i realized i have said this almost every time i see a new baby.
You might be wondering now that babies can look like their mothers too.....why are you not talking about it. The reason is (....wait... wait........drum rolls please...... ) an experiment i learned in my third year stats class.
(Yon don't have to read the whole paragraph if you dont want, but you do want to read the conclusion at the end. I promise you, it will be interesting to read). I am going to explain the experiments briefly here. (Don't fall asleep yet!!) This experiments used many replicates of: one baby picture and three different male adult pictures with one of them being the biological father. The researches then asked random people to pick out the biological father out of the three males after showing them the baby's picture. If people were selecting randomly, then the chance of each male being picked as the biological father is going be 33% (100/3 =33). But the percentage of people getting the answer right was significantly higher than 33. The researches then did another the similar experiment. This time, they used replicates of : one baby picture and three female pictures with one of them being the biological mother. But this times, when the researches asked people to pick out the mother. The percentages of people getting the right answer was not significantly higher than the percentages of random guessing. From these two tests, they concluded that babies do resemble their father and not their mother.
Why would that be, you might ask...... (drum rolls again).....
During pregnancy, babies are inside their mother. So mom knows the baby is hers. But the dad can't be as 100% sure whether the baby is his or not. Let me put this in another way...the mom knows she has a baby and that baby is hers cause the baby is inside her, but the dad can not be sure if he is the dad cause the mom could be carrying the baby from another male. Human is supposed to be faithful to their significant other so we assume the dad is usually the dad. But many birds or mammals (animal) in the wild are not monogamous meaning they have many different partners. So the males sometimes can not be sure whether they are the biological father or not. In a survival of the fittest world, animals won't waste their energy to raise young which are not theirs. Hence the more the babies look like their dads, the higher the chance the dads will think the babies are theirs and hence be willing to spend energy to raise the offsprings. I know this sounds crazy, but if the dad doesn't think the baby is his, why would he raise the baby. Raising a baby is HARD....( go ask your parents). So from an evolution point of view.......dads are more willing to raise babies which resemble them more cause they have a higher chance of being their biological children.
I have a question now then... if you look like your dad more.. does that mean you have evolved for longer compared to someone who doesn't look like their dad as much??????
Time to look at the mirror and ask yourself if you look like your dad or not :)
feel free to share comments or any thoughts you have after reading this!!! <3
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