Social networking is in your genes

Ever wonder what makes that cool guy so cool or that weird guy so weird? Thanks to science we can now tell you that its in their genes. A recent publication in PNAS describes a twin study where they looked at identical sets of twins and fraternal sets of twins and compared their "social networks". Twin studies are always infallible right? Right? Essentially they looked at how many friends they had and the interconnectivity of those friends. They also examined the individual's place or position within that social network. Maybe not surprisingly there appeared to be more of a correlation with the identical twins leading the authors to conclude that "popularity is influenced by our genes, meaning some people are natural-born party animals, while others are more likely to lurk on the margins at social gatherings." Science! Always shifting blame away from our independent selves. Yet another trait that we can chalk up to some sort of determinism that we have less control over than we had thought. But wait, shouldn't evolution weed out these "loser" genes? Apparently not, the authors hypothesize "[...] there were times in human development when it was more important to be at the centre of a group, for instance when food was scarce, and times when it was better to be on the fringes of a society, such as when disease was rampant." See, there is room for us all. Hope all you popular, well fed suckers enjoy all the disease you are certainly subject to get. So sorry to those of us that perhaps weren't fortunate enough to have attractive genes. Times were that you could make up for that misfortune by having a dynamite personality and being the life of the party, but apparently thats also in your genes. Tough break. Perhaps one day science will unlock the "Fonzie" gene for all of us nerds. I wonder if this also applies to pseudo-online friendships or even imaginary ones for that matter? Maybe some of us are just born facebookers and some of us are born to scorn the facebookers. Anyway next time you are at a party don't look down on the social misfits, loners, spazzes, geeks, lingerers, awkward or nervous fellows, or that weird bearded guy. Its not my, er, I mean, their fault.