Genetic structure of the Utah Mormons: isonymy analysis

Isonymy analysis is reported for a sample of 188,895 marriages extracted from the Utah Genealogical Database. Inbreeding rates estimated by isonymy are low, ranging from 0.005 for the earliest marriage cohort (1800-1809) to 0.0008 in the most recent cohort (1950-1959). The inbreeding values decrease considerably through time, but they are consistently higher than inbreeding values estimated from pedigrees. Several explanations are offered for this, including polyphyletism of surnames and the presence of Scandinavian patronyms in this population. Random isonymy between subdivisions is also compared with random kinship estimated from migration matrices. In terms of within-subdivision kinship, the two approaches yield similar results. However, the results are quite dissimilar for between-subdivision kinship. This reflects the recent and nonrandom settlement of Utah by different ethnic groups with different surname distributions. In later time periods, the correlations between the two types of kinship estimates increase, showing that migration patterns (which are strongly determined by geographic distance) exert an increasing influence on the distribution of surnames. Logistic regression is performed on a subset of marriages (n = 88,202), using isonymous vs. nonisonymous marriage as the dependent variable. The independent variables are year of marriage, geographic distance between husband's and wife's birthplaces, endogamous vs. exogamous marriage, and population sizes of husband's and wife's birthplaces. Year of marriage and geographic distance are shown to be significant independent predictors of isonymous marriage.     

Are the Siriono Raw or Cooked?

In this paper Siriono myth and ritual are interpreted with a model of Siriono social structure. Whereas other students of the Siriono have noted their lack of sociability and have even suggested that their culture is incoherent, the present approach suggests that social exchange among the Siriono is a total social fact, but one that focuses on a peculiar relationship between men and women within a kinship idiom of parallel descent and matrilateral cross-cousin marriage .     

Paths of Relationship,Spirals of Exchange: Imag(in)ing North Pentecost Kinship

In Stone Men of Malekula: Vao (1942), a text that was published more than twenty‐five years after he carried out long‐term fieldwork in Vanuatu, John Layard introduced a new technique for rendering kinship data in diagrammatic form. Inspired in part by Gregory Bateson, his ‘circular technique’ was derived from diagrams drawn up according to the genealogical method, and was designed to overcome certain structural problems identified within these. One important implication of the ‘circular technique’ that is not made explicit in Layard's analysis is a resonance with many of the idioms and metaphors that ni‐Vanuatu evoke in talking about relationships of exchange and kinship. Where processes of birth, death, marriage and exchange are conceptualised in terms of a broad flow of departures and returns across discernible trajectories, images incorporating circles and spirals are utilised as key metaphors for understanding social relationships through space and time. Focusing on the Raga‐speaking district of North Pentecost, Vanuatu, this article explores such idioms while presenting a revision of Layard's circular technique.     

Genetic structure of the Saguenay, 1852-1911: evidence from migration and isonymy matrices

The Saguenay is a region in northeastern Québec populated in the second half of the 19th century through migration from other parts of Québec. The present-day population of nearly 300,000 is the result of both immigration and high rates of intrinsic growth. This population has been of interest to geneticists because of the high incidence of certain hereditary diseases, notably spastic ataxia, tyrosinemia, agenesis of the corpus callosum, vitamin D-dependent rickets, and myotonic dystrophy. Parent-offspring migration and isonymy matrices were used to estimate random kinship using the Malécot model for six 10-year time periods from 1852-1911. Comparisons between two estimates of kinship--one from parent-offspring migration matrices (phi) and the other from isonymy (R)--and geographic distance were made using both product-moment and Mantel correlation. Comparisons of within- and between-subdivision kinship were made using nonparametric and Mantel correlation. Within-subdivision kinship from the phi matrix was also compared with kinship estimated from marriage dispensations for endogamous marriages. The estimates of random kinship from the parent-offspring matrices showed a good fit with geography. However, isonymy did not correlate well with geographic distance; and phi and R showed no correlation until the last two time periods, and the diagonal of phi did not correlate with the marriage dispensations. Examination of scatterplots of phi vs. R suggests that nonrandom migration during the process of settlement formation is responsible for the lack of correlation. While movement across space seems to be highly dependent on distance, nonrandom selection of migrants means that between-subdivision estimates of kinship based on migration are not congruent with those obtained by other methods. On the whole, genetic differentiation seems to have been low due to the high levels of movement between subdivisions and immigration. The weak dependence of genetic structure on geographic distances in the present population is demonstrated by mapping the geographic distribution of cases of three recessively inherited diseases.     

Kinship and Mode of Production

This article links the basic elements of kinship and marriage to the division of labor between the sexes. The concept of a mode of production is used to analyze the distinctive features of this organization of the labor process. These features include the categorization of persons by generation and sex and a specification of reciprocal rights and obligations. It is thus argued that kinship pertains to a particular form of production rather than to an irreducible and unchangeable human nature . [kinship, division of labor by sex, mode of production]     

THE MEANINGS OF KINSHIP AMONG THE ESE EJJA OF NORTHERN BOLIVIA

This article focuses on the construction of relatedness among an Amazonian people of northern Bolivia. In analysing the Ese Ejja's kinship terminology and practices, it engages with the widespread stress on the processual nature of relatedness encountered in Amazonian studies. The article shows that, for the Ese Ejja, kinship relations are made through shared practices, although in some important respects kinship is considered to be given at birth. Given kinship is considered fixed, whereas processual kinship is open to contestation. The article argues that processual and given aspects of kinship must be considered together in order to account for local understandings of relatedness. The data presented invite further investigation into Amazonian ideas about the sharing of substance through filiation. This has important implications for the understanding of the conceptualization of cross- and parallel cousins. The article also suggests that in Amazonia otherness is not always given, as has been extensively argued, and that, in the context of Ese Ejja kinship relations, it is created through marriage and it is constantly made and undone.     

Intergenerational and Sibling Conflict Under Patrilocality

Here we argue that models developed to examine cooperation and conflict in communal breeders, using a “tug-of-war” model of reproductive skew generated by incomplete control, are an appropriate way to model human kinship systems. We apply such models to understand the patterns of effort put into competition between father and son and between brothers in conflict over family resources in a patrilineal kinship system. Co-resident kin do not necessarily emerge with equal shares of the cake in terms of reproductive output. The models show that, depending on the efficiency with which they can gain more control of the resource, on the marriage system, and on the relatedness of the partners in conflict, individuals can do better to help their relatives breed rather than fight each other for the resources needed to reproduce. The models show that when a son’s father is still breeding with his mother, sons should not compete for any share of reproduction. However, under polygyny, increased effort is spent on father/son and brother/brother conflict. Fathers will win the majority of reproduction if dominant to sons (in contrast to the finding that daughters-in-law win in conflict over mothers-in-law in patrilocal kinship systems, which has been suggested as explaining the evolution of menopause). Hence who wins in the sharing of reproduction depends not just on which sex disperses but also on the relative competitive ability of all individuals to exploit family resources. Anthropologists have long argued that cultural norms can reduce conflict. These formal evolutionary models help us to quantify the effects of reproductive conflict in families, throwing light on the evolutionary basis not just of patterns of reproductive scheduling, but also human kinship and marriage systems.     

Medico-genetic study of the population of Kostroma Province. VI. The parameters of isolation by distance in the populations of the Bui and Shar'ya Districts of Kostroma Province

A model of isolation by distance proposed by Malécot and developed by Morton is applied to the data on marriage distances collected in two regions of Kostroma Province. There is good agreement between the estimates of local inbreeding when using the isonymy method and the model of isolation by distance. Interpopulation kinship approaches 0 at the distance 700 km. The mean coefficient of kinship for parents in the families with autosomal-recessive pathology is 20 times higher than mean coefficient of kinship in the population.     

Mating structure in the Dogon population in the Tabi Massif

Abstract

The traditional structures influencing mate choice in a small isolated African population and their influence on actual marriages observed were studied to determine if the marriage rules caused marriages to diverge from the distribution expected if mating were random. The results tend to indicate that the marriage rules of the Dogon have in all probability no repercussion on the group's biological kinship. The real constraints are of a demographic nature, since the frequency of each cousin type and the relative age differences between potential spouses play a major role in the actual frequency of each marriage type.     

Kinship and mate choice in a historic eastern Blue Ridge community, Madison County, Virginia

Potential mates analysis is difficult to apply to small historic populations that lack clear boundaries or regular vital event registration. Here I analyze the actual mate pool as an alternative way to identify causes of nonrandom mating when unmarried members are unknown. Factors influencing mate choice within a historic eastern Blue Ridge community in Madison County, Virginia, are examined for four marriage cohorts: 1850-1879, 1880-1899, 1900-1919, and 1920-1939. These factors include nuclear kin avoidance, preferred age differences between mates, and preferences for more distant kin. A simulation is used to recombine members of the cohort-specific pools of married individuals to generate the probabilities of various types of kin marriages. The pedigree and vital statistics data are derived from first-time marriage licenses filled by community members in Madison County from 1794 to 1939. The numbers of marriages examined for each cohort are 88, 120, 132, and 132, respectively; the mate pools constructed from the samples are viewed from the female perspective. The results generated by simulation on the actual mate pools consist of mean kinship coefficients, numbers of marriages between "allowed" kin types, and probabilities of these values when marriage is random with respect to kinship. The results indicate significantly high levels of inbreeding in all four marriage cohorts, primarily because of high levels of first-cousin marriages in the first three cohorts and of first-cousin once-removed marriages in the 1920 cohort. The observed mating patterns are discussed in terms of the social history of the Blue Ridge community and restrictions of the data.     

Geographic distribution of surnames and genetic structure: the county of Ardeche at the beginning of the twentieth century

The analysis of the geographical distribution of surnames (whose transmission in the European societies is similar to that of the Y chromosome) allows to study in an exhaustive way the spatial and temporal human population structure and the influence of environmental variations on this structure. The genetic structure of the Ardèche county was analysed through a study of the surname characteristics (diversity, frequency, geographical dispersion, etc.) of individuals born between 1891 and 1915. The estimation of the intra-community average consanguinity and the inter-district genetic relationships reveals a clear differentiation between populations of the mountainous part (geographically isolated, highly inbred) and those of the Rh?ne valley (less isolated, weakly inbred). As predicted by the isolation by distance model, inter-population coefficients of kinship decreases as distance increases, confirming the presence of a spatial structure, characterized by neighborhood exchange and resulting from former migratory flow.     

Genetics and demography: Notes on the third Princeton conference (Princeton,N.J., October 20–22, 1966)

Abstract

A method is presented for the analysis of deviations from random mating. Kinship, demographic, social, and spatial characteristics observed among married couples have been compared with the distributions expected if mates were chosen at random from all possible pairs of mates. This procedure has been used to investigate both failure to mate and patterns of assortative mating for cohorts born on Sanday, Orkney Islands, between 1885 and 1924. Differences in mating opportunity were observed. The 315 males who eventually married on the island differed from the 446 never‐married males in birth order and sibship size as well as geographic and kinship “distances” measured between ego and all females available for marriage. Comparison of wives with the potential mates of married males indicated that mating was assortative with respect to kinship, demographic, social, and geographic characteristics. Further implications of this nonrandom pattern of mate choice are discussed and application of this method to other populations suggested.     

Royal dynasties as human inbreeding laboratories: the Habsburgs

The European royal dynasties of the Early Modern Age provide a useful framework for human inbreeding research. In this article, consanguineous marriage, inbreeding depression and the purging of deleterious alleles within a consanguineous population are investigated in the Habsburgs, a royal dynasty with a long history of consanguinity over generations. Genealogical information from a number of historical sources was used to compute kinship and inbreeding coefficients for the Habsburgs. The marriages contracted by the Habsburgs from 1450 to 1750 presented an extremely high mean kinship (0.0628±0.009), which was the result of the matrimonial policy conducted by the dynasty to establish political alliances through marriage. A strong inbreeding depression for both infant and child survival was detected in the progeny of 71 Habsburg marriages in the period 1450–1800. The inbreeding load for child survival experienced a pronounced decrease from 3.98±0.87 in the period 1450–1600 to 0.93±0.62 in the period 1600–1800, but temporal changes in the inbreeding depression for infant survival were not detected. Such a reduction of inbreeding depression for child survival in a relatively small number of generations could be caused by elimination of deleterious alleles of a large effect according with predictions from purging models. The differential purging of the infant and child inbreeding loads suggest that the genetic basis of inbreeding depression was probably very different for infant and child survival in the Habsburg lineage. Our findings provide empirical support that human inbreeding depression for some fitness components might be purged by selection within consanguineous populations.     

Dispersal ability in codling moth: mark–release–recapture experiments and kinship analysis

• 1 The present study focused on the dispersal patterns in the codling moth because such information is fundamental for determining the dynamics and genetics of the pest populations and for developing efficient management programmes.
• 2 We implemented mark–release–recapture experiments (MRR) with both male and female codling moths of two laboratory and one wild population using a sex pheromone and pear ester as attractants in delta traps. The experiments were conducted in apple orchards in central Greece over two consecutive years (2007–2008). In addition, kinship assignment tests were applied on 303 genotyped individuals (11 microsatellite loci) from two contiguous apple orchards in central Greece aiming to estimate the dispersal of fertilized females.
• 3 Both MRR and kinship analysis revealed that most male and female adults dispersed within 80 m, whereas some individuals moved at longer distances (maximum distance of approximately 200 m). A Bayesian analysis on microsatellite data revealed that exchange rates of codling moths between neighbouring orchards ranged among generations from 17.6 to 32.7%. The exchange rate between these orchards estimated by kinship analysis was 25.6% over all generations.
• 4 The collected data confirm the view of the sedentary nature of coding moth and indicate that genotypes able to migrate at long distances are not present in the studied area. The availability of food resources within orchards during the growing season is one possible factor that could favour this sedentary behaviour.

     

Cooperative pastoral production — the importance of kinship

While there is a general assumption that labour has a positive effect on pastoral production, studies that have quantified this relationship have been characterized by ambiguous results. This is most likely related to the fact that possible cooperative pastoral production has been little explored in the literature, although it is well documented that nomadic pastoralist households share and exchange labour in so-called cooperative herding groups. Consequently, this study aims at investigating possible cooperative labour-related effects on production among Saami reindeer herders in Norway by using kinship relations as a proxy for cooperation. This study found that cooperative labour investment is important for Saami reindeer herders, but that the effect of kinship and labour needs to be understood in relation to each other. When assessing the effect of labour and kinship simultaneously, both labour and genealogical relationship had positive effects on herd size. We also found a positive interaction between kinship and labour suggesting that high levels of relatedness coupled with a large potential labour pool had an increasingly positive effect on herd size.     

Dispersal,kinship and inbreeding in an island population of the Great Tit

We investigated the kinship structure of an island population of the Great Tit (Parus major). Kinship of birds could be inferred by comparing their family trees. Dispersal was also studied to explain the observed pattern of kinship. On the island of Vlieland the tits breed in several wooded areas. Both males and females preferred to breed in their natal area; males did so more strongly than females. Hence gene flow between the areas is restricted. However, within the largest wooded area females showed random dispersal, while males showed a slight tendency to breed near their natal site. The degree of kinship of neighbouring birds is a suitable control group for the relatedness of partners that takes into account the effects of dispersal. In the largest wooded area, birds were on average equally related to their partner and to their neighbours. Moreover, the mean coefficient of kinship between male and female neighbours was equal to the average kinship in this part of the population. We conclude that mating is random with respect to kinship. There is no evidence for avoidance of inbreeding. It is unlikely that kin recognition plays an important role in the process of mate choice in this population of Great Tits. We suggest that ecological factors are the main causes for the observed patterns of dispersal and mating. On the island more female than male immigrants enter the population each year. Incidental data indicate an exchange of birds between the population studied and surrounding populations. Ancestries of immigrants are not known, and indeed a first analysis of all birds, including immigrants, showed that males were more closely related than females. However, differential immigration could not fully explain the observed difference in kinship. The presence of local adaptation in males is suggested as a possible additional cause.     

Preferential Marriage among the Rukuba of Benue-Plateau State, Nigeria

The overall system of Rukuba marriage is formally a straight exchange of women between the component units of two exogamous moieties, component units which in turn abduct each other's wives in secondary marriage. The youths and girls of each of these component units pair off in formalized premarital relationships until girls marry out in the other moiety. The exchange pattern between the moieties works in such a way that the eldest girl of a set of uterine sisters must marry her mother's last lover's son, and her junior sisters are preferentially married in their mother's natal component unit, thus introducing a delayed exchange between the component units of opposite moieties working concurrently with the straight exchange system between the moieties. This is made possible by the various combinations of primary and/or preferential marriage and subsequent secondary marriages. [Rukuba, moieties, Nigeria, preferential marriage]     

AMBUSH: A Computer Program for Stochastic Microsimulation of Small Human Populations

A new generation of computer simulation programs for exploring problems in demography, kinship ties, descent groups, and other kinds of connectivity in small human populations is now available for use. AMBUSH is a simulation package which may be useful for simulating effects of fertility and mortality schedules, rules of marriage and kinship, density-dependent infanticide, and other features of closed breeding groups, and their stochastic variability. The program, described here, is available from the authors . [microsimulation, demography, kinship, connectivity]