BREEDING TACTICS, SOCIAL-STRUCTURE AND GENETIC-VARIATION IN MAMMALS -PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS

Breeding tactics and social structure are among the primary determinan ts of the level and distribution of genetic variation in a population, giving rise to genetic structure. However the effects of such behavio rs are neither intuitively obvious nor predictive. Interpretations of genetic interactions are hampered by a lack of suitable underlying mod els and the resulting weak empirical data base means that we are prese ntly unable to answer fundamental questions such as whether the social structure exhibited by a species has any necessary or consistent rela tionship with the extent of genetic population structure in the specie s. In this review I present a brief overview of recent theoretical mod els, and summarise results of the two most common empirical approaches ; namely, genetic comparison of identified social groups, and studies of arbitrarily selected samples. Some recommendations are made with re spect to future empirical investigations. Increased sophistication in classifying social complexity will be necessary to elucidate the effec ts of social structure and breeding tactics on partitioning of genetic variation, and to determine the true correlation between social level and genetic structure.