Researchers Find Possible 'Popularity Gene'

[GrnMarvl14]

Source.

WASHINGTON — Advertisers would like you to believe the right jeans can make you the life of the party, but scientists say it may be the right genes instead.

Researchers at Harvard and the University of California, San Diego report that popularity seems to have an inherited component.

Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, along with Christopher Dawes and James Fowler of UC San Diego, studied 1,110 twins in a population of more than 90,000 adolescents.

They measured indications of popularity such as the number of times an individual was named as a friend. They also looked at whether an individual tended to be at the center or the edges of a social group.

There was more similarity between the social positions of identical twins than of fraternal twins, an indication that the measures of popularity had an inherited component, the researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While identical and fraternal twins both have the same parents, identical twins come from the same egg while fraternal twins are fertilized separately.

"One of the things that the study tells us is that social networks are likely to be a fundamental part of our genetic heritage," Fowler said in a statement. "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."

There may be an evolutionary explanation for this genetic influence and the tendency for some people to be at the center while others are at the edges of the group, the researchers said. If a deadly germ is spreading through a community, individuals at the edges are least likely to be exposed. However, to gain access to important information about a food source, being in the center of the group has a distinct benefit.

Seem to remember hearing something similar to this a while back...but I'm blanking on what it was.

 

[Zeta]

This is stupid, identical twins are more likely to get attention because they're IDENTICAL. It's not only novel to most people, it's a fetish for pretty much 99% of the population to sleep with two identical twins at once.

Also, if both of the twins both look ugly, then yeah - they'll have less friends. And if they both look great, they'll have tons of friends.

I mean, this study is studying all the wrong things.

 

[Lil Brother]

Mmm, yeah, that seems like a huge leap of logic. That method certainly seems like a roundabout, overly complex way of trying to prove the theory, at the very least. But hey, what the hell do I know?

While identical and fraternal twins both have the same parents, identical twins come from the same egg while fraternal twins are fertilized separately.

Oh, thank God they clarified that. I would have been totally lost had it not been for this one vital piece of information which is clearly not common knowledge.

 

[domesticshorthair]

I didn't understand the article that much. So, if you don't have this popularity gene, it's highly unlikely that you'll be popular?