SHOETER ARTICLES AND DISCUSSION 



NOTE ON ASSORTATIVE MATING IN MAN WITH 

 RESPECT TO HEAD SIZE AND HEAD FORM 



AssoBTATiVE mating in man lias been much discussed^ but 

 has been little investigated by scientific methods. 



For characters such as age of husband and age of wife where 

 there is an obvious preferential mating we may have coef- 

 ficients of assortative mating as large as i-=-\-J5. For stat- 

 ure, span and forearm Pearson has determined coefficients of 

 about + .20 for span and span, + .20 for forearm and forearm, 

 and + .28 for stature and stature in husbands and wives in his 

 English series. The cross correlations for these various charac- 

 ters are in general smaller. For bodily characters other than 

 stature the data are very few and are in general unsatisfactory. 



With characteristic caution Pearson long ago suggested^ that 

 coefficients of assortative mating might be due to the husbands 

 and wives being drawn from the same local races. The im- 

 portance of this factor seems to be very small in his own ma- 



This question must continually recur whenever assortative 

 mating for physical characters is discussed. It seems very de- 

 sirable, therefore, to obtain some measure of the correlation be- 

 tween husband and wife with respect to cephalic index, a char- 

 acter which has been considered of great importance by an- 

 thropologists in differentiating the races of Europe. For head 

 size and head form we have had, as far as we are aware, until 

 recently only the data for forty-eight families of Eastern Euro- 

 pean (Russian) Jews living in New York City, for which Boas"" 

 found assortative matings for cephalic index measured by 

 r = .15±.10. 



Recently Frets in a series of papers* has given data for head 



1 The literature of the field has been reviewed up to 1912 by one of us: 

 Harris, J. Arthur, "Assortative Mating of Man," Popular Science Monthly, 

 80: 476-492. 1912. 



2 Pearson, K., "Data for the Problem of Evolution in Man. III. On 

 the Magnitude of Certain Coefficients of Correlation of Man," etc., Proc. 

 Roy. Soc, Vol. 66: 23-32. 1899. 



1903. ' ' ^ 



4 Frets, G. P., "Heredity of Head Form in Man," Genctica, 3: 193-400. 

 1921. This paper contains the original measurements. These have been 

 to some extent cheeked against his other papers. 



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