Do We Really Pick Our Friends Based On Genetic
Similarities?
A new study debunks the idea that friendships are
influenced by shared genes. If asked how you’ve chosen the people you count as
close friends, you might give one of several logical answers: that they’re
people with whom you share interests or personality traits, or that you enjoy
their company, or even that you became friends out of pure happenstance.
In recent years, though, as DNA sequencing has gotten
increasingly quicker, cheaper and easier, some researchers have looked at individuals’
genes and come to a surprising finding—that people who are friends are
disproportionately likely to share certain similarities in their genetic
makeup.
Some scientists have even hypothesized that this is the
result of an evolutionary advantageous strategy, similar to the theory of
inclusive fitness for kin: As a prehistoric human, if you tended to stick
together and support others with whom you share genes, helping them survive led
to the survival of your own genes, even if you personally didn’t make it to
pass your genes on to your offspring. Under that theory, we’re able to
recognize our non-family genetic brethren and, consciously or not, become
friends with them based on that similarity.
A group of social scientists led by Jason Boardman of the
University of Colorado, however, was skeptical. They doubted whether genetic
similarity was really driving the way we pick our friends—and had a suspicion
that, instead, other social factors drove us to become friends with people we
happen to share genes with. In order to test their hypothesis, they dove deep
into data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which
gathers a wide range of data on thousands of middle- and high-school students
across the country, on everything from risk-taking behavior to particular genetic alleles to relationships
with others.
Their findings, presented in an article published
yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, strongly
rebut the idea that genes determine friends and instead present an alternate
idea: that social mechanisms simply put us into situations where we’re exposed
to people we share genes with, and that we become friends with them based on
this context. Ultimately, they write, “our work highlights the fundamental role
played by broad social structures in the extent to which genetic factors
explain complex behaviors, such as friendships.” In other words, genes alone
aren’t sufficient to explain a complicated decision-making process like
choosing friends.
The researchers came to this conclusion by using survey
data to compare schools that varied in how many friends shared genetic
similarities. Confirming previous work, they did find that, as a whole, a pair
of students that listed each other as close friends tended to share certain
alleles for particular genes.
However, they also found that students in schools with
the greatest levels of social stratification and racial segregation were most
likely to form genetically-similar friendships. As it turns out, students from
the same ethnic background are much more likely to share these particular
genetic alleles to begin with. This also holds true for social class, because
ethnic background strongly correlates with economic standing in the schools
included in the data set.
For the researchers, this paints a very different picture
of how genes affect friendships than previously understood. Instead of students
discerning the genes of others and forming friendships based on the DNA they
shared, it’s much more likely that—in most American schools at least—they’re
simply given the most exposure to other students like them starting at an early
age. Instead of a sunny lesson about evolutionary altruism, they say, we’ve
merely found an indirect reminder of the continuing degree of de facto
segregation in schools.
[image source: flicker.com/pavan]
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