Michael D. Weight and Henry Harpending (2016)
Abstract
The theory of selection of quantitative traits is widely used in
evolutionary biology, agriculture and other related fields. The fundamental
model known as the breeder’s equation is simple, robust over short time
scales, and it is often possible to estimate plausible parameters. In this paper
it is suggested that the results of this model provide useful yardsticks for the
description of social traits and the evaluation of transmission models. The
differences on a standard personality test between samples of Old Order
Amish and Indiana rural young men from the same county and the decline of
homicide in Medieval Europe are used as illustrative examples of the overall
approach. It is shown that the decline of homicide is unremarkable under a
threshold model while the differences between rural Amish and non-Amish
young men are too large to be a plausible outcome of simple genetic selection
in which assortative mating by affiliation is equivalent to truncation selection.
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