Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 113, Issue 24, Pages 6647-6652Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1523592113
Keywords
assortative mating; fertility; polygenic scores; cohort trends
Categories
Funding
- Russell Sage Foundation Grant GxE and Health Inequality over the Life Course
- National Institute on Aging [NIA U01AG009740, RC2AG036495, RC4AG039029]
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) [R21HD078031]
- NICHD
- Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research [1R21HD071884]
- NIH/NICHD [R24HD066613]
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This study asks two related questions about the shifting landscape of marriage and reproduction in US society over the course of the last century with respect to a range of health and behavioral phenotypes and their associated genetic architecture: (i) Has assortment on measured genetic factors influencing reproductive and social fitness traits changed over the course of the 20th century? (ii) Has the genetic covariance between fitness (as measured by total fertility) and other traits changed over time? The answers to these questions inform our understanding of how the genetic landscape of American society has changed over the past century and have implications for population trends. We show that husbands and wives carry similar loadings for genetic factors related to education and height. However, the magnitude of this similarity is modest and has been fairly consistent over the course of the 20th century. This consistency is particularly notable in the case of education, for which phenotypic similarity among spouses has increased in recent years. Likewise, changing patterns of the number of children ever born by phenotype are not matched by shifts in genotype-fertility relationships over time. Taken together, these trends provide no evidence that social sorting is becoming increasingly genetic in nature or that dysgenic dynamics have accelerated.
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