Marriage used to be practically universal, but now persists as an institution for only some groups, while others choose non-marital fertility. This paper posits that if one role of marriage is to insure one partner's investment in children, then home-ownership can be seen as providing the necessary "collateral" for this contract. As easier divorce and paternity enforcement outside of marriage h...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether change in paternity changes recurrence risk of hyperemesis gravidarum (HG). STUDY DESIGN Survey data on recurrence of HG was compared between cases who had a paternity change between pregnancies and cases who did not. RESULTS The percentage of HG pregnancies in women with the same partner for all pregnancies was not significantly different from the percentage ...

It is widely hypothesized that the evolution of female extra-pair reproduction in socially monogamous species reflects indirect genetic benefits to females. However, a critical prediction of this hypothesis, that extra-pair young (EPY) are fitter than within-pair young (WPY), has rarely been rigorously tested. We used 18 years of data from free-living song sparrows, Melospiza melodia, to test w...

Men take a proprietary view of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity. In this chapter, we (a) argue that sexually proprietary male psychologies are evolved solutions to the adaptive problems of male reproductive competition and potential misdirection of paternal investments in species with mistakable paternity; (b) describe the complex interrelated design of mating and paternal decision r...

This article argues that legal determinations of filiation are normative ideological constructions about how societal relations between parents and children should be ordered. They are based upon regular understandings of the relationship between biological and social facts and, as this article demonstrates, operate to create an asymmetrical relationship between the categories between paternity...

Leks are classic models for studies of sexual selection due to extreme variance in male reproductive success, but the relative influence of intrasexual competition and female mate choice in creating this skew is debatable. In the lekking lance-tailed manakin (Chiroxiphia lanceolata), these selective episodes are temporally separated into intrasexual competition for alpha status and female mate ...

There is a long-going debate on the genetic origin of Chinese Muslim populations, such as Uygur, Dongxiang, and Hui. However, genetic information for those Muslim populations except Uygur is extremely limited. In this study, we investigated the genetic structure and ancestry of Chinese Muslims by analyzing 15 autosomal short tandem repeats in 652 individuals from Dongxiang, Hui, and Han Chinese...

Contemporary data of extra-pair paternity (EPP) in human populations may be biased by the use of modern contraceptives. Studies have now estimated historical EPP rates in several human populations. The observed low EPP rates challenge the idea that women routinely 'shop around' for good genes by engaging in extra-pair copulations.

The expansion of legal rights to same-sex couples is afoot in a number of Western countries. The effects of this roll-out are not only important in their own right but can also provide a window on the institution of marriage and the rights bundled therein. In this paper, using Swedish longitudinal register data covering the period 1994-2007, we study the impact of the extension of rights to sam...

DNA fingerprinting is a powerful test for parentage and paternity testing of cattle. The mechanism of genetic identification using DNA markers is outlined with a brief description of theory and methodology and examples provided to demonstrate how it works. Theoretical expectations of the test are discussed and results obtained to date presented.