Assortative mating and the segregation variance.

Feldman and Cavalli-Sforza (Theoret. Pop. Biol. (1979), 15, 276-307; (1981), 19, 370-377) have emphasized the role of the segregation variance in models of assortative mating for continuous characters. This note examines its behavior in the context of a general additive model. Using known results concerning the effects of assortative mating and selection on genic variance and correlations among uniting gametes it is shown that the effects of these processes on segregation variance wil be small if the effective number of loci is large. Thus models in which the segregation variance remains constant are approximate descriptions of the behavior of characters determined by many loci.