An article in Scientific American disputes the idea that newborns resemble one parent more than the other:
The paternal-resemblance hypothesis got some scientific backing in 1995, when a study in Nature by Nicholas Christenfeld and Emily Hill of the University of California, San Diego, showed that people were much better at matching photos of one-year-old children with pictures of their fathers than with photos of their mothers. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
Case closed? Hardly. “It’s a very sexy result, it’s seductive, it’s what evolutionary psychology would predict—and I think it’s wrong,” says psychologist Robert French of the National Center for Scientific Research in France. A subsequent body of research, building over the years in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, has delivered results in conflict with the 1995 paper, indicating that young children resemble both parents equally. Some studies have even found that newborns tend to resemble their mothers more than their fathers.
In a 1999 study published in Evolution & Human Behavior, French and Serge Brédart of the University of Liège in Belgium set out to replicate the paternal-resemblance finding and were unable to do so. In a photo-matching trial with pictures of one-, three- and five-year-old children and their parents, subjects identified mothers and fathers equally well.
A more recent study in the same journal employed a larger set of photos than were used by either Christenfeld and Hill or Brédart and French in their studies and still concluded that most infants resemble both parents equally. “Our research, on a much larger sample of babies than Christenfeld and Hill’s, shows that some babies resemble their father more, some babies resemble their mother more, and most babies resemble both parents to about the same extent,” says Paola Bressan, a psychologist at the University of Padova in Italy who co-authored the 2004 study. Bressan added that, to the best of her knowledge, “no study has either replicated or supported” the 1995 finding that babies preferentially resemble their fathers.
My confident memory doesn’t go back to remembering which parent my siblings resembled more as newborns. To some extent all babies resemble Winston Churchill. However, as adults my siblings and I all resemble both of our parents, half of my siblings resembling my dad more and half my mom more.
Although throughout my life I’ve been told by people who knew my dad that I resemble him I think it’s mostly superficial and that I resemble my mother more. I have some of my dad’s mannerisms but he was was tall (for his generation) and had finer features and a more slender build than I do. As a young person I had dark reddish-brown hair, was of medium height and notably stocky build. My neck, chest, and wrist were larger when I was 14 than my dad’s when he was 20 (as was the case in so many things he kept a journal).
And, as I remarked to someone the other day, the character flaws of each of my parents have reached their full flower in me.
