14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new scientific research reported on Monday, the number and type of friends each person has is an entirely gene-determined fact. Scientists say that it's gene expression that causes a person to be a social “butterfly,” or someone to live at the outskirts of groups. The same holds true for people who have over one or two hundred friends, as opposed to those who only have gathered four or five that don't even know each other. And while some argue that true friends are hard to come across, the experts behind the new study maintain that people with less “friendship genes” rarely get involved in friendship relationships, and tend to live alone most of the time.
“Some of the things we find are frankly bizarre. 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,” the leader of the new study, Nicholas Christakis, who is an expert working at the Harvard University in Massachusetts, explained for Reuters during a telephone interview.
“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,” colleague James Fowler from the University of California in San Diego added. The two worked together on previous studies, detailing how obesity, smoking and happiness spread very rapidly through social networks.
In order to come up with these conclusions, the two followed more than 1,000 identical and fraternal twins, with data collected from national surveys. Working with Christopher Dawes, a researcher at UCSD, they took into account the fact that identical twins shared all genes, whereas fraternal twins only had half of them in common. They chose to study twins because they were almost always parts of the same social networks, and the researchers wanted to learn the differences between social networks of identical twins and those of fraternal ones.
“We found there appears to be a genetic tendency to introduce your friends to each other,” Christakis revealed. This means that, in the case of identical twins, people in their social network were far more likely to meet each other than friends of fraternal twins. The researchers hypothesized that there were evolutionary reasons for this, such as the construction of a powerful support group, whose sole purpose was to help its members in time of need. The experts emphasized that this was most likely an adaptation to the harsh environment at the dawn of mankind.