ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Perfect genetic correlation between number of offspring and grandoffspring in an industrialized human population.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 66 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trial
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- When theory cannot explain data, the theory needs rethinking. Invited replies to: Orzack SH, Hardy ICW. 2021, and Lehtonen J. 2021.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- No genetic contribution to variation in human offspring sex ratio: a total population study of 4.7 million births.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Health and Aging: Unifying Concepts, Scores, Biomarkers and Pathways.Aging and disease · 2019Review
- Allele frequency dynamics in a pedigreed natural population.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Older fathers' children have lower evolutionary fitness across four centuries and in four populations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Sexual dimorphism in the genetic influence on human childlessness.European journal of human genetics : EJHG · 2017Article
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- Genetic evidence for natural selection in humans in the contemporary United States.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- How does variance in fertility change over the demographic transition?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Y-chromosome descent clusters and male differential reproductive success: young lineage expansions dominate Asian pastoral nomadic populations.European journal of human genetics : EJHG · 2015Article
- A test of the facultative calibration/reactive heritability model of extraversion.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2015Article
- Genotype × cohort interaction on completed fertility and age at first birth.Behavior genetics · 2015Article
- The Biodemography of Fertility: A Review and Future Research Frontiers.Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und SozialpsychologieArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Reproductive success is widely used as a measure of fitness. However, offspring quantity may not reflect the genetic contribution to subsequent generations if there is nonrandom variation in offspring quality. Offspring quality is likely to be an important component of human fitness, and tradeoffs between offspring quantity and quality have been reported. As such, studies using offspring quantity as a proxy for fitness may yield erroneous projections of evolutionary change, for example if there is little or no genetic variance in number of grandoffspring or if its genetic variance is to some extent independent of the genetic variance in number of offspring. To address this, we performed a quantitative genetic analysis on the reproductive history of 16,268 Swedish twins born between 1915 and 1929 and their offspring. There was significant sex limitation in the sources of familial variation, but the magnitudes of the genetic and environmental effects were the same in males and females. We found significant genetic variation in number of offspring and grandoffspring (heritability = 24% and 16%, respectively), and genetic variation in the two variables completely overlapped--i.e., there was a perfect genetic correlation between number of offspring and grandoffspring. Shared environment played a smaller but significant role in number of offspring and grandoffspring; again, there was a perfect shared environmental correlation between the two variables. These findings support the use of lifetime reproductive success as a proxy for fitness in populations like the one used here, but we caution against generalizing this conclusion to other kinds of human societies.
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