Non-Paternity Event (NPE), When One's Supposed Father Is Not Biological Father

choi

Jennifer Wilson, Missed Connection; Inside the world of DNA surprise. New Yorker, Aug 25, 2025, at page 24.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazi ... ut-of-dna-surprises

Quote:

"In many European countries, direct-to-consumer DNA testing is effectively banned; in France, taking such a test is punishable by up to one year in prison. These tests are disruptive, it is argued.

"According to one study, [in the United States] roughly seventy-five per cent of couples who now use donor sperm are same-sex couples and single women.

Note:
(a) Lily "Wood named her podcast 'NPE Stories.' The term NPE is often credited to a 2000 study conducted by a pair of geneticists at Oxford who examined whether male Britons with the last name Sykes could be traced to a single shared ancestor through their Y chromosomes. But they kept coming across men named Sykes who didn’t even share their father's Y chromosome. They called these subjects, diplomatically, 'non-paternity events.' "
(i) Sykes B (from University of Oxford) and Irven C, Surnames and the Y chromosome. American Journal of Human Genetics, 66: 1417 (2000)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10739766/
(Abstract: "[All samples were males with Sykes surname.] Almost half the sample shared the same Y-chromosome haplotype * * * This points to a single surname founder for extant Sykes males, even though written sources had predicted multiple origins. The distribution of other [the other half] Sykes Y-chromosome haplotypes were not significantly different from those in controls and may be accounted for by the historical accumulation of nonpaternity [ie, Sykes wives got pregnant from an affair, at a frequency of 1.3% per generation] during the past 700 years, in which case the average rate estimate is 1.3%/generation")

Click the icon on right margin for free access.
(ii) The English surname Sykes denoted "someone who lived near a small watercourse especially one flowing through flat or marshy ground or near a gully dip or hollow from Middle English sik(e) 'stream ditch' (Old Norse sík)."


(b) "Alexis Hourselt [female' * * * Her mother sat on the living-room couch in a gray sweatshirt, holding a pink Stanley cup. * * * Carole and Jaime [Alexis's supposed mother and father, respectively] went over to their daughter's [Alexis Hourselt's] house. Carole couldn't stop crying, so Jaime did all the talking. 'He said, "I met you when you were two months old," ' Hourselt recalled. She was taken aback. 'I thought, Maybe Mom had an affair or something. It didn't register to me as a possibility that he would be in on it.' * * * Carole swore that she didn't remember the [sexual] encounter, but the revelation then created problems in her marriage. 'Jaime said, "I didn't realize I'd married a floozy," ' she recalled. 'And that's the nice term for what he said.' * * * She accompanied him [Alexis Hourselt's biological father Cliff] to one of them [family functions], a family reunion in North Carolina. There, however, biology began to reveal its limits. Hourselt, not having grown up in the Black church, felt lost. For the talent show, someone did a dramatic reading of Bible verses. 'It was the "he who throws the first stone" one,' she told me, trying to recall the exact words. I could hear my aunt's [Cliff's sister] voice in my head going, 'Sister [used to refer to a black woman, here Alexis] doesn't know her Scripture.' It's Jesus speaking in the Gospel of John, refusing to condemn an adulteress."
(i) Stanley (drinkware company)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_(drinkware_company)
(ii) in on (idiom): "knowledgeable about (something) or involved in (something)"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/in%20on

In the context, it is the definition "knowledgeable about" that fits. In other words, Alexis had not thought that Carole had an affair (which led to her birth) and that Jaime was unaware of the affair.
(iii) English dictionary:
* floozy (n; origin unknown; First Known Use 1899; variant  floozie)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/floozy
(iv) "And that's the nice term for what he said"
(A) floozy: "These days floozy (or floozie) has a dated feel, and is only really used in jokey contexts."
Oxford Reference
https://www.oxfordreference.com/ ... 780198868750-e-2081
(B) The word is surely better than whore (for which hoe is used euphemistically).
(v) The male first name Clif or Cliff is short from Clifford or Clifton, two English surnames.
(vi) Alexis Hourselt's photo in her website: DNA Surprise.
https://dnasurprises.com/about/





(c) "In 'Mamma Mia!,' a daughter’s quest to find the truth about her paternity becomes an opportunity to revisit the exciting sexual escapades that filled her mother’s youth. In one of my favorite films, 'Stealing Beauty,' the nineteen-year-old Liv Tyler—who learned late in childhood that her father was Aerosmith's Steven Tyler—plays a young woman who travels to Italy on a hunch that her mother had a secret lover there; it, too, is a paternity quest that doubles as a sensuous study of a mother's glory days."
(i)
(A) Mamma Mia (ABBA song)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamma_Mia_(ABBA_song)
(1975; "The song's name is derived from Italian and literally translates as 'my mother,' but is used as an interjection (Mamma mia!) in situations of surprise, anguish, or excitement")

Check its lyrics and you will learn that the song is different from the musical (or film).
(B) Mamma Mia! (musical)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamma_Mia!_(musical)
(1999; written by British playwright Catherine Johnson; section 3 Synopsis)

Mamma Mia! is also a 2003 film based on the musical and written by Catherine Johnson, too.
(ii)
(A) Stealing Beauty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_Beauty
(1996)
(B) Liv Tyler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liv_Tyler
(1977- ; section 1 Early life)
(C) Liv (given name)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liv_(given_name)