Genetic relatedness predicts South African migrant workers' remittances to their families
Genetic relatedness predicts South African migrant workers' remittances to their families
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DOI：
10.1038/nature03420
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发表时间：
2005-03-17
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Posel, D
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bowles, S;Posel, D
包容性健康模型(1，2)预测了许多常见的观察行为：在人类中，对家庭暴力(3)、食物分配(4，5)和照看孩子(6)的研究发现，人们偏爱那些与他们关系更密切的人。然而，在某些情况下，亲属利他主义的影响似乎不大(7-9)。个人对亲人的偏爱是否达到了亲人-利他主义模型所预测的程度？关于南非移徙工人向其农村家庭汇款的数据使我们能够对人类进行明确的测试，据我们所知，这是第一次。使用与汇款相关的健康收益和成本、移民与转移受益人的遗传关系以及他们特定年龄和性别的生殖价值观的估计，我们估计了使移民工人的包容性健康最大化的汇款水平。这是一个比平均关联度更好的对观察到的汇款的预测，即使我们考虑到(通过多重回归)对汇款水平的协变影响。但其影响并不大：在观察到的汇款水平中，只有不到三分之一可以用我们的亲属利他主义模型来解释。
Inclusive fitness models(1,2) predict many commonly observed behaviours: among humans, studies of within-household violence(3), the allocation of food(4,5) and child care(6) find that people favour those to whom they are more closely related. In some cases however, kin-altruism effects appear to be modest(7-9). Do individuals favour kin to the extent that kin-altruism models predict? Data on remittances sent by South African migrant workers to their rural households of origin allow an explicit test, to our knowledge the first of its kind for humans. Using estimates of the fitness benefits and costs associated with the remittance, the genetic relatedness of the migrant to the beneficiaries of the transfer, and their age- and sex-specific reproductive values, we estimate the level of remittance that maximizes the migrant worker's inclusive fitness. This is a much better predictor of observed remittances than is average relatedness, even when we take account ( by means of a multiple regression) of covarying influences on the level of remittance. But the effect is modest: less than a third of the observed level of remittances can be explained by our kin-altruism model.