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What does this say about racism? Segregation?
This is interesting as I've typically made friends along lines of interest. I guess my next question would be are genetically similar people more likely to have similar interests. edit: corrected grammer
If that is the case, it would lead to the politically uncomfortable question of different genders or ethnic groups being more likely to have particular interests.
> The tendency for friends to have similar genomes might result from people befriending those of similar ancestry, but the duo are confident that isn't the case. Not only did they control for the effect of population structure and ancestry, but the Framingham data is relatively homogeneous in terms of ethnicity, consisting largely of people of European descent. How did they control it? Even amongst Europeans, I imagi…
I might counter-hypothesize that the 1% they found is just the amount of variance in ethnic group that wasn't controlled for perfectly.
This is interesting as I've typically made friends along lines of interest. I guess my next question would be are genetically similar people more likely to have similar interests. edit: corrected grammer
> I guess my next question would be are genetically people that have genetic similarities more likely to have similar interests. If that is the case, it would lead to the politically uncomfortable question of different genders or ethnic groups being more likely to have particular interests.
What does this say about racism? Segregation?
I can imagine that whether or not cilantro tastes like soap, whether or not you love the smell of books, similar allergies, and if you can stand to eat spicy foods goes a long way toward the likelihood of friendship. There are bound to be social factors, geographic factors, and other factors. This study is just pointing out that friends are likely to be more similar in certain ways than people who aren't friends. Don't jump to too many conclusions on just the summary article about the study.
I figured friends were more driven by proximity first then shared experiences second.
The population used in this study was the population in the Framingham Heart Study, presumably because they had the DNA and friendship graph already lying around. But starting from a small town's population, you've got pre-existing social networks which will both influence the future genetics and the future social networks of the town. You could get a lot of confounding correlations like "you're more likely to be friends with someone you live nearby to and you're more likely to live nearby to people you are related to".
If you repeated this with college students you'd have friendships formed between people with few if any previous connections.
What does this say about racism? Segregation?
The article specifically mentions olfactory similarities being pro-friend and immune differences being pro-friend. It didn't mention ethnic markers like melanin, face shape, nose width, ear size, or relative toe length at all. In fact, it said they attempted to control for racial and ethnic differences. How well that was accomplished wasn't really made clear in the article. I can imagine that whether or not cilantro…