Pretty sure my Thai best friend is more dissimilar to me than a fourth cousin.
unless you are thai yourself? are we supposed to presume that everyone is not-thai on this site?
Fair enough. I'm not even Asian.
Friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins
141–143 of 143 posts
Re: Friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are hitting the borders where logic and common usage meet. I am actually surprised that descriptive grammar holds up so well to logic. (There's no a priori reason why descriptive grammar, that describes common usage of language, actually is as mostly compressible to simple rules as it is.)
If there's a clearer and more specific way to speak about something, we should try to use it.
Design of language is a constant trade-off, between ease of remembering, compression (ie giving shorter ways to express more common concepts), fault-tolerance, desire of the speaker to look clever, fashion, ...
And all of us work on the evolution of language every day.
Re: Friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, which means the extensibility of these claims is exactly as good as those corrections, which can't possibly hope to model the missing information (the actual genetic distribution of friends).
Given that the US is a lot more racially heterogenous than the majority of the world (where the average person would have friends of a closer genetic makeup), I would bet that if anything these results are skewed the other way.
The problem is all they're measuring is the genetics of this locality, or any locality. You acquire your friends mostly through geographical proximity; in most places, the people nearest you are going to have a certain level of relatedness.
But this has less to do with friendship and more to do with geography; they might have achieved a similar result by comparing people to their neighbors.