At 12:20 PM 10/19/00 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:

Assuming, of course, that the birth records accurately reflect parentage. If you take a course in human genetics you're likely to be astonished at the

rate of fooling around that must occur to account for the appearence of traits within families - I've heard that as high as 10% of firstborns must have had a father different than the one on the birth certificate (no, I can't give you a cite).

When I was reading about other nations' plans to do what Ken Brown pointed out only Iceland does now, it occurred to me that even with an anonymized database, you could infer parentage from the raw anonymized data -its a harder problem than testing a particular parenting hypothesis (is A likely descended from B + C, given samples of A,B,C?), but maybe possible. Maybe the EULA will have a no-reverse-engineering-pedigrees clause..