Ancestry Matters

Abstract

Patrilineality, the organization of kinship, inheritance, and other key social processes based on patrilineal male descent, has been a salient feature of social organization in China and many other societies for centuries. Because continuity or growth of the patrilineage was the central focus of reproductive strategies in such societies, we introduce the number of patrilineal male descendants generations later as a stratification outcome. By reconstructing and analyzing 20,000 patrilineages in two prospective, multi-generational population databases from 18th and 19th century China, we show that patrilineages founded by high status males had higher growth rates for the next 150 years. The elevated growth rate of these patrilineages was due more to their having a lower probability of extinction at each point in time than to surviving patrilineal male descendants having larger numbers of sons on average. As a result, patrilineal male descendants of high status males account for a disproportionately large share of the male population in later generations. In China and elsewhere, patrilineal kin network characteristics influence individuals’ life chances; thus effects of a male founder’s characteristics on patrilineage size many generations later represent an indirect channel of status transmission that has not been considered previously.

Power and Autistic Traits

“…In a large region of Asia, genetic analysis indicates that about 8% of all men today are descendants of Genghis Khan ( Zerjal et al, 2003 ). Consistent with this, a recent study showed that “male descendants of high-status males account for a disproportionately large share of the male population in later generations” ( Song et al, 2015 , p. 574). It thus appears that people alive today are disproportionately the descendants of powerful men.…”

The formal demography of kinship III: Kinship dynamics with time-varying demographic rates

“…Social scientists have begun to extend the long-standing interest in parental influences on children to inequality over multiple generations and assess the influences of grandparents and other more distant kin in families' long-term reproductive success and socioeconomic attainment (Mare 2011;Song 2021). Formal models of kinship complement existing empirical and simulation-based investigations of the demographic dynamics of households, lineages, and kin networks (LeBras and Wachter 1978;Smith 1987;Smith and Oeppen 1993;Song, Campbell, and Lee 2015). Social changes are often driven by various mechanisms of status transmission, not only from parents to offspring but also between other types of kinship relations, and by natural and cultural selections (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981).…”

Historical Chinese Microdata. 40 Years of Dataset Construction by the Lee-Campbell Research Group

“…6 Table 3 summarizes the CUSD. -ROC 1912-ROC -1949-ROC 165,981 136,220 2010 People's Republic of China CUSD-PRC 1949-2003150,893 150,893 1998 Overseas Students CUSD-OS 1847-19482015 In Japan 64,164 32,543…”

“…There was longterm continuity not only during the Qing but between the Qing and the late 20th century in the relative status of lineages (Campbell & Lee, 2011). Socioeconomic privilege not only increased the number of children a man had, but increased the total number of descendants he had for as many as six generations, meaning that in every generation, a disproportionate share of the population was descended from the most socioeconomically privileged members of the population in previous generations (Song, Campbell, & Lee, 2015). We have also explored computational approaches to the study of lineages: Fu et al (2018) used visualization and network techniques to study the determinants of the morphology of descent line structure.…”