Collaborative Research on the Genetic Effects of Culture: Y Chromosome DNA, MtDNA, and Patrilineal Kinship in the Dogon of Mali

亲属关系是人类社会生活的普遍特征，在美国，家谱是第二受欢迎的爱好。然而，尽管人们对亲属关系如此着迷，一个根本的谜团却被忽视了：人们是否会采取符合基因利益的亲属关系？还是文化定义了亲属关系，导致基因基础变得模糊？这项研究将探索亲属关系的文化和基因领域之间的一致性，并在这样做时，阐明生物学和文化之间更广泛的关系。这是一项合作项目，结合了人类种群遗传学家和人类学家的专业知识。这项跨学科的研究将把最先进的分子技术引入人种学领域的研究，并提供丰富的人种学数据集，允许使用基因序列数据提出新的问题。这项研究的重点是西非马里的传统小米种植民族多贡人。多贡人是这项研究的理想选择，因为他们采用了各种各样的文化习俗，似乎是出于繁殖动机。这项研究将检验这样一个假设，即这些文化规则服务于那些执行这些规则的人的基因利益，并导致文化与生物学的紧密映射。这项研究还将测试关于人类合作基础的其他假设。这一目标意义重大，因为它将是首次利用DNA测序的遗传关系数据分析人类群体中的助人行为。这项研究更广泛的影响包括对美国和马里学生在遗传技术和定量实地工作方法方面的培训。住院医生将在发展中国家获得经验，并与非洲农村卫生机构分享他们的专业知识。研究结果将在科学期刊、遗传数据库和一本专门的专著上发表。

Kinship is a universal feature of human social life and, in the United States, genealogy is the second most popular hobby. Yet despite this fascination with kinship, a fundamental mystery has been neglected: Do people adopt kinship practices that serve the interests of their genes? Or does culture define kinship practices causing genetic underpinnings to become obscured? This study will explore the congruence between the cultural and genetic spheres of kinship and, in so doing, shed light on the broader relationship between biology and culture. It is a collaborative venture that combines the expertise of a human population geneticist with that of an anthropologist. This interdisciplinary research will introduce state of the art molecular technology to ethnographic field studies and provide a rich ethnographic data set to permit new questions to be asked using genetic sequence data. The study focuses on the Dogon, a traditional millet farming people of Mali, West Africa. The Dogon are ideal for this research because they employ a variety of cultural practices that appear to be reproductively motivated. This research will test the hypothesis that these cultural rules serve the genetic interests of those who enforce them and that they lead to a close mapping of culture onto biology. The study will also test alternative hypotheses about the basis for human cooperation. This objective is significant because it will be one of the first analyses of helping behavior in a human population that uses data on genetic relatedness from DNA sequencing. The broader impacts of the study include the training of American and Malian students in genetic techniques and quantitative fieldwork methods. Medical residents will gain experience in a developing country and share their expertise with a rural African health facility. The results will be disseminated in scientific journals, genetic databases, and a specialized monograph.