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In the year 2000, two geneticists at the University of Oxford conducted a study to see how many men with the same last name, the surname they picked, was Sykes, could be traced back to a single shared ancestor. When they rounded up a bunch of guys to find out, they made a surprising discovery. Not only were there men whose Y chromosomes didn't connect

them to that ancient forefather, there were also some whose Y chromosomes didn't connect them

to their own fathers, which is to say they had been raised by someone other than the man

who got their

mothers pregnant, and presumably this was something neither they nor their dads realized until

these genetic tests. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. The scientists came up

with a delicate euphemism for these aberrations in the data. They called them non-paternity events or NPEs.

25 years later, many thousands of people with all kinds of surnames have taken direct-to-consumer

DNA tests and discovered that they, too, did not know the true story of their conception.

My guest has been talking to people who have experienced these sometimes shocking revelations

and learn just how stabilizing they can be.

Jennifer Wilson is a staff writer at The New Yorker, which published her article,

The Family Fallout of DNA Surprises.

Jennifer, welcome to think.

Thank you for having me.

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