Let’s begin today with a pop quiz. Take out your number two pencils, everybody.

1. A man and a woman conceive and give birth to a child the “old-fashioned” way. Who are the child’s parents?
2. A man and a woman adopt a 10-month-old infant. Who are the child’s parents?
3. A woman has in vitro fertilization with another woman’s egg and her male partner’s sperm. The egg is implanted in her uterus and she gives birth to the child. Who are the child’s parents?
4. A man and a woman employ a surrogate mother to be implanted with a donor ovum that has been fertilized with donor sperm. The surrogate mother gives birth to the child, and the original man and woman take custody of it. Who are the child’s parents?

The answer to the first question is likely obvious, but the other questions seem to beg for a more nuanced use of terms: the distinction between genetic parents and what I’ll call familial parents (those who actually raise the child) is useful for answering the second and third questions. The fourth question adds a third term to the mix, one that we don’t usually use but that perhaps we should: a biological parent — currently, it can only be a biological mother — is one who carries the child prenatally and gives birth to it. (This relationship is not insignificant, as the number of surrogate mothers reluctant to give up the children they birth can attest.)

It’s possible for a person to have any combination of these roles, and with further changes in reproductive technology and advances in cloning, new roles may arise. But which one makes the person a Parent, with a capital P? In Western culture, it’s generally agreed upon that a child’s familial parents — the ones who clothe him, feed him, house him, and care for him — are his official, unqualified (in the sense of lacking a qualifying term) parents. They are, by definition, the ones with a lasting, tangible connection to the child, the ones whose actions influence the child, and the ones who have taken on the responsibility for the child’s welfare.

In fact, given the current ease of anonymous gamete donation, it’s possible for a genetic parent to have no tangible connection to his or her child, aside from eye color and about 25% of its I.Q. When 5 minutes in a sperm bank bathroom is all it takes to become a genetic father, the term “father” seems like a bit of a misnomer. Genetic parenthood can have so little to do with Parenthood proper that it’s surprising it hasn’t become a more obsolete concern.

But it hasn’t; genetic parenthood is still a huge concern in Western culture today. Adoption, a practice that has existed far longer than humans have, is still considered a thorny issue. Wannabe parents invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in in-vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies before resorting to adoption. It’s a common belief that adoptive parents form weaker bonds with their children than genetic parents do — a belief that is entirely unfounded, according to ample social science research. Parents worry that if they tell their child that he is adopted, he’ll feel that he is damaged in some way, so giving him the bad news is treated like deploying a nuclear bomb; it must be done with extreme care and precision, and only as a last resort. (Meanwhile, tiptoeing around the issue with palpable anxiety is precisely what gives the child the impression that something is wrong with being adopted.)

An even thornier issue is when a father discovers that he is not the genetic father of his child. According to an article in The New York Times this past Sunday, getting back a paternity test with a negative result can be one of the most distressing events in a man’s life: “the issues can be so jarring,” the reporter writes, that “some of the men interviewed for this article had trouble speaking or broke into tears when recounting their experience.” What, exactly, is so jarring? It’s not finding out that their girlfriends or wives were cheating on them; it’s discovering that the children they’ve been fathers to all these years are not genetically related to them.

It’s tempting to explain all of this away as “natural” using evolutionary theory: an organism’s primary goal, the argument says, is to propagate its own genetic material. It wants to maximize its number of healthy, reproductively fit offspring, while minimizing the amount of its own resources that it devotes to this goal. So of course we want our children to be ours genetically, and of course a man is shattered when he discovers he’s been supporting a child with another man’s genes.

But evolution didn’t stop as soon as we started walking upright; we’re still evolving, and to think that our goals now are the same as they were 64 million years ago is folly. If our most basic goal were spreading our seed, then the opportunity to contribute to a sperm or egg bank — for money! — would be heaven-sent rather than creepy, and giving a child up for adoption would be a win-win situation.

As conscious beings, we are more than the sum of our parts; we are more than our genes. We are our ideas, we are our traditions, we are our beliefs and actions. Those creations — ideas, traditions, beliefs and actions — are what we strive to propagate through reproduction. It’s why our desire for parenthood transcends genetic boundaries and culminates in adoption when necessary; it’s why the thought of unknown children with half our genes being taught foreign ideals without our knowledge is so unnerving; it’s why giving up a child is so difficult. The label of genetic parenthood might not be obsolete yet, but it’s on its way out.