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

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Lansing JS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2575272 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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

Lansing J Stephen JS Watkins Joseph C JC Hallmark Brian B Cox Murray P MP Karafet Tatiana M TM Sudoyo Herawati H Hammer Michael F MF

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20080814 33

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 nonrecomb ...[more]

PMID: 18703660

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Project description:Homozygosity has long been associated with rare, often devastating, Mendelian disorders, and Darwin was one of the first to recognize that inbreeding reduces evolutionary fitness. However, the effect of the more distant parental relatedness that is common in modern human populations is less well understood. Genomic data now allow us to investigate the effects of homozygosity on traits of public health importance by observing contiguous homozygous segments (runs of homozygosity), which are inferred to be homozygous along their complete length. Given the low levels of genome-wide homozygosity prevalent in most human populations, information is required on very large numbers of people to provide sufficient power. Here we use runs of homozygosity to study 16 health-related quantitative traits in 354,224 individuals from 102 cohorts, and find statistically significant associations between summed runs of homozygosity and four complex traits: height, forced expiratory lung volume in one second, general cognitive ability and educational attainment (P < 1 × 10(-300), 2.1 × 10(-6), 2.5 × 10(-10) and 1.8 × 10(-10), respectively). In each case, increased homozygosity was associated with decreased trait value, equivalent to the offspring of first cousins being 1.2 cm shorter and having 10 months' less education. Similar effect sizes were found across four continental groups and populations with different degrees of genome-wide homozygosity, providing evidence that homozygosity, rather than confounding, directly contributes to phenotypic variance. Contrary to earlier reports in substantially smaller samples, no evidence was seen of an influence of genome-wide homozygosity on blood pressure and low density lipoprotein cholesterol, or ten other cardio-metabolic traits. Since directional dominance is predicted for traits under directional evolutionary selection, this study provides evidence that increased stature and cognitive function have been positively selected in human evolution, whereas many important risk factors for late-onset complex diseases may not have been.

Dataset Information

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

Publications

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

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