For alcoholism,
Charles Goring found the resemblance between husband and wife in the
following classes to be as follows:
Very poor and destitute .44
Prosperous poor .58
Well-to-do .69
The resemblance of husband and wife, in respect of possession of a
police record, he found to be .20. Of course alcoholism and criminality
are not wholly due to heredity; the resemblance between man and wife is
partly a matter of social influences. But in any case the existence of
assortative mating for such traits is significant.
3. Preferential mating occurs when certain classes of women are
discriminated against by the average man, or by men as a class; or _vice
versa_. It is the form of sexual selection made prominent by Charles
Darwin, who brought it forward because natural selection, operating
solely through a differential death-rate, seemed inadequate to account
for many phases of evolution. By sexual selection he meant that an
individual of one sex, in choosing a mate, is led to select out of
several competitors the one who has some particular attribute in a high
degree. The selection may be conscious, and due to the exercise of
aesthetic taste, or it may be unconscious, due to the greater degree of
excitation produced by the higher degree of some attribute.
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