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Edited by Robert D. Mare, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, and approved April 16, 2014 (received for review November 15, 2013)
Significance
It is well established that individuals are more similar to their spouses than other individuals on important traits, such as education level. The genetic similarity, or lack thereof, between spouses is less well understood. We estimate the genome-wide genetic similarity of spouses and compare the magnitude of this value to a comparable measure of educational similarity. We find that spouses are more genetically similar than two individuals chosen at random but this similarity is at most one-third the magnitude of educational similarity. Furthermore, social sorting processes in the marriage market are largely independent of genetic dynamics of sexual selection.
Abstract
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.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ben.domingue{at}gmail.com.
Author contributions: B.W.D., J.F., D.C., and J.D.B. designed research; B.W.D. performed research; B.W.D. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; B.W.D. analyzed data; and B.W.D., J.F., D.C., and J.D.B. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1321426111/-/DCSupplemental.
Assortative mating among US adults
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