April 29, 2004
Women marry men who look like dad
Women tend to choose husbands who look like their fathers - even if they are adopted, reveals a new study.
The research shows that women use their dads as a template for picking a mate by a process called "sexual imprinting", says Tamas Bereczkei at the University of Pécs in Hungary and colleagues.
Husbands and wives have long been suggested to look alike and this is known to occur in many animal species. Couples that look like each other are also more likely to share common genes, and having a degree of similarity is believed to beneficial.
This might explain the study's findings, suggests Glenn Weisfeld, one of the research team and a human ethologist at Wayne State University, Detroit, US "There seems to be an advantage for animals to select a mate somewhat similar to themselves genetically," he told New Scientist.
"One good possibility is that there are some fortuitous genetic combinations which are retained in the offspring if both parents are similar," he says. "In humans there is evidence to show a lower rate of miscarriage."
However, he points out that there is a balance between the benefits of marrying someone genetically close and the harmful effects of inbreeding. "There seems to be an ideal balance, maybe around the first or second cousin point."
Posted by Dienekes at April 29, 2004 07:48 PM | PermaLinkHas anybody done a study on outbreeding -- you get hybrid vigor but also genetic mismatches. Cochran says he looked at the data once to see if interracial marriages had higher or lower fertility, but he couldn't see any difference, pro or con.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at April 29, 2004 10:29 PMI would imagine it was lower, with a concentric kinship pattern of fertility. Cousin marriage (according to Discover) is more fertile than non-cousin marriage. GSA (genetic sexual attraction) suggests that even closer blood pairings might be even more fertile (w/o that pesky Westermark effect). Everybody really just wants to $#%^ their mom and/or their sister - I find that very funny (and, of course, fantastically creepy).
Posted by: Jason Malloy at April 29, 2004 11:50 PM>> Cousin marriage (according to Discover) is more fertile than non-cousin marriage.
How do they measure that?
Posted by: Dienekes at April 30, 2004 11:14 AMHere's the related excerpt:
Moderate inbreeding may also produce biological benefits. Contrary to lore, cousin marriage may do even better than ordinary marriages by the standard Darwinian measure of success, which is reproduction. A 1960 study of first-cousin marriages in 19th century England done by C.D. Darlington, a geneticist at Oxford University, found that inbred couples produced twice as many great-grand children as did their outbred counterparts.
[article. (subsciption only)]
Posted by: Jason Malloy at May 2, 2004 08:15 AMIt's hard to say whether inbreeding is responsible for the higher number of descendants (in a biological sense), or the demographic characteristics of the people who tend to inbreed.
Posted by: Dienekes at May 2, 2004 11:12 PMConsang.net talks about it too, citing Bittles and more modern research (ctrl + F - fertility). Consang couples do have higher fertility with more tightly spaced birth intrevals and (perhaps) reproduction lasting to a later age. I'll be speculative - this might be partially due to increased attraction. I sense strange Hamiltonian mechanisms at work.
Posted by: Jason Malloy at May 3, 2004 10:18 AM