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assortative mating

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Legal, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia 0.01 sec.
mating /mat·ing/ (māt´ing) pairing of individuals of opposite sexes, especially for reproduction.
assortative mating , assorted mating, assortive mating the mating of individuals having similar qualities or constitutions.
random mating  the mating of individuals without regard to any similarity between them.

as·sor·ta·tive mating (-sôrt-tv)
n.
Nonrandom mating in which individuals mate preferentially according to phenotype.

assortative mating
sexual reproduction in which the pairing of male and female is not random.


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The researchers not only found similar ancestry patterns between the pairs of spouses, they also found the imprint of many generations of such assortative mating in the genomic architecture within each individual.
The specific consequences of assortative mating are complex, but it can be generalized that if individuals preferentially mate according to phenotypic similarity (positive assortative mating), it will normally increase quantitative genetic variance and that negative assortative mating generally has the opposite effect (Conner & Hartl 2004).
A body of literature on assortative mating indicates that couples tend to pair up on the basis of similarity along different dimensions (see Watson et al.
 
 
 
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