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You can choose your friends but not your family, so the old saying goes. But do we really choose them, or are we genetically pre-disposed to connect with the people in our friendship groups?

People who like to consider their close friends as family may not be too far wrong, according to a new study from the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University. The research project discovered that friends who do not appear to be biologically related often still resemble each other genetically.
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Do kids who grow up without dads have three strikes against them? It has long been assumed that an absent father and a single-parent household (with the parent usually being the mother) deprives children of the skills they need to be socially and academically successful. But that isn’t necessarily so. In a new study, researchers found that conjugal multiplicity, in which women have multiple partners, was in fact a strategic adaptation to the conditions of poverty that in fact provides developmental advantages for poor children in rural Jamaica.read more

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The oldest child in a family is usually the most successful. Even identical twins are not really identical. And for some reason, the marriages that produce the most children are unions between distant cousins.

New research shows that first-born children get about 3,000 more hours of quality time with their parents between ages 4 and 13 than the next sibling gets when they pass through the same age range, which is probably why older children tend to get more education, make more money and score higher on IQ tests. Economist Joseph Price says, “We’ve known for a long time that eldest children have better outcomes, and these findings on quality time provide one explanation why.”
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Families don?t like the way each other smells, according to researchers, who say this may be nature’s way of discouraging incest. Scientists at Wayne State University in Detroit tested family members to see if they could recognize one other by their smell. They studied 25 families with children between ages 6 and 15, and gave them T-shirts to sleep in and odorless soap to wash with. They were told to keep the shirts in plastic bags and were later asked to sniff two T-shirts, one worn by a family member and another worn by a stranger.
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