The less related the parents, the more chances the offspring were to be taller, have a better cognitive ability as well as a higher education attainment, according to a new study.
A new study of population across the globe state that the less alike two parents are genetically, the mentally sharper and taller their kids tend to be. According to the findings published in the Journal Nature, the humans evolved to favor height and quick thinking.
That doesn't sound surprising, experts said. However the work is "fascinating" in that it gathered genetic information on more than 350,000 people from across the globe and found consistent patterns, Dr. Martin Bialer, a medical geneticist said.
Dr. Martin Bialer was not involved in the research, Physicians News Digest noted.
Parents' genetic diversity was dependably associated with four traits in their kids (i.e. height, cognitive skills including the ability to learn, remember and problem-solve), educational attainment, and lung function. In each case, the more diverse two parents were the better.
Parents' genetic diversity did not matter much as far as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, blood weight or other factors that have a major impact on common, chronic health conditions are concerned.
Health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure as well as heart disease usually arise later in life. Moreover, human evolution is concerned with the ability to create healthy kids, and then survive for long enough to be able to raise them, Bialer noted.
The senior researcher on the study, Jim Wilson agreed.
"These risk factors mostly have their effect post-reproductively, and so would not be subject to so much natural selection."
Wilson is a senior lecturer in population and disease genetics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Kids who were born from genetically similar parents have less than 10 months of formal education and 1.2 cm shorter as compared to those who were born with genetically diverse parents. In addition, lung functions of different groups are also notably different, according to records on Empire State Tribune.
The first author Dr. Peter Joshi explained, "There has been speculation ever since Charles Darwin that genetic diversity would be beneficial in terms of evolutionary fitness. We think genetic diversity decreases the chances of inheriting defecting copies of the same gene from both father and mother."
It's no secret; children born to closely related parents are at increased risk of rare genetic disorders. Wilson noted that Charles Darwin was among the first to recognize that inbreeding reduces "evolutionary fitness."
Darwin even married his first cousin and wondered what effects that could have on his own children, Wilson said.
This new research "shows the power of large-scale genomic studies to answer fundamental questions about evolution - indeed, questions that Darwin himself pondered," Wilson said.
The research however does not indicate how far an individual needs to travel to dip into a completely different gene pool.
