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Related Concept Videos

Mate Choice01:20

Mate Choice

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Mate choice—the decision about whom to mate with—is a type of natural selection, since animals must reproduce to pass down their genes. Mate choice is also called intersexual selection because the behavior occurs between the sexes.
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While Mendel’s Law of Segregation states that the two alleles for one gene are separated into different gametes, a different question of how different genes are inherited remains. For example, is the gene for tall plants inherited with the gene for green peas? Mendel asked this question by experimenting with a dihybrid cross; a cross in which both parents are homozygous for two distinct traits resulting in an F1 generation that are heterozygous for both traits.
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Natural Selection and Mating Preferences01:06

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The principle of natural selection posits that organisms better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. This principle is closely intertwined with mating preferences, a key aspect of sexual selection, which evolutionary psychologists believe is driven by instincts to propagate one's genes. Such instincts significantly influence mating behaviors and preferences between genders.
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Diploid organisms have two alleles of each gene, one from each parent, in their somatic cells. Therefore, each individual contributes two alleles to the gene pool of the population. The gene pool of a population is the sum of every allele of all genes within that population and has some degree of variation. Genetic variation is typically expressed as a relative frequency, which is the percentage of the total population that has a given allele, genotype or phenotype.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 14, 2026

Determination of the Mating Efficiency of Haploids in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
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Assortative mating without assortative preference.

Yu Xie1, Siwei Cheng2, Xiang Zhou2

  • 1Institute for Social Research and Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48104; and Center for Social Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China yuxie@umich.edu.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|April 29, 2015
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Assortative mating, or marrying similar partners, can occur without conscious preference. Dynamic marriage processes in a closed system can create these patterns as more people marry over time.

Keywords:
Gale–Shapley modelassortative matingcomposition heterogeneityencounter mating modelstructural effect

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Area of Science:

  • Sociology
  • Economics
  • Mathematical Modeling

Background:

  • Assortative mating, the union of individuals with similar social characteristics, is widely observed.
  • Existing research primarily attributes this phenomenon to conscious partner preferences.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate alternative explanations for assortative mating beyond individual preferences.
  • To demonstrate how structural dynamics within a closed system can generate assortative mating patterns.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized microsimulation techniques to model marriage formation processes.
  • Employed the Gale-Shapley model (deterministic and probabilistic versions) and encounter mating models.

Main Results:

  • Assortative mating patterns emerge dynamically as marriage progresses within a finite population.
  • Individuals entering marriage later in a cohort differ systematically from earlier entrants, driving the observed assortative patterns.

Conclusions:

  • Structural factors, specifically the temporal dynamics of marriage formation in a closed system, can independently lead to assortative mating.
  • This challenges the sole reliance on individual preferences to explain the prevalence of marrying similar partners.