Father | kinship | Britannica (original) (raw)

Learn about this topic in these articles:

• • …a male is not the father of a particular child. Since the red cell antigens are inherited as dominant traits, a child cannot have a blood group antigen that is not present in one or both parents. For example, if the child in question belongs to group A and both…
• • …are traditionally contracted by the father or guardian of the bride and her intended husband, who must offer his bride the mahr, a payment offered as a gift to guarantee her financial independence.
• • …solve crimes and to determine paternity. Since its development, DNA fingerprinting has led to the conviction of numerous criminals and to the freeing from prison of many individuals who were wrongly convicted. However, making scientific identification coincide exactly with legal proof is often problematic. Even a single suggestion of the…
• • Second, paternity, in the legal sense, was easier to establish in the case of a lawful marriage than in its absence. The common law of England, for example, presumes in favour of legitimacy when the child is born in lawful wedlock, even if the biological facts…
• • …witnesses are especially common in paternity and status proceedings with regard to blood-typing. These methods have now been so much improved that the suspicion of paternity may be definitely dismissed in many cases. In Germany and elsewhere, opinions based on biologic and hereditary evidence are used for these same purposes.…
• • …the absence of a human father. The concept was one of paternity at two levels; qualitative superiority emanated from the notion of divine paternity, but one’s position in society came from the human husband of one’s mother. In some versions of the myth of Theseus, the Attic hero who succeeded…
• • …especially the roles of the father and mother. These relationships to some extent are determined by the structure of the society and its economy. The mother image is closely bound up with Earth symbolism, vegetation, agriculture, fertility, the reappearance of life, and the lunar cycle. The father image usually is…