Guess the dads!

August 15, 2018 • 1:00 pm

These young men both had famous fathers, and their fathers played in the same band. Guess who they are.

The answer is here, and it isn’t hard. If you guessed correctly, it shows, as I used to demonstrate to my class, that the variation among people in their facial features has substantial heritability: that is, facial features are capable of being inherited. We all know that kids often look strikingly like their parents, and that’s because their “looks”—what makes us recognize them—are based to a large extent on variable genes in the population. (We’re not sure why the variation remains in the population, but I suspect it’s because of substantial and continuing admixture and mating of people whose ancestors were in isolated populations that looked quite different.)

I used to demonstrate this to my evolution class by showing pictures of Kirk and Michael Douglas, and Blythe Danner and her daughter Gwyneth Paltrow. The resemblance in each case is striking. Sadly, however, most of my students didn’t know who these people were. I suspect that ignorance applies not only to the kids above, but to their fathers.

Get off my lawn!

p.s. The guy on the right is James McCartney

31 thoughts on “Guess the dads!”

  3. John Lennon and Paul McCartney .

    I have noticed it in my own family ,my great nieces are little copies of my niece.

  4. Pretty easy, especially since I had already seen this photo roll through social media. 😉

  6. Looks like a coupla scousers from The Quarymen, but damned if I can remember their names.

  8. OK, I feel dumb. I had no idea. Now that I know the answer, I can see that Sean Lennon has slightly oriental-looking eyes, which would have been a good clue if I’d noticed earlier.

    What’s doubly depressing is that these guys aren’t even that young–both are over 40. And you can’t trust anyone over 30.

    I feel really old now.

  9. Sean Lennon, back when he was singing about 20 years ago, even sounded like his father.

    When I was a teenager and would answer the phone at home, my mother’s friends would say I sounded like her.

  10. Guess who, eh? I’ve picked up on this little clue. Tai Bachmann and Burton Cumming’s son.

  11. I looked at that photo and asked myself what band were Eric Clapton and George Harrison in?

    1. Wait, I knew about Clapton & Pattie Boyd, but not about George or Eric gettin’ wit’ Linda M.

  12. This is why we have the term ‘family resemblance’.

    Robert Walker Jr (best remembered for the Star Trek episode ‘Charlie X’) is the spit of his father, Robert Walker (from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and Rope).

    1. My Dad walked in on a broadcast of “Charlie X” and thought it WAS Robert Walker.
      (A certain Hollywood actress whom shall remain nameless was dating my father and was going to take him to a major studio event, but her manager told her to dump my Dad for…Robert Walker.)

      1. As a kid I thought they were the same. It wasn’t till I was old enough to think about checking the dates I realised they couldn’t be the same person. ‘Charlie X’ and Strangers on a Train have always been favourites of mine.

  13. Jamie Lee Curtis and Tony Curtis look uncannily alike. It’s a bit more unusual for children to do closely resemble the parent of the opposite sex.

    Admittedly, Tony Curtis was quite pretty for a bloke.

  15. Pretty sure the one on the left is Sean Lennon, who released some unremarkable psych-pop stuff a while back. Might still be going, I don’t know.

    I maintain that his dad was the one true all-time genius in The Beatles; George and Paul being merely very good songwriters who were lifted to olympian heights by the intraband competition.

  19. Fascinating – would have been even better if the musical genes also matched!
    I use Picasa to manage my photos and it’s identification function quite often cannot distinguish between me, my dad and my younger son.

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