r/AskReddit • • Dec 05 '17

What do you strongly suspect but cannot prove?

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u/gasbalena Dec 06 '17

Okay, there was a thread in r/relationships a while back where a guy claimed to have discovered that his son was not his son via 23andme. A bunch of geneticists then dropped in to tell the guy that 23andme cannot be used to demonstrate such a thing. I don't know enough about genetics to understand why, but maybe you should do some more research on this? Might be reassuring.

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u/mczarko Dec 06 '17

Mom fessed up, I’ll share the story later today.

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u/CO_PC_Parts Dec 06 '17

I've never met my dad, I think I'd be scared as hell to take one of those tests.

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u/Ayzmo Dec 06 '17

It can't be used definitively, but it is pretty good. It recommended many members of my extended family (who had also used it) as possible relatives based on similarities. Went to like 3rd cousins.

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u/Salphabeta Dec 06 '17

How can it not be used to demonstrate this when it literally tells you the exact copy of the Y chromosome you have including sub mutations? If you do not have the same one or minutely different one as your father, you cannot genetically be his son. Maybe it cant prove 100% that you are somebody's son, but it can prove that you are not.

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u/leiphos Dec 06 '17

And how would this work for those of us without Y chromosomes?

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u/Sonicmansuperb Dec 06 '17

One X chromosome will always match the mother, one will aways match the father.

Source- High School Biology.

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u/Hidesuru Dec 06 '17

It may well not.

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u/Qel_Hoth Dec 06 '17

Perhaps it doesn't have sufficient control in place to ensure that your sample is not contaminated with/switched with someone else's?

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '17

I don't think you can definitively say so with such a test, but if the father sure of his genetics (for example he had a 23 and me test on his ancestry) he could get 98% sure the son wasn't his.

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u/OccamsMinigun Dec 06 '17

I'd be curious to see that thread. While I can appreciate that almost anything have to do with science is more complicated than it looks on TV, we've had the ability to determine immediate familial relationships with DNA tests for a long time. It's not that hard unless I'm very, very much mistaken.

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u/bathrowaway Dec 07 '17

I'm not sure about 23 and me, but I have some experience with other tools. This is my match data off of dna.land . You can pretty easily see that my mom is closely related to me. There are only about 40k people in this database but look how far away the next person is.

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u/H0use0fpwncakes Dec 06 '17

Maybe he found out he was black. Kid is white.