Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
- 12,329
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
See:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27507146/
Sometimes I wonder how much total government spending goes toward research proving what we basically already know through common sense.
Yes, outgoing or extroverted people probably have more success with the opposite sex. Yes, extroversion is probably highly genetic in origin. That it's selected for in our highly "social" species is also not a surprise.
However, this kind of finding has limited usefulness. In the past, people's preferences, or the attractiveness of someone's "game", hardly entered into it. Marriages were for economic gain if at all possible: who had the most land, or the tenancy, or could bring some cows, and sheep, or pots and pans to the marriage.
"Personality has been associated with reproductive success in humans and other animals, suggesting potential evolutionary selection pressures. However, studies to date have only examined these associations on a phenotypic level, which may be inadequate in estimating evolutionary change. Using a large longitudinal twin dataset of contemporary Finns, we compared the phenotypic (breeder's equation) and genetically informed (the Robertson-Price identity) associations between lifetime reproductive success (LRS) and two personality traits-neuroticism and extraversion. Neuroticism was not associated with LRS at the phenotypic nor genetic level, while extraversion was associated with higher LRS in men both phenotypically and genetically. Compared to the univariate phenotypic analysis, the genetic analysis suggested a larger selection response of extraversion, and a selection response of neuroticism due to indirect selection. We estimated that neuroticism decreases by .05 standard deviations and extraversion increases by .11 standard deviations by one generation. Our results highlight the importance of considering genetic associations between personality and fitness and investigating several inter-related personality traits and their covariance with each other to predict responses to selection more accurately."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27507146/
Sometimes I wonder how much total government spending goes toward research proving what we basically already know through common sense.
Yes, outgoing or extroverted people probably have more success with the opposite sex. Yes, extroversion is probably highly genetic in origin. That it's selected for in our highly "social" species is also not a surprise.
However, this kind of finding has limited usefulness. In the past, people's preferences, or the attractiveness of someone's "game", hardly entered into it. Marriages were for economic gain if at all possible: who had the most land, or the tenancy, or could bring some cows, and sheep, or pots and pans to the marriage.
"Personality has been associated with reproductive success in humans and other animals, suggesting potential evolutionary selection pressures. However, studies to date have only examined these associations on a phenotypic level, which may be inadequate in estimating evolutionary change. Using a large longitudinal twin dataset of contemporary Finns, we compared the phenotypic (breeder's equation) and genetically informed (the Robertson-Price identity) associations between lifetime reproductive success (LRS) and two personality traits-neuroticism and extraversion. Neuroticism was not associated with LRS at the phenotypic nor genetic level, while extraversion was associated with higher LRS in men both phenotypically and genetically. Compared to the univariate phenotypic analysis, the genetic analysis suggested a larger selection response of extraversion, and a selection response of neuroticism due to indirect selection. We estimated that neuroticism decreases by .05 standard deviations and extraversion increases by .11 standard deviations by one generation. Our results highlight the importance of considering genetic associations between personality and fitness and investigating several inter-related personality traits and their covariance with each other to predict responses to selection more accurately."