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Subject: [DNA] PubMed abstract: male dominance rarely skews Y chromosomedistribution
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 08:59:45 EDT

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Aug 19;105(33):11645-50. Epub 2008 Aug 14.

Male dominance rarely skews the frequency distribution of Y chromosome
haplotypes in human populations.

Lansing JS, Watkins JC, Hallmark B, Cox MP, Karafet TM, Sudoyo H, Hammer MF.

Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.

A central tenet of evolutionary social science holds that behaviors, such as
those associated with social dominance, produce fitness effects that are
subject to cultural selection. However, evidence for such selection is inconclusive
because it is based on short-term statistical associations between behavior
and fertility. Here, we show that the evolutionary effects of dominance at the
population level can be detected using noncoding regions of DNA. Highly
variable polymorphisms on the nonrecombining portion of the Y chromosome can be used
to trace lines of descent from a common male ancestor. Thus, it is possible
to test for the persistence of differential fertility among patrilines. We
examine haplotype distributions defined by 12 short tandem repeats in a sample of
1269 men from 41 Indonesian communities and test for departures from neutral
mutation-drift equilibrium based on the Ewens sampling formula. Our tests
reject the neutral model in only 5 communities. Analysis and simulations show that
we have sufficient power to detect such departures under varying demographic
conditions, including founder effects, bottlenecks, and migration, and at
varying levels of social dominance. We conclude that patrilines seldom are dominant
for more than a few generations, and thus traits or behaviors that are
strictly paternally inherited are unlikely to be under strong cultural selection.

PMID: 18703660 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]



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