Women helping healthier men to evolve
Evolution of the sexes Men are evolving to have healthier genes thanks to their genetic relationships with women, new research suggests.
Although, say the researchers, the effect of culture could well be drowning out this genetic signal
Women helping healthier men to evolve
Evolution of the sexes Men are evolving to have healthier genes thanks to their genetic relationships with women, new research suggests.
Although, say the researchers, the effect of culture could well be drowning out this genetic signal.
The research, by Dr Stephen Stearns, of Yale University, and colleagues, reveals that genetic connections between males and females strongly affect each others' responses to natural selection.
"Because those connections exist, men respond differently evolutionarily to natural selection than they would if they were not connected to females. In this case they respond in a way that improves their health," says Stearns.
"Males are under selection to get healthier - to have lower total cholesterol, lower blood glucose and lower blood pressure because of the effects coming through females, not because of effects acting directly on them."
Genes that influence bodily traits are under different selection pressures in women and men.
So what impact do these different pressures have on traits given that, over the generations, genes spend roughly half their time in males, and half their time in females?
To explore this, Stearns and colleagues analysed a number of traits in 1500 family trees, containing 15,000 people taken from a long term medical study in the United States.
Their study, reported today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B looked at traits including height, weight, blood pressure and glucose, total cholesterol, and age at first birth, all of which are affected by our genes.
First the researchers measured how each trait affected the number of offspring men and women had. This showed the degree of evolutionary advantage each trait gave 