Genetic and educational assortative mating among US adults.
Understanding the social and biological mechanisms that lead to homogamy (similar individuals marrying one another) has been a long-standing issue across many fields of scientific inquiry. Using a nationally representative sample of non-Hispanic white US adults from the Health and Retirement Study and information from 1.7 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms, we compare genetic similarity among married couples to noncoupled pairs in the population. We provide evidence for genetic assortative mating in this population but the strength of this association is substantially smaller than the strength of educational assortative mating in the same sample. Furthermore, genetic similarity explains at most 10% of the assortative mating by education levels. Results are replicated using comparable data from the Framingham Heart Study.
Institute of Behavioral Science and ben.domingue@gmail.com.
Benjamin W
BW
Domingue
La Follette School of Public Affairs,Center for Demography and Ecology, andDepartment of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706; and.
Jason
J
Fletcher
Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, New York University, New York, NY 10003.
Dalton
D
Conley
Institute of Behavioral Science andDepartment of Sociology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309;
Jason D
JD
Boardman
D030541:Databases, Genetic; D004522:Educational Status; D005006:Ethnicity / Q000235:genetics; D005260:Female; D055106:Genome-Wide Association Study; D005838:Genotype; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008393:Marriage; D056186:Metagenomics / Q000379:methods*; D010641:Phenotype; D044469:Racial Groups / Q000235:genetics; D012725:Sexual Behavior; D018454:Spouses; D014481:United States
genetic homogamy; homophily; random mating