{"id":14209,"date":"2012-09-18T09:22:09","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T16:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2012\/09\/18\/assortative.html"},"modified":"2012-09-18T09:22:09","modified_gmt":"2012-09-18T16:22:09","slug":"assortative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2012\/09\/18\/assortative\/","title":{"rendered":"assortative"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A couple weeks ago, I came across the phrase assortative mating<\/i> in an article about autism<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Judith Warner explores a provocative theory about why rates of autism, particularly the mild form known as Asperger's, are on the rise: because people who have certain “autistic” traits are increasingly meeting and marrying each other and having offspring who are more likely to be on the spectrum.<\/p>\n

The theory of “assortative mating” was first put forth by neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen, a leading autism researcher[. . . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I hadn't seen the word “assortative” before, but it didn't occur to me to post about it here until a week or so later, when I came across it again in various articles about research on social networks in mythology<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The three myths were shown to be similar to real-life networks as they had similar degree distributions, were assortative and vulnerable to targeted attack. Assortativity is the tendency of a character of a certain degree to interact with a character of similar popularity; being vulnerable to targeted attack means that if you remove one of the most popular characters, it leads to a breakdown of the whole network—neither of these appears to happen in fiction.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Wikipedia has more general info on assortative mixing<\/a> in the network-theory context, also known as assortativity, or (when referring specifically to social networks) as homophily<\/i>.<\/p>\n

According to MW11, the word “assortative” in the mating context (“being nonrandom mating based on like or unlike characteristics”) dates back to 1897; they don't list the network-theory meaning per se, but I can see how the one could have derived from the other.<\/p>\n

(Btw, thanks to Google Web History search<\/a> for letting me find the first article quickly and easily when I went looking for it after encountering the term a second time.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple weeks ago, I came across the phrase assortative mating in an article about autism: Judith Warner explores a provocative theory about why rates of autism, particularly the mild…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-to-me-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}