As the saying goes “friends are the family you choose”,
could now have a deeper meaning to it due to a study that lead to a possible
scientific reasoning behind this statement.
After a study was performed based on data from the Framingham Heart
Study, it was found that friends had more gene variations in common than
strangers. Pairs of friends appeared to
share the same gene involved in a person’s sense of smell, the olfactory gene,
most commonly.
Researchers compared gene variations between nearly 2,000
people who were not biologically related.
According to social scientist, Nicholas Christakis of Yale University researchers
conducted the study to “provide a deep evolutionary account of the origins and
significance of friendships.”
It was found that
pairs of friends have had the same genetic relation as people did with their
fourth cousin, or a great-great grandfather, after analyzing about 1.5 million
marker of gene variations. This
information could be translated into about 1 percent of the human genome. Though this number may not seem very
significant, it is significant in the world of genetics. These results suggest that choosing friends
who share similar genes is a behavior that could have contributed to human
evolution.
This information is very fascinating because often times, we
always wonder why we associate ourselves with people we seem to have more in
common with, or why we get along with some people, and not others. This is also a different take on the concept
of evolution, and how this could influence it in the future. As more research is done to further study how
friends could share common DNA sequences, it will be interesting to see other
similarities found in genes, and other ways we could possibly be related to our
friends.
Original Article: http://www.livescience.com/46791-friends-share-genes.html
Additional: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/07/14/331354227/do-we-choose-our-friends-because-they-share-our-genes
I found this article awesome!!! I have always been drawn to people with similar characteristics as me. It is amazing that this genetic link as actually been made. Very interesting!
ReplyDeleteThis article is very interesting! It is amazing to think that who we associate ourselves with has to do with sharing similar genes with them. I cant wait to see what other similarities will be discovered with further research.
ReplyDeleteWow this is a very interesting article. I find it amazing that there could be a genetic link among friends.
ReplyDeleteThis article intimidates me. It seems that the affects of our genes seem to be increasingly found to control our lives more than we might think. Its strange to think that our genes can alter who we associate with.
ReplyDelete