Shortly after they were married my middle son and his wife
researched family trees and learned they share a common ancestor. His fourth
great grandfather is her fifth, which makes them distant cousins. A few years back
I discovered an app on facebook that promised to reveal distant relatives among
my circle of friends. I was surprised and delighted to find several of my
favorite people are also third or fourth cousins. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so
surprised, after all. According to a Yale/UC San Diego study, we tend to choose
as friends people who are genetically similar to ourselves. James Fowler, one
of the authors of the study claims, “We have more DNA in common with the people
we pick as friends than we do with strangers in the same population.” There’s
an old saying, “Your can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.”
How curious that the friends we choose may be family, too.
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