Some genetic traits in Solomon Island populations. V. Assortative mating, with special reference to skin color

Abstract

Married couples in four Solomon Islands tribes did not mate assortatively for body size or shape. All four groups had high correlations (0.6 to 0.9) between spouses' age and moderate correlations, 0.3 to 0.5, for ageassociated traits like nose height, ear length, and grayness of hair. Three brownskinned groups from Malaita (Kwaio, Lau, and Baegu) showed significant assortative mating for skin color whereas the very dark-skinned Nasioi, from Bougainville, did not. The positive correlations between spouses for skin color, with r's for various bodily regions ranging from 0.2 to 0.6 in the three Malaitan tribes, persisted when age was partialled out. As expected with assortative mating, the Malaitans' skin color was highly variable.

Assortative mating for human height: A meta‐analysis

“…We were unable to derive effect sizes from a record reporting on a twin sample (Hirschhorn et al, ) and were unable to locate a potentially relevant paper from our literature search (Bergman & Koniarek, ). The following studies (including reviews that reported on several studies) were included in the meta‐analysis: Pearson and Lee, ; Susanne, ; Spuhler, ; Johnston, ; Pollitzer et al, ; Baldwin and Damon, ; Crognier, ; Harrison, Gibson, and Hiorns, ; Hill, Rubin, and Peplau, ; Mueller and Malina, ; Roberts, Billewicz, and McGregor, ; Garn, Cole, and Bailey, ; Chrzastek‐Spruch, ; Nance, Corey, and Eaves, ; Price and Vandenberg, ; Kaur and Singh, ; Pieper, ; Malina, Selby, Buschang, Aronson, and Little, ; Annest, Sing, Biron, & Mongeau, ; McManus and Mascie‐Taylor, ; Pennock‐Román, ; Sharma and Sharma, ; Ahmad, Gilbert, & Naqui, ; Province and Rao, ; Staessen et al, ; Byard, Poosha, and Satyanarayana, ; Byard, Mukherjee, Bhattacharya, Russell, and Rao, ; Hutchinson and Byard, ; Mascie‐Taylor, ; Nagoshi and Johnson, ; Okada, ; Stark, Salzano, and DaRocha, ; Wolański et al, ; Tambs et al, ; Sutton, ; Sanchez‐Andres and Mesa, ; Wolański, ; Dasgupta, Dasgupta, and Daschaudhuri, ; Ginsburg, Livshits, Yakovenko, and Kobyliansky, ; Luo, Albertsson‐Wikland, and Karlberg, ; To, Cheung, and Kwok, ; Eaves et al, ; Price, Reed, and Guido, ; Dalmia and Lawrence, ; Eckman, Williams, Nagoshi, ; Al‐Kandari, Crews, & Poirier, ; Xu et al, ; Hur, ; Mukhopadhyay et al, ; Raychaudhuri, Ghosh, Vasulu, and Bharati, ; Silventoinen, Kaprio, Lahelma, Viken, and Rose,…”

A twin study of skin reflectance

“…VA is that part of the genetic variation due to the additive effects ofgenes in the absence of assortative mating. If assortative mating occurs for skin colour, it will increase the additive genetic variance between pairs but in proportions such that it is completely confounded with estimates of E 2 • Baldwin and Damon (1973) report assortative mating for skin colour among the heterogeneously coloured people of the Solomon Islands, but we known of no data to suggest that it occurs to any degree within European populations and it will not be considered further in this paper.…”

Structured mating: Patterns and implications

“…Phenotype-based assortative mating has been well documented in humans for several traits including age [12, 13, 14], height [12, 15, 16, 17], weight [12, 16] and other physical characteristics such as skin pigmentation [18], and eye and hair color [12, 14]. In addition, there are other behavioral and social factors that are highly correlated between spouse-pairs and are thought to affect mate selection such as educational level [15, 16, 19], occupation [15], socioeconomic status [12,13], religion [12,16], smoking [20], alcohol consumption [21, 22], language [23] and culture [23].…”