Cheating women can try to blame unfaithfulness on their genes:
Professor Tim Spector, director of the Twin Research Unit at St Thomas Hospital in London, said that about 40% of the variation in faithfulness was due to genes. The figure means that if a woman is unfaithful, her identical twin sister would be twice as likely as average to be unfaithful as well.
A non-identical twin sister of an unfaithful woman would be 50% more likely to have an affair outside marriage.
Attempts to link infidelity directly to a specific gene or set of genes failed, although the researchers said that they did manage to locate some of the traits to three of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes.
The theory?
The study, published in the journal Twin Research, suggests that a genetic predisposition toward female infidelity may have evolved because it was important in allowing women married to “low status” men to surreptitiously become pregnant to “high status” males.
I don’t know about that, but I’m not qualified to opine on female motivations. I have yet to be sold on much of this genetics-controls-behavior research. It typically offers more questions than answers. But perhaps we’ll get a more complete picture over time.
Sounds to me its less “nature” than “nurture”… if two twin girls are raised in a house where one of the parents cheat, and one of the grown twins cheats, then its more a factor of their upbringing than genetics that would up the chances of the other twin cheating.
Fraternal, paternal, or otherwise.
I wonder what % of the twins that were studied had unfaithful parents?
I read somewhere once (a while back, so I don’t know where) that, despite accepted wisdom, women were more likely to cheat than men.
Unless by the wildest chance of a tie, doesn’t one or the other have to be true? Either women or men have to be statistically more likely to cheat, but does it really have anything to do with anything but random chance?
I mean, unless the split is like 80/20 or something.
That’s a problem I’ve long had with analyses that only compare two subjects.
Barry, it’s risky business trying to figure out what research found from a newspaper article, but the story says there didn’t seem to be a genetic predisposition in the females’ “attitudes towards infidelity.” So that might cut against the family background factor. I don’t know.