Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

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This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

Monogamy. What makes one species pair off while members of a closely related species play the field?

The answer may lie in their genes. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin were interested in how complex characteristics arise during evolution.

We chose to investigate this question using monogamous mating systems because animals with monogamous mating systems are available in all of the different vertebrate clades.

Rebecca Young, a research associate and evolutionary biologist who led the study.

And we were able to find species that had independently evolved monogamy in each of these lineages.

Young's colleague Hans Hoffman, professor of integrative biology, adds,

So we decided early on that we didn't just want to study a particular group of animals like mice or fish,

for example, or a particular group of birds, and compare between monogamy and non-monogamy

there, but instead take a very broad look across vertebrates, across 450 million years of evolution

when these fish and birds and frogs and us shared the last

common ancestor. The researchers chose five pairs of species and looked to see if they could spot

a signature pattern of gene activity that was shared only by the animals that were monogamous.

And they discovered a set of 24 genes whose activity in the brain is strongly associated with monogamy,

including genes involved in neural development, learning and memory, and cognition.

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