Surrounded by friends? It's all in your genes

[belano4ka]

Are you a social butterfly, or do you prefer being at the edge of a group of friends? Either way, your genes and evolution may play a major role, U.S. researchers reported on Monday. While it may come as no surprise that genes may help explain why some people have many friends and others have few, the researchers said, their findings go just a little farther than that.
"Some of the things we find are frankly bizarre," said Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University in Massachusetts, who helped conduct the study.
"We find that how interconnected your friends are depends on your genes. Some people have four friends who know each other and some people have four friends who don't know each other. Whether Dick and Harry know each other depends on Tom's genes," Christakis said in a telephone interview.


For this study, they and Christopher Dawes of UCSD used national data that compared more than 1,000 identical and fraternal twins. Because twins share an environment, these studies are good for showing the impact that genes have on various things, because identical twins share all their genes while fraternal twine share just half.
"We found there appears to be a genetic tendency to introduce your friends to each other," Christakis said.
There could be good, evolutionary reasons for this. People in the middle of a social network could be privy to useful gossip, such as the location of food or good investment choices.
But they would also be at risk of catching germs from all sides -- in which case the advantage would lie in more cautious social behavior, they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It may be that natural selection is acting on not just things like whether or not we can resist the common cold, but also who it is that we are going to come into contact with," Fowler said in a statement.

[Shadow-off]

In part one part I agree with their findings, but I think they took on more study than they should have. There are also parts of this I would have to contest.

Genetically I agree inheritance may in fact determine an introverted or extroverted person. I believe that more of the population is extroverted. I also believe that there are higher incidences of extroverted people. This does not make introverted abnormal as many people exhibit both behavioral traits.

To keep this short; I don't believe that Tom's friends knowing each other doesn't have anything to do with genetic inheritance. I think that Tom's social environment and experiences, both good and bad, play a large role in his decision to introduce friends to each other or not. That has a lot to do with what Tom may have to gain or lose from introducing friends or not. An example: Tom knows four hot girls. He may not choose to introduce them to each other. ( No Loss but with reduced risk ). Or he may been happily married and want to introduce all of them to each other. ( NO Loss potential gain but with potential risk). I think am confident in believing it has to do with loss or gain in some way shape or form. This could be expanded into an entire topic of variations of the example; but I'll stop.

What is very interesting to me is this doctor gives me the impression that he has forgotten
that in every Social Psychology text ever written it clearly states that Affiliation is a human instinct and behavioral trait. His theory that " Choice to introduce is determined genetically " I think should be expanded to say " Choice to introduce is determined genetically in regard to individuals expressing the tendency more or less to introduce or not." Again that has to do with being an extrovert, introvert or mix of the two.
Is it beneficial to introduce friends ? If your life is normal yes if not no.

He also speaks of Contracting colds. We do not get colds from cold weather or not keeping warm. Rather we contract the majority of our colds from an environment where people assemble together more frequently. In the Winter at a school in a classroom with the windows shut to keep out the cold. Airborne viruses are basically trapped in this unventilated environment and have a greater vector of finding a host. It can be any place people group together under the same environmental conditions.

So can I say extroverts get colds more than introverts ? :becky: