purple motes

Just as trade is more likely to occur between parties less geographically distant, the same appears to be true for communication.  In the U.S. telephone network about 1983, the share of calls within the local switching office averaged 66% for rural switching offices, compared to 31% for urban switching offices.   The greater share of intra-office calls in rural switching offices occurred despite rural offices serving on average only 700 telephone lines, compared to 41,000 telephone lines for urban offices.   The relevant difference seems to be geographic distance: rural offices served on average 130 square miles, while urban offices averaged 12 square miles of service area.   Geographic distance shaped calling patterns much more than the number of persons that could be called.

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Data: switching-center statistics for the U.S. public telephone network, c. 1983 (Excel version)

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The Internet's communication protocols separate diverse physical communication channels from  a wide variety of communications applications.  That separation encapsulates complexity and fosters incremental innovation.  It has been a hugely productive communicative structure.

A variety of communication content, however, remains closely bound to particular communication protocols.  Consider, for example, physical-layer protocols for the transmission of the classical Chinese text, The Scripture and Instructions on the Elixirs of the Nine Tripods of the Yellow Thearch (Huangdi jiuding shendan jingjue).  This text, from roughly two millennium ago, claims to describe a way to eternal life.  In addition, the text describes a specific physical-layer protocol for its own transmission:

As a [token of an] oath, a golden human figurine weighing nine ounces and a golden figurine of a fish weighing three ounces are thrown into an eastward-flowing stream.  Both figurines should be provided by the one receiving the Way [the text plus oral instructions].  Beside the stream, in a place unfrequented by other people, a seat [or altar, zuo] for the Mystic Woman should be set up.  Burn incense and announce to those on high:  "I intend to transmit to so-and-so the Way of long life."  Place the scripture on the elixirs on a table, and place the seat next to it.  When you are ready to transmit the Way, face north and prostrate yourself for an hour; if the sky remains clear and there is no wind, the transmission may proceed.  At the transmission, master and disciple together sip the blood of a white chicken as a covenant.[1]

The text describe instructions for wondrous elixirs.  If those instructions are valued, so too should be the text's instructions for its own transmission.  Put differently, not transmitting the text according to its instructions would explain failures of elixirs made according to the text's instructions.[2]

The significance of communications protocols for applications isn't just a matter of ancient superstition.  Even in our age of convergence and multi-platform content, who hasn't heard, "It's not what you said, but how you said it!"

Notes:

[1] Quoted in Campany, Robert Ford (2009) Making transcendents: ascetics and social memory in early medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press) p. 97.

[2] Ge Hong's Inner Chapters (c. 320), which promotes alchemy, explains the failure of an alchemical book thus:

When Liu De, Xiang's father, came into possession of this book while in charge of the case of Liu An, he did not have it properly transmitted to him by a teacher.  And so when Liu Xiang, who had no understanding of the arts of the Dao in the first place, happened to encounter this book, he assumed that its meaning was conveyed exclusively on the surface of the paper on which it was written, and that is why his attempt to fabricate gold [based on it] failed.

Quoted in id. p. 99.

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Groups with greater social investment tend to favor more restrictive access to knowledge.  Greater social investment means more connections with socially credible and authoritative persons and groups, and greater material interests in maintaining those connections.  Social investment supports credibility and authority.  So too does knowledge ("knowledge is power").   However, persons who are neither credible nor authoritative can develop important knowledge.  The extent to which the socially invested succeed in suppressing knowledge among those without credibility and authority significantly affects the development of knowledge.

In the Neo-Assyrian Empire spanning Mesopotamia about 2800 years ago, scholar-scribes were highly invested socially.  The Neo-Assyrian Empire was a powerful, highly developed empire that emerged from more than a millennium of Assyrian civilization.  Neo-Assyrian scholar-scribes were an elite associated with royal courts and royal libraries.  They wrote on clay tablets using a cuneiform script.  Their craft thus was closely connected technologically to accountability in transactions and the development of writing.  The cuneiform script that they used increased in complexity over time and diverged from an increasingly simplified script used for commercial and bureaucratic purposes.[1]  Neo-Assyrian scholar-scribes had a recognized social identity, common interests in a key technology of social memory, and a close connection to political power.

Neo-Assyrian scholar-scribes limited access to broad disciplines of knowledge.  They limited to experts (meaning themselves) technical knowledge concerning extispicy (divination by means of animal entrails), exorcism, lamentation, medicine, and astrology.  The scholar-scribes claimed that such knowledge originated in divine revelation to ancient sages.  The scholar-scribes sought to limit transmission of texts to their class, warned their students not to share class-work with others outside the scholarly institution, and wrote texts using textual instruments designed to restrict textual circulation. Such instruments included a secrecy label and a colophon explicitly restricting circulation (Geheimwissen colophon).[2]   These appeared both separately and occasionally in combination, such as:

Secret of the great gods.  An expert may show an(other) expert.  A non-expert may not see (it).  A restriction of the great gods.  Written according to its original and checked.[3]

Babylonians and Medians demolished the Neo-Assyrian empire about 2600 years ago.  Neo-Assyrian knowledge is slowly and laborously being recovered and reconstructed from the fragments currently accessible.

Buddhist sutras have been disseminated under a much different knowledge-access regime.  The historical Buddha was a king's son in a small kingdom in present-day Nepal.  Buddhism probably arose at a time when the northern Indian sub-continent was divided into sixteen kingdoms, each much larger than the kingdom in which the Buddha was born.  Within the Indian subcontinent as a whole, Buddhism began with little social investment.  It rapidly developed major, enduring, and competing sects and sacred texts.

Disseminating Buddhist teachings and gaining adherents to them generated the growth of Buddhism.  Buddhist scriptures included textual instruments designed to encourage textual circulation.  Most Mahāyāna Buddhist sutras instruct the reader, irrespective of who the reader is, to re-copy the sutra.[4]  For example, copies of The Scripture on the Ten Kings written in tenth-century Dunhuang (China) include these admonishments:

Uphold the scripture and you will avoid the underground prisons;
Copy it and you will be spared calamity and illness.
...
If you wish to seek riches and nobility and a family with a long life span,
You should copy the text of this scripture, obey it, and uphold it.

The text commands its own circulation via instruction from the Buddha himself:

the Buddha with great care and diligence entrusted him [King Yama] with this scripture [and said]:  "Its name is The Teaching of the Sevens of Life that Are Cultivated in Preparation [The Scripture on the Ten Kings]. You, together with the four orders, must circulate it widely."[5]

The Scripture on the Ten Kings was not a canonical Buddhist text.  Nonetheless, it appears to have been widely circulated.  Tenth-century copies recovered from Dunhuang show that The Scripture on the Ten Kings was produced in a variety of physical formats and used ritually in a wide range of ways.  Persons across the spectrum of social positions commissioned copies of the scripture.[6]

Social investment seems also to have been correlated with secrecy across Jewish sects at the time of Jesus.  In Luke 12:1-3, Jesus declares:

Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, that is, their hypocrisy.  Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.  Therefore whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops.

The declaration to those speaking in the dark and whispering behind closed doors seems to be addressed to the Pharisees.  Matthew 10:25-27 provides a slightly different account:

So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.  What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.

Here, Jesus seems implicitly to contrasts himself with a Pharisaical teacher.  These two text together suggests that the Pharisees, who were much more socially invested in Jewish society than was Jesus, sought to hold important knowledge secret.  Jesus, like early Buddhists, sought to circulate important knowledge widely.[7]

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Notes:

[1] Lenzi (2008) pp. 136-140.  I use the term scholar-scribe for the Akkadian term ummânū in the source Neo-Assyrian texts.   Not all scribes were scholars.  Id. p. 146.

[2] Id. Ch. 3 insightfully reveals that the Geheimwissen colophon was just one means to mark broad disciplines of knowledge that were generally kept secret.   On the specification and secrecy of these disciplines, see id. pp. 70-1, 77-103.

[3] From Mystical Miscellanea: KAR 307, rev. 26-27, owned by the exorcist Kişir-Aššur, trans. id. p. 173.  Id. 170-204 provides a complete catalog of secrecy labels and Geheimwissen colophon, with translations.

[4] Teiser (1994) p. 87.

[5] This and the previous quote from the translation in id. pp. 207, 217.

[6] Id., Part Two.

[7] Interpretation of these two Gospel texts has tended to focus on ungodly personal actions and personal hypocrisy.  But it seems to me that they are better understood in relation to social investment and knowledge-access regimes.  Lenzi (2008) argues that in biblical Israel divine knowledge was not kept secret.  Perhaps the Pharisees had begun to keep divine secrets by Jesus' time.

References:

Lenzi, Alan. 2008. Secrecy and the gods: secret knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia and biblical Israel. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian text Corpus Project.

Teiser, Stephen F. 1994. The scripture on the ten kings and the making of purgatory in medieval Chinese Buddhism. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

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Things are crucial to human social networks.  Some things never lose their appeal.

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Variations in average telephone use have been relatively small across more than a century of telephone use.   From 1893 to 1913, the number of telephones in many countries around the world increased by more than a factor of ten. The average number of intra-urban telephone conversations per subscriber telephone changed little.   For example, the number of subscriber phones in Austria increased from 14 thousand to 146 thousand from 1893 to 1913.  The average number of conversations per phone fell from 7.3 per phone per day in 1893 to 6.6 per phone per day in 1913.   For the countries for which data are available in both 1893 and 1913, the median country-average conversations per phone per day fell from 4.6 to 4.1.  These figures are similar for telephone use in the U.S. across the twentieth century.

Because communication is fundamentally related to social life, social structure significantly constrains communications technology use.  Persons who want to have a lot of telephone conversations have to find someone else likewise interested.   But the social issue goes much deeper than common interest: forms and frequencies of communication are tightly bound up in social relations.  For example, talking frequently with someone usually signals an intimate personal relationship.   It also values that relationship relative to other personal relationships.  Similarly, struggling with what to say or to write usually doesn't arise from a lack of possible content.  The concern is with what is interesting, relevant, and appropriate.

Media technology changes quickly.  Social relations change slowly.

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Data: Telephones and intra-urban (local) telephone calls by country, 1893-1929 (Excel version).

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Biological paternity is highly significant.  Because Darwinian evolution depends on biological paternity, evolved patterns of behavior, such as parental care, are likely to be sensitive to biological paternity.  Moreover, biological paternity is increasingly relevant to health care screening and treatment.  Most men in most cultures express concern for biological paternity.   Biological paternity not only has fundamental genetic significant, but also considerable socially constructed significance.  In many jurisdictions, biological paternity entails large, government-determined parental payments ("child support payments") legally enforced with the threat of imprisonment.[1]

Under U.S. case law, biological paternity trumps misrepresentation and fraud in establishing government-determined parental payments.  Here are uncontested facts of Dubay v. Wells (2007):

In the fall of 2004, Dubay and Wells became involved in a romantic relationship. At that time, Dubay informed Wells that he had no interest in becoming a father. In response, Wells told Dubay that she was infertile and that, as an extra layer of protection, she was using contraception. Dubay, in reliance on these assurances, participated in a consensual sexual relationship with Wells.

The parties’ relationship later deteriorated. Shortly thereafter, and much to Dubay’s surprise, Wells informed Dubay that she was pregnant, allegedly with Dubay’s child. Wells chose to carry the child to term and the child, EGW, was born on an unspecified date in 2005.  During the pregnancy and birth of the child, Dubay was consistently clear about his desire not to be a father.[2]

Michigan imposed government-determined parental payments on Dubay.   Dubay argued that government-determined parental payments discriminate against men, who lack effective opportunities to receive the protection of child abandonment and child adoption laws when confronted with unplanned parenthood.  All the way up to the U.S. Court of Appeals, courts rejected Dubay's claim.   They consistently ruled that sexually discriminatory treatment of government-imposed parental payments  is not unequal under law.   Under such a legal regime, sexual intercourse that generates a pregnancy that a woman chooses not to abort has large financial implications for men.

The great importance of biological paternity has not produced an efficient paternity information economy.   Available evidence indicates that, in high-income countries, men falsely regard roughly 5% of children to be their own biological children.  While hospitals take great care to ensure newborn babies are not switched among mothers, hospitals do not routinely check paternity to ensure that men have accurate knowledge about their biological paternity.  DNA testing for determining biological paternity is cheap and has a very low error rate.  But hospitals do not regularly offer this service in conjunction with child delivery and newborn care services.

Moreover, government-determined parental payments are regularly imposed without DNA testing for biological paternity.   Government-determined parental payments are large, long-term monthly payments.  Changing the level of payment in response to changes in a man's financial situation, such as loss of job, requires a time-consuming, difficult legal procedure.  Nonetheless, paternity testing is not required before imposing government-determined parental payments.   In most jurisdictions, a married man is liable for government-determined parental payments for his wife's child even if the child is a product of his wife's extra-marital sexual activity.[3]   In many jurisdictions in the U.S., more than half of government-determined parental payments are imposed through default judgments.  DNA testing provides highly accurate determinations of biological paternity.  Default judgments provide a highly faulty indication of paternity.

Making paternity information universally accessible to the relevant men could be done easily as a matter of law.   First, hospitals could be required to offer, as part of child delivery services, a paternity test to any man signing a birth certificate.  Men not wanting true knowledge about their biological relation to the child before signing a birth certificate might be required to pursue a legal procedure similar to that required for lowering the level of government-determined parental payments in circumstances of job loss.  Moreover, a paternity test could be required before imposing any government-determined parental payment.   Such laws would contribute greatly to making paternity information accurate and universally accessible.

Legal developments, in contrast, have tended to suppress possibilities for men to acquire true knowledge of their paternity. Consider, for example, the U.K.'s Human Tissues Act of 2004.   Suppose that an unwed woman has parental custody of a child too young to consent legally to a DNA test.  Suppose a man with a reasonably basis for believing that he might be the biological father of the child currently does not have parental responsibility for the child.  The Human Tissues Act criminalizes the man taking a strand of the child's hair, without the mother's consent, for the purpose of testing his paternity of the child.   Under the Act, punishment for knowledge-seeking of this type is a fine or imprisonment of up to three years, or both.   That's harsh punishment for a man seeking highly important knowledge.

Questions of paternity tend to be emotionally fraught.  They also directly concern large monetary payments to governments and between individuals (mainly from men to women).   The poorly functioning paternity information economy perhaps reflects fundamental sex differences in communications.

Notes:

[1] "Government-determined parental payments" more clearly describes the relevant payments than does "child support payments."  The level of the payments depends primarily on the adults' incomes, not on the child's needs.  The payments are made to the parent (usually the mother), not the child.   The recipient of the payment has no legal obligation to spend the payment on the child.  No accounting for the spending of the payment is required under law.   The most important form of child support is undoubtedly freely given love and personal concern for the child.  Government-determined parental payments enforced under the threat of imprisonment are much different from such child support.  Imprisonment is the ultimate sanction for not paying.  Other sanctions include garnishing wages, revoking a driver's license, revoking a business licenses, and refusing to issue a passport.

[2] Dubay v. Wells, et. al., No. 06-2107, U.S. Court of Appeals, 6'th District, decided Nov. 6, 2007.  This was an appeal of Dubay v. Wells, Case Number 06-11016-BC, U.S. District Court, East District of Michigan, Northern Division, decided July 17, 2006.  The latter decision declared Dubay's claim "frivolous, unreasonable, and without foundation."   The decision also declared, "If chivalry is not dead, its viability is gravely imperiled by the plaintiff in this case." Further underscoring its frivolous judgment, the Court required Dubay to pay the state's attorney fees.  Because the case apparently was serious enough to attract participation from the Attorney General of Michigan, the state's attorney fees were probably considerable.

[3] The article that unfairly presented Carnell Smith's situation also inaccurately described relevant statistics.

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Every Sunday afternoon, Japanese youths gather on Jingu Bridge in Tokyo to display their fashions, to express themselves through their attire, and to socialize with others doing the same.   Shops in the area have opened to sell this street chic fashion known as Harajuku.   The shops both take fashion merchandising leads from the gathered youths and sell to them and to the tourists who come to see them.

Harajuku and other forms of costume play (cosplay) are closely linked to music bands, manga, anime, movies, and other entertainment content.   Harajuku has attracted dedicated followers around the world, including in Washington, DC.  Harajuku differs from dressing up in the well-understood, common social enterprise that counter-balances individual, competitive display.

Selling objects for personal expression in social circumstances oriented toward those objects is a propitious business plan for social networking sites.

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Consider some misunderstandings of early U.S. telephone service providers at the start of the twentieth-century:

When the Independent [telephone] companies first began to come together in conventions to exchange experiences, one fact was always commented upon with great curiosity by the managers of town or city plants.  This was that they invariably met with failure in their endeavors to induce farmers to put in what are known as "lockout" devices, by means of which every telephone on a party line becomes practically a private wire.  In cities, the party line is considered a great nuisance, because there is no privacy in conversation.  Naturally, the managers of plants figured that this objection prevailed in the country also; but, almost without exception, they found that one of the great attractions to the farmer was that his [and her] telephone did ring every time the other sixteen or twenty people on the line rang up, and that that he [and she] could hear or be overheard in conversation.  It was a practical demonstration of the social hunger the farmer has endured for centuries, and which is now ended, thanks to the arrival of telephone competition.

Sociality trumps privacy for the lonely.

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Quotation source: Latzke, Paul. 1906.  A fight with an octopus; being the story of a great contest that was won against tremendous odds, as printed originally in Success magazine [Feb. 1906] Chicago: The Telephony Pub. Co., p. 43-4.

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Human reproduction naturally implies sexual inequality in kin knowledge.  Women naturally know for certain their biological children.  Men know their children by ignorance, faith, or modern paternity-testing technology.

The widespread availability of contraceptives does not make paternity uncertainty insignificant.   A gynocentric study found that 49% of pregnancies in the U.S. in 2001 were unintended, meaning that the pregnant women did not intend to create a pregnancy.   A different study asked men about children that they believed they had fathered.   These men described 33% of their perceived children as unintended.[1]   Even with widespread availability of contraceptives, unplanned parenthood (meaning unplanned motherhood) and abortion have been huge public issues for decades.   The widespread availability of contraceptives similarly does not eliminate unplanned fatherhood or paternity uncertainty.

Survey data on sexual behavior suggests that more than 10% of births in the U.S. are to women with more than one  concurrent heterosexual partner.   Surveys from the early 1990s that identify concurrent heterosexual partners report about 12% of women ages 15-44 having such sexual relations.  Among persons ages 15 to 44 in the U.S. in 2002 and reporting heterosexual activity in the prior year , 17% of women and 23% of men reported more than one sexual partner in the past year.[2]   Breaking down such figures by marital status and weighing by share of births in the corresponding category implies 14% births are to women who have had more than one sexual partner in the previous year.  A similar calculation using age categories implies 20% of births are to women who have had more than one sexual partner in the previous year.   The differences in these figures indicates non-independence of giving birth and having more than one sexual partner.    This issue, as well as possible misreporting, complicate interpreting the figures.[3]  But a plausible inference is that the share of births attributable to women with concurrent sexual partners is greater than 10%.

Limited available information about tests of biological paternity in high-income Western countries suggests that men falsely regard as their own biological children about 4% of children.  A relationship-testing accreditation organization serving mainly the U.S. reported for 2006 a total of 15,082 paternity tests that were not part of legal procedures and for which paternity exclusion (non-paternity) was tracked.  A plausible sample frame for non-legal tests are men for whom paternity uncertainty is highly salient.   The non-paternity share among these tests was 30.4%.  A similar figure comes from meta-analysis of scholarly studies in the past two decades that analyzed human biological paternity in paternity-testing samples from high-income countries.  None of these studies adequately relate the sample tested to a large, general population.  Another small set of studies over the past two decades for high-income countries includes small samples of men that typically have a close physical and social relationship to the child and its mother.  The median non-paternity share among these studies is 1.5%.[4]  Assume that men who seek a paternity test outside of a legal proceeding (30% non-paternity) are representative of the presumed fathers of 10% of children.   Assume that 90% of children have fathers for whom the other, more general studies are representative (1.5% non-paternity).   Then over-all men falsely believe to be their own biological children about 4% of children.[5]

Studies of socially monogamous non-human animals suggest that the non-paternity rate in humans probably is higher than 4%.   A comprehensive study of extra-pair paternity in birds found that, among socially monogamous bird species, extra-pair offspring averaged 11.1% of total offspring and were included on average in 18.7% of broods.  Studies of paternity encompassing 17 populations (from 14 different species) of socially monogamous non-human mammals having sexual-social interaction patterns broadly similar to humans show in aggregate a non-paternity share of 23%.   Four species of lizards that display strong pair-bonds were measured to have a 21% extra-pair paternity share.   Social structure for socially monogamous mammals, and for reptiles more generally, significantly affects extra-pair paternity.   Changes in social structure that increase the frequency of opposite-sex, extra-pair interaction, such as humans engaging in more mixed-sex work outside the home, tend to increase the share of extra-pair offspring.[6]

A large number of children and men today have false beliefs about their biological kinship.  Recent discussion of paternity has lacked adequate review of available scientific knowledge.  Given the current scientific knowledge reviewed above, the share of children having false paternity beliefs is plausibly estimated at roughly 5% in high-income Western countries.   For the U.S., that means about 4 million children are wrongly identifying their biological father.   The number of men in the U.S. who falsely believe children to be their biological children is probably over 3 million.[7]   Whether attributed to ignorance or faith, these false fatherhood beliefs could easily be enlightened with cheap, scientific paternity-testing technology.

Enlightenment does not necessarily destroy love.  Imagine a man, married to a woman.  He's required to leave the country for a year for an over-seas assignment.   When he returns after a year, he finds his wife pregnant.   With the wisdom known to men for millennia, the man knows that he is not the father of this child.  His knowledge offers an opportunity for exercising saintly love.  He could choose to continue to love his wife and to accept the child as his own.   Modern paternity-testing technology would give millions of men a similar choice.  Extraordinary love is worth the risk of knowledge.

Related post: the paternity information economy

Notes:

[1] Finer, Lawrence B, and Stanley K Henshaw. 2006. "Disparities in Rates of Unintended Pregnancy in the United States, 1994 and 2001". Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. 38 (2): 90 (49% of pregnancies unintended in U.S. in 2001); Martinez, Gladys. 2006. Fertility, contraception, and fatherhood: data on men and women from Cycle 6 (2002) of the National Survey of Family Growth. Hyattsville, Md: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Table 8, p. 39 (men in 2002 report 8.6% of their children over the past five years unwanted, 24.8% mistimed).

[2] For data and calculations, see multiple sexual partners worksheet (Excel version).  Primary sources: Adimora, Adaora A, Victor J Schoenbach, Dana M Bonas, Francis E A Martinson, Kathryn H Donaldson, and Tonya R Stancil. 2002. "Concurrent Sexual Partnerships Among Women in the United States". Epidemiology. 13 (3): 320.  Mosher, William D., Anjani Chandra, and Jo Jones. 2005. Sexual behavior and selected health measures: men and women 15-44 years of age, United States, 2002. DHHS publication, no. (PHS) 2005-1250. [Hyattsville, MD]: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Tables 1-2, pp. 19-20.    In a random survey of Seattle residents ages 18 to 39 in 1995, 18% of women and 27% of men reported having concurrent sexual partners.  See Manhart, Lisa E, Sevgi O Aral, King K Holmes, and Betsy Foxman. 2002. "Sex Partner Concurrency: Measurement, Prevalence, and Correlates Among Urban 18-39-Year-Olds". Sexually Transmitted Diseases. 29 (3): 133.

[3]  Women and men differ greatly in reporting sexual partners over their lifetime, but not over the past year.  See Brown, Norman E, and Robert C Sinclair. 1999. "Estimating Number of Lifetime Sexual Partners: Men and Women Do It Differently". The Journal of Sex Research. 36 (3): 292.   The extent to which women and men misreport the number of sexual partners over the past year isn't known.

[4]  The data on the 15,082 paternity lab cases not part of a legal proceeding (non-legal cases) are reported in the AABB Relationship Testing Annual Report, 2006.  The scholarly studies are the relevant subset extracted from Anderson, Kermyt G. 2006. "Reports - How Well Does Paternity Confidence Match Actual Paternity? Evidence from Worldwide Nonpaternity Rates". Current Anthropology. 47 (3): 513.  Data from both sources, and relevant analysis, are available in an online extra-pair-paternity workbook (Excel version).   Note that the non-paternity share of children is different from the share of men falsely believing their biological paternity. Anderson (2006) fails to recognize this distinction.  It describes shares of fathers, but reports shares of exclusions.  Shares of exclusions are most plausibly interpreted as a child-based measure.    For further details, see the extra-pair-paternity workbook (Excel version).

[5]  This figure is low relative to a recent study of subjective perceptions of non-paternity in Austria.  Women estimated the share of children with falsely attributed biological paternity to be 14%, and men estimated the share to be 9% (sample size, 795 women, 763 men).  See Voracek, Mart, Maryanne Fisher, and Todd K. Shackelford. 2009. "Sex Differences in Subjective Estimates of Non-Paternity Rates in Austria".  Archives of Sexual Behavior. 38 (5): 652-656.

[6] Griffith, Simon C., Ian P. F. Owens, and Katherine A. Thuman. 2002. "Extra pair paternity in birds: a review of interspecific variation and adaptive function". Molecular Ecology. 11 (11): 2195-2212.  Cohas, Aurelie, and Dominique Allaine. 2009. "Social structure influences extra-pair paternity in socially monogamous mammals". Biology Letters. 5 (3): 313.  I eliminated from the Cohas-Allaine dataset populations that were socially monogamous, but solitary and populations with pair-bonding with continuous pair interaction, and then calculated an over-all non-paternity share.   For details, see the socially monogamous mammals worksheet in the extra-pair paternity workbook (Excel version).   Uller, Tobias, and Mats Olsson. 2008. "Invited Review: Multiple paternity in reptiles: patterns and processes". Molecular Ecology. 17 (11): 2566-2580.  The lizards were four species of skinks: Egernia whitii, Egernia stokesii, Egernia cunninghami, Tiliqua rugosa, and Oligosoma grande.  The cited statistics is from id. p. 2568.   Id. emphasizes the importance of cost of mating and mate-encounter rates on extra-pair paternity in reptiles.  Cohas and Allaine (2009) emphasizes the importance of more elaborate mammalian social structure on the extent of extra-pair paternity in socially monogamous mammals.

[7]  U.S. Census population estimates for 2008 indicate 82.6 million persons ages 19 or younger.  To the extent that some men have false paternity beliefs about more than one child, the number of men with false paternity beliefs is less than the number of extra-pair offspring.  On the other hand, the number of men who falsely believe that they are not the biological father of a child is probably a large fraction of the number of men who falsely believe that they are the biological father of a child.  Large investments of men's time, attention, and financial resources in children typically distinguishes the latter false belief from the former.

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Telephone social networks are quite small:

I recently sat down at an SQL terminal with several hundred billion call records behind it. With a simple SQL query, I determined how many distinct people the average American telephones more than once in a given month (answer: five).

Facebook users average 130 "friends".   Telephone social networks are more like the grooming relations at the evolutionary roots of interpersonal affiliation.

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