I am a regular reader of the ScienceDaily RSS feed. I like to keep abreast of all of the latest developments in various fields that interest me, although I know that I probably would not get anything out of reading the actual studies. I was attracted to this study on genetic similarities of couples since I wanted to see how my inter-racial marriage fits in with their study.
I interpret that to mean that they studied 825 couples where both members were of European descent. So does that mean that all inter-racial marriages are considered to be outliers not worth studying? I know that in the environment I have worked for the last 22 years (The military) there is a higher incidence of people marrying outside of their ethnic group, but is it that rare that they can be tossed aside as outliers?
The biggest thing I have against this study is that it is redundant thinking. Yay, they proved that people that deliberately choose a partner who is similar to them are genetically similar, and anyone who doesn’t is an outlier. That’s good science?
Emphasis mine. That is, even within a race, they found that people are more similar to their spouses than they are to a randomly chose member of that race. IOW, this is more than just “I want to marry someone of the same background”.
I think it’s reaching to draw any conclusions about the authors’ view on non-white or interracial marriages. It’s not that they’re “outliers”, or “not worth studying”. It’s just that in a study like this, you need to control or eliminate as many variable as possible. The question they were asking was whether genetic similarity between spouses was at a deeper level than race. Including multiple races would have confounded the answer to that question rather than clarified it.
So their definition of population is a homogenous group within the US? Wouldn’t the study reflect society better if the sample was representative of the choices available in liberal America of 2014?
Another question that arises for me is that, as everyone who has read the race threads on this board knows, there is more genetic diversity in a random sample of sub-saharan African populations than anywhere else, so why not do a study on that many African American couples, who are even more diverse? To me it seems that to better prove the hypothesis, starting with a more genetically diverse population improves the signal to noise ratio.
In any scientific study, the definition of “population” is “the group of samples we tested”. For this study, the population they chose was a bunch of Americans of European descent. Why did they choose that population? You’d have to ask the authors. I’d assume it was because that was the easiest group for them to get samples from.
Probably. You’re assuming that one of the goals of the study was to “reflect society”, which is almost certainly wrong. They weren’t looking to understand everything that’s going on in society; they were looking to get evidence for one simple, specific question, and that can only be done by simplifying the real world down into a model, by eliminating variables. Just like how we do research in rats, even though it would be much more relevant to do it in humans. There are lots of reasons to turn to simpler models.
Possibly, though I haven’t looked at the study closely to say for sure. But if they got a significant result (which they did, since they published), then the model population they chose was sufficient. It worked.
You’re reading a LOT of moral and value judgments into this study that just simply are not there. It’s standard scientific practice, nothing more.
I take your point: by focusing on monoracial couples, they’re limiting their sample to people who have already shown they’re attracted to mates with whom they have certain physical traits in common. The sample is innately skewed, which might (or might not) skew the results.
It would be interesting to see if this finding holds in interracial couples as well - if a Hispanic man is married to a white woman, is he likely to have more genetic markers in common with her than with other whites, and does she have more in common with him than with other Hispanic men - in other words, do these couples unconsciously seek out similarity within dissimilarity? But that’s a more complicated study, and it’d be harder to find enough subjects.
Same as Smeghead, I don’t think there’s any value judgment or commentary about society implied here: they just went for the simplest option.
I think there’s probably an easy explanation to the question raised by the study, which is this: “why would white [European American] couples be more genetically similar than two random white Americans?”
I think the easy answer is that married couples are more likely to know each other, and thus more likely to have similar backgrounds (e.g. hailing from the same city/state/region), which would mean they’re more likely to be related (however distantly) than two random white people.