1. Random mating is described by J. Arthur Harris[95] as follows:
"Suppose a most highly refined socialistic community should set about to
equalize as nearly as possible not only men's labor and their
recompense, but the quality of their wives. It would never do to allow
individuals to select their own partners--superior cunning might result
in some having mates above the average desirability, which would be
socially unfair!
"The method adopted would be to write the names of an equal number of
men and women officially condemned to matrimony on cards, and to place
those for men in one lottery wheel and those for women in another. The
drawing of a pair of cards, one from each wheel, would then replace the
'present wasteful system' of 'competitive' courtship. If the cards were
thoroughly shuffled and the drawings perfectly at random, we should
expect only chance resemblances between husband and wife for age,
stature, eye and hair color, temper and so on; in the long run, a wife
would resemble her husband no more than the husband of some other
woman. In this case, the mathematician can give us a coefficient of
resemblance, or of assortative mating, which we write as zero. The other
extreme would be the state of affairs in which men of a certain type
(that is to say men differing from the general average by a definite
amount) always chose wives of the same type; the resemblance would then
be perfect and the correlation, as we call it, would be expressed by a
coefficient of 1.
Pages:
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352