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Looking Just Daddy? Thank Evolution!

Posted by
March 12, 2009
Father's Day, Hyde Park

Image by TFIDONNIE via Flickr

It’s almost a given sooner or later the proclamation that your child looks just like dad.  It is a common first reaction, much to the (last) nerve of some mommas.  However, there is a reason to this. Evolution.

Mother nature leaves no questions when it comes to maternity.  We carried the child for nine months, we birthed them, so there’s no real way for the mother of the child to be in question.  However, dads aren’t so lucky.  Evolutionary speaking, the father has no way to know if the baby he is looking at is his.  Before the testing we have today, there was aways a chance that the child might not be his.

This is a detriment to the species not to mention hard coded into the brain, if a male is raising a child that isn’t his the resources available to genetic children diminish. So the only way mother nature could make a father ‘stick around’ (again, evolutionary  speaking) is to make baby look like daddy.

Research shows that when shown photos of babies females and males react differently.  The male brain scans the image of the baby looking for similarity to his own features.

Here’s a great blog post on this it goes into more depth on the topic than I have here.

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