An experiment with mice was designed to test the relative efficiency of three selection methods that help to minimize the rate of inbreeding during selection. A common house mice (Mus musculus) population was selected for 17 generations to increase the weight gain between 21 and 42 days. The population was split at random into three lines A, B and C where three selection methods were applied: i...

We reasoned that mating animals by minimising the covariance between ancestral contributions (MCAC mating) will generate less inbreeding and at least as much genetic gain as minimum-coancestry mating in breeding schemes where the animals are truncation-selected. We tested this hypothesis by stochastic simulation and compared the mating criteria in hierarchical and factorial breeding schemes, wh...

Consider the problem of selection involved in choosing seeds from plants showing a certain dominant character, while no effort is made to influence the source of pollen. In the following discussion the fate of a single Mendelian character will be studied under such mating. The conclusion can be stated thus: The limiting population resulting from the type of mating in question i s all of one cl...

C. C. Li showed that Hardy-Weinberg proportions (HWP) can be maintained in a large population by nonrandom mating as well as random mating. In particular he gave the mating matrix for the symmetric case in the most general form possible. Thus Li showed that, once HWP are attained, the same proportions can be maintained by what he called pseudorandom mating. This article shows that, starting fro...

Simulations of the evolution of populations of diploid organisms showed that mate selection strategies which selected for “good genes” and strategies based on assortative mating, confer a much higher average fitness and higher evolutionary stability to populations than random mating. This advantage was more conspicuous the more genes per organism were simulated and the more genes were involved ...

Linkage disequilibrium is often measured by two statistics, D and r, which can be interpreted as the covariance and the correlation between loci and across gametes. When data consist of diploid genotypes, however, gametes cannot be identified. A variety of iterative statistical methods are used in such cases, all of which assume random mating. Previous work has shown that D and r can be express...