27 research outputs found
Do mothers also âmanipulateâ grandparental care?
Paternity uncertainty has proven to be a robust ultimate hypothesis for predicting the higher investment in grandchildren observed among maternal grandparents compared to that of the paternal grandparents. Yet the proximate mechanisms for generating such preferred biases in grandparental investment remain unclear. Here we address two different questions for better understanding the proximate mechanisms leading to the observed bias in grandparental investments: (i) is there a larger emphasis on resemblance descriptions (between grandchildren and grandparent) among daughters than among sons, and (ii) do mothers really believe that their offspring more resemble their parents, that is, the childrenâs grandparents, than fathers do? From questioning grandparents, we find that daughters more often and more intensely than sons express opinions about grandchildâgrandparent resemblance. Moreover, daughters also seem to believe that their children more resemble their grandmother than sons do. The latter is, however, not the case for beliefs about childrenâs resemblance to grandfathers. In sum, our results suggest that even in a population of Norwegians, strongly influenced by ideas concerning gender equality, there exist a sexual bias among parents in opinions and descriptions about grandchildâgrandparent resemblance. This resemblance bias, which echoes that of mothers biasing resemblance descriptions of newborns to putative fathers, does not seem to represent a conscious manipulation. Yet it could be instrumental for influencing grandparental investments. We believe that a âmanipulative mother hypothesisâ might parsimoniously account for many of the results relating to biased alloparenting hitherto not entirely explained by âthe paternity uncertainty hypothesis.
Reply to J.J. Muñoz-Perez et al. Comments on âConfirmation of beach accretion by grain-size trend analysis: Camposoto beach, CĂĄdiz, SWSpainâ by E. Poizot et al. (2013) Geo-Marine Letters 33(4)
In a novel finding for a beach environment, Poizot
et al. (2013) identified an FB+ trend (sediments becoming
finer, better sorted and more positively skewed upshore) on a
well-developed swash bar on the upper foreshore of the
Camposoto beach of CĂĄdiz in SW Spain. In their Discussion
of that paper, Muñoz-Perez et al. (2014) provide some
supporting arguments and also report grain-size, beach profile
and other data from nearby beaches which differ from those of
Poizot and colleagues for Camposoto beach, pointing out that
a trend observed on one beach may not apply to a
neighbouring beach. However, even though the absolute
values differ, the overall trends actually do show the same
general behaviour. In our Reply to their comments, we also
address some difficulties in comparing granulometric datasets
generated by different analytical techniques
Paternity Testing Commission of the International Society of Forensic Genetics:Recommendations on genetic investigations in paternity cases
The International Society for Forensic Genetics (ISFG) has established a Paternity Testing Commission (PTC) with the purpose of formulating international recommendations concerning genetic investigations in paternity testing. The PTC recommends that paternity testing be performed in accordance with the ISO 17025 standards. The ISO 17025 standards are general standards for testing laboratories and the PTC offers explanations and recommendations concerning selected areas of special importance to paternity testing
DNA Commission of the International Society of Forensic Genetics: recommendations on forensic analysis using Y- chromosome STRs
During the past few years, the DNA Commission of the International Society of Forensic Genetics has published a series of documents providing guidelines and recommendations concerning the application of DNA polymorphisms to the problems of human identification. This latest report addresses a relatively new area - namely, Y-chromosome polymorphisms, with particular emphasis on short tandem repeats (STRs). This report addresses nomenclature, use of allelic ladders, population genetics and reporting methods. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved