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Humans Choose Friends With Similar DNA
KentuckyFC writes "The study of social networks has long shown that people tend to pick friends who are similar to them — birds of a feather stick together (PDF). Now a study of the genomes of almost 2000 Americans has found that those who are friends also share remarkable genetic similarities. 'Pairs of friends are, on average, as genetically similar to one another as fourth cousins,' the study concludes. By contrast, strangers share few genetic similarities. The result seems to confirm a 30-year-old theory that a person's genes causes them to seek out circumstances that are compatible with their phenotype. If that's the case, then people with similar genes should end up in similar environments and so be more likely to become friends."
In a number of different memoirs from actors in the original Planet of the Apes, it was noted that people playing different types of apes always sat with each other at lunch. It was a bizarre granfalloon - baboons with baboons and orangs with orangs for no other reason than that they looked the same. And these were people that knew each other before the film.
People have a natural inclination to like people that look more like them whether it makes sense in modern society or not.
Groucho wasn't being self deprecating, he was mocking the anti-semitism of the time and how once he became famous, all these organizations that normally would never have considered letting someone Jewish join suddenly wanted him to become a member.