How to Cheat
The Perils of Married Dating–Pregnancy
A cautionary tale of stepping out
First and for most, no matter where a child comes from, I think we can all agree that how they were conceived is not their fault. In this story reported in the New Zealand Herald, a proud dad has his dreams of fathering a son dashed when the baby turns out to have different racialize features than both mom and dad.
Hiding cheating at the best of times is a hard task for the experienced cheater, and while an unexpected pregnancy might not give you away, there are a couple of things you cannot hide. Parents with blue eyes cannot give birth to a brown-eyed child because blue is a recessive genetic trait, meaning the parents can only pass on the gene for blue eyes.
Brown-eyed parents can give birth to a blue-eyed child because the brown gene is dominant. If you inherit a brown from dad and a blue from mom, the brown will express itself. If both mom and dad have a blue and a brown, there’s a 25% chance baby can have blue eyes.
The second thing you cannot hide is the racialized traits inherited from mom or dad. Of course, it’s always fairly obvious who the mother is. What is less apparent is who the dad is. What makes us successful as a species is the robustness of how our genes work. Otherwise, we’d never…
