It does sound fun. However, you may struggle somewhat to isolate the grandmother effect. Today’s culture and society tends to be much more dispersed than it was when this effect was prominent. No longer are we in smaller villages with the family close (wthin a days walk), but now we are in various cities and countries, often completely seperated from the grandmother.

Also, I couldn’t tell from your post how you are going to calculate your baseline. To obtain evidence that those children reared with the help of the grandmother had a greater chance at passing on their genes than those that did not, you would have to find a way to determine how many children did NOT pass on their genes since they did NOT have the assistance of their grandmother during their developmental years… No small challenge.

It’s quite possible you’ve already thought this through, and just did not mention it above. Either way, I’m be excited to read more, and wish you all of the best in your pursuit. Enjoy!

Oh, and don’t be daunted by background readings… What I like to do is read multiple papers at a time, along side textbooks,reviews and the internet. So, instead of reading papers, you study them, look up terms when you need to, etc. It winds up going slower, but you wind up gleaning a lot more information. By doing that sort of leg work in the beginning, it’s so much easier when you have to read more papers later on, and when your doing your own writing. Good luck!