i linked to this paper…
Friendship and Natural Selection
…in this past sunday’s linkfest, but, to be honest with you, i hadn’t actually read it. (yeah, i do that sometimes. ok, ok — a LOT of times!)
since then, a couple of people urged me to read the arXiv blogpost on it (thanks @DKshad0w and @SamoBurja!), which prompted me to read the orig. research paper and … wow! … mind. blown.
now, no, i’m NOT a geneticist — i don’t even play one on the innerwebs — so i’m not your gal for evaluating whether or not these guys — nicholas christakis and james fowler — have done their work right, but if they have, this is very cool stuff:
– “Pairs of friends are, on average, as genetically similar to one another as fourth cousins, which seems noteworthy since this estimate is net of mean ancestry and background relatedness.”
fourth cousins! note that these are (i believe) all white folks. the data are from the framingham heart study, but the researchers do say that they controlled both for relatives (i.e. that individuals might be “friends” with people who are, in fact, distant relatives) and ethnicity (eg. that italians might just be friends with other italians).
– “It is intriguing that genetic structure in human populations may result not only from the formation of reproductive unions, but also from the formation of friendship unions. This in turn has relevance for the idea of an evocative gene-environment correlation, proposed more than 30 years ago, which suggests that a person’s genes can lead one to seek out circumstances that are compatible with one’s genotype. Our results suggest that these circumstances could include not only the physical environment but also the *social* environment, and hence the genotypic constitution of one’s friends. As Tooby and Cosmides argue, ‘not only do individual humans have different reproductive values that can be estimated based on various cues they manifest, but they also have different association values.’ People may seek out particular, convivial social environments that affect their fitness.“
i’ve been saying for a while now that the family types/social structures in which individuals are located ought to be taken into consideration when thinking about the fitness of those individuals and how natural selection might be working on different individuals living and reproducing in different sorts of social structures (individuals living in nuclear family structures versus large clan structures, for instance). i’ve mostly been thinking about family structures, but christakis and fowler are talking about friendship structures — alliances with non-family members. cool!
– “The existence of excess genetic similarity between friends is also relevant to the growing area of indirect genetic effects, wherein the phenotypic traits of focal individuals are influenced by the genomes of their neighbors, in a kind of ‘network epistasis.’ In fact, our results support the idea that humans might be seen as metagenomic not just with respect to the microbes within them, but also with respect to the humans around them. It may be useful to view a person’s genetic landscape as a summation of the genes within the individual and within the people surrounding the individual, just as in certain other organisms.“
yeah. just muse on THAT for a while. (~_^) and then try this on for size…
– “[T]he human evolutionary environment is not limited to the physical environment (sunshine, altitude) or biological environment (predators, pathogens), but also includes the social environment, which may itself be an evolutionary force. Our finding that positively correlated genotypes are under positive selection suggests that the genes of other people might modify the fitness advantages of one’s own genes, thus affecting the speed and outcome of evolution.“
did you get that? the researchers found that, the SNPs that were most common between the friends (the homophilic SNPs), have, indeed, been under recent positive selection:
“To test the hypothesis that homophilic SNPs are generally under recent positive selection, we use the Composite of Multiple Signals (CMS) score. This score combines signals from several measures of positive selection to create a single value that indicates the likelihood a SNP has been increasing in frequency due to selection pressure over the last 30,000 years (see SI). In Fig.3, we show that, after correcting for correlated outcomes due to linkage disequilibrium and for varying precision in the GWAS estimates (see SI), the top 20% most homophilic SNPs have significantly higher CMS scores than the other 80% (+0.07, SE 0.02, p = 0.003)…. In contrast, Fig.3 also shows that CMS scores are not significantly higher for the most homophilic SNPs in the strangers GWAS (–0.00, SE 0.02, p = 0.86). This suggests that the whole-genome regression model we use does not generate false positives…. In sum, it appears that, overall, across the whole genome, the genotypes humans tend to share in common with their friends are more likely to be under recent natural selection than other genotypes.“
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with human biodiversity in mind, my question would be: do all peoples everywhere form an equal number of friendships with (technically) unrelated individuals? yes, i have an obsession with clannish peoples — but, seriously — do people who live in clans or tribes make as many “friends” as peoples who don’t? do they even have the opportunity? if not, what might this mean for natural selection in those populations?
(note: comments do not require an email. friends.)
hbd chick 