Hey, good to see you, too. Thanks for lunch, man.

Okay, I'm hearing you. We do have different realities, I'll admit mine is more convenient, no doubt. And one of the reasons I posted this was to see what people were thinking nowadays. Let me see if I can dig up the lag time on paternity results. I would have guessed a hospital might get it done in around 3 days, but I don't really know. The idea is that the paternity test is automatic, private and rapid. The 'opt out' is always available, so if someone has so much invested that he doesn't care, then he just opts out.

I haven't had this discussion much in the last 15 years, but I've been through it many times before that. The unmarried scientists, every one, all thought it was a sensible thing, the married ones thought it would be a difficult call.

How would you Dads solve this hypothetical, if you're interested: You and the gf or wife have a child, you're in the hospital, but she's had a difficult delivery and is in the ICU for now. Meanwhile, an electronic glitch caused a false emergency in the maternity ward and your newborn had to be evacuated. In the chaos, a mistake may have occurred. Risk management has crunched the numbers, they come to you and tell you that there's a 1% chance some mistake has been made as to which baby is yours.

Do you:
a.) Let it go?
b.) Check the child against your DNA?
c.) Wait until the wife is better and check the child against the wife's DNA?

I'm curious to see how you would answer this, I'm guessing it's 'c.'

Meanwhile...what about two other points I brought up:
1.) All children want to know who their genetic fathers are.
2.) A person's genetic makeup is becoming a major player in the their ability to anticipate disease, promote health and live longer lives.

These two go hand and hand as more people than ever are finding out that they're not related to Dad, and they don't know half of what they've inherited. Though this is a maternally inherited thing of mine, bicuspid Aortic valves run in the family. Mom had one, Aunt had one, I asked a cardiologist about it and he confirmed I have it. It's something I'm glad I know about ahead of time, though I dread having to get the surgery at some point.

I've got a friend of mine, he's about 55, who only now realizes that cancer runs in his family. He had colon cancer about 8 years ago and survived. He's now got this terrible intimal layer sarcoma all through his lungs. In both cases, he waited too long to get it diagnosed because he wasn't aware of his genetics. He's very lucky to have survived the colon cancer, for sure, and he's going through some nasty chemo right now. Meanwhile, his brother got colon cancer and survived.

10 years or so from now, ideally, this risky behavior would never happen because family genetics will be closely tracked. Nobody's got enough money to test for all the different possible genetic threats, so an accurate history will become critical. Do we ignore this problem? Or do we just pray that the major threats become easy to test for and ignore the family history?

In poorer communities, upwards of 30% of children are not related to their Dads. It's a major problem:

"Actual figures range from 1 percent in high-status areas of the United States and Switzerland, to 5 to 6 percent for moderate-status males in the United States and Great Britain, to 10 to 30 percent for lower-status males in the United States, Great Britain and France. Moreover, the men most likely to sexually hoodwink the lower-status males are men of higher status."