Definition of assortative in English:
assortative
adjective əˈsɔːtətɪvəˈsôrdədiv
Denoting or involving the preferential mating of animals or marriage between people with similar characteristics.
Example sentencesExamples
- In positive assortative mating, individuals of similar phenotype mate together more frequently than expected by chance.
- The outcome of this is assortative mating with respect to mate quality.
- Condition-dependent preferences will emerge in both sexes as a result and presumably will combine to make mating even more strongly assortative.
- Women with brains were not always the hottest commodity on the marriage market, notes UCLA sociology professor Robert Mare, who has conducted extensive studies of educational assortative mating over time.
- Through their combined effect, the cycle of success together with assortative mating or sexual selection would have greatly accelerated the action of natural selection and the rate of human evolution.
- Fruit flies have served as a prime model system in research on the effect of mate choice and assortative mating on speciation.
- Despite the overall assortative pairing, the most striking pattern in this figure is that every hermit male was paired with a pure hermit female, whereas an equal number of pure hermit females pair with hybrid and Townsend's males.
- Finally, we found no evidence of assortative preference for size.
- Mating may thus be assortative as females mate selectively with males of the same vocal background, discouraging gene migration.
- There may be incomplete admixture between components of the population because of assortative mating, niche specialization, or, particularly in the case of humans, cultural differences.