http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20464/

Usually when looking at the interactions between nodes in a social network, certain traits need to be analyzed to determine which nodes are connected to one another. The traits that have been assessed could include qualitative ones such as participation in a common activity or a quantitative one such as the number of times a Facebook message was sent. This article suggests a new phenotype with which people can assess the degree of relatedness or commonality – comparing one’s DNA sequence. The website 23andme, states the article, allows users to post their DNA sequence, and just as Facebook users can look at friends’ photos, 23andme users can look at friends’ genomic data.

The idea is analogous to social networking in many other ways. The website groups people into haplogroups, groupings based on genomic comparison and evolutionary branching. Thus the haplogroup serves as a new, unique way to unite people together. As Facebook users A and B can initiating friends by noticing that they have common friend C, or that they are in a common group D, now people can initiate social relationships based on belonging to a particular haplogroup. Although the idea seems interesting and potentially fun on a social networking level, it could also lead to the kind of thinking that leads to racism and genocide. After all, if one haplogroup starts to think it is superior to the other based on its genetic information, this could set the stage for negative interactions with other haplogroups. The idea is particularly interesting in a social networking context as people are using their genome, which could potentially represent everything about them – i.e. personality, health, risk of getting certain diseases, perhaps “evolutionary fitness” in some sense – to form social relationships. In my opinion, scientists should be wary of allowing people to use their genetic makeup to base any kind of social relationship.