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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."
How dare you insult my friends by comparing them to me!
... white people are racist
how dare you say white people are racist!
No kidding. I'm thinking that the majority of people live, breed and die within a few hundred miles of where they were born and this goes on generation after generation. One would expect a certain homogeneity in the range of genes within that population.
Was there a control for geographically similar area? If you live in certain areas like Appalachia, everyone you know is probably a fourth cousin. So of course your friends would be related to you.
This is why I don't have friends - I'm not human.
Don't trust any concentration of power.
Whatever the cause, the discovery that our friends are genetically similar to us has significant implications. “The subtle process of genetic sorting in human social relationships might have an important effect on a number of other biological and social processes,” say Christakis and Fowler.
For example, germs, viruses and even information may spread more (or less) easily amongst groups that share a particular genetic background.
So we evolved a tendency to monoculture, making us more vulnerable to disease? That would seem ... counterintuitive.
I find this study to be extremely flawed, not to say elitist / racist.
Yes, rednecks who listen to country music and drink cheap beer and whisky like to have friends who are also rednecks who listen to country music and drink cheap beer and whisky.
If the study had been conducted with 2000 subjects from culturally diverse places, like NY or Tokyo, I'm sure the results would've been a lot diferent.
I was going to post AC, but fuck it, I got karma to burn...
Except they specifically say you have more in common than with a randomly selected stranger, so you're "obvious" point is completely contravened by the article.
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ4B7G8Rw3Q
yeah, people like to live in a comfort zone — but i've found that some of the best friends come from right out of that comfort zone..
2cents
jp
A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares to cut the rope and be free.
(Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek)
This is why I don't have friends - I'm not human.
What are you doing out?!? Get back in your cage!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
After all, many friends fuck their friends' wives, so after a couple of generations, they are all a happy family.
No kidding. I'm thinking that the majority of people live, breed and die within a few hundred miles of where they were born and this goes on generation after generation. One would expect a certain homogeneity in the range of genes within that population.
I live 2500+ miles from where I was born and some of my best enemies are humans.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If there are only six degrees of separation between you and just about everybody on earth, the classification "fourth cousin" probably covers a large part of the earth's population!
FTFA:
But the FA goes on about the many many many questions raised.
This is one of those studies where our grandkids will have a better idea of what's going on.
I once heard on a TED talk that one should ignore all research on the brain in one's lifetime because it'll be most likely wrong.
I think genetics should fall into that category.
... such as birthplace and race?
Race alone would account for a huge genetic difference, and people tend to be friends with people of their own race for all sorts of reasons that can be easily explained through psychology and sociology. You're also more likely to be at least distantly related to people who live in the same area as you do.
Slashdot just ran a story on universal genome sequencing at birth. How long before your prom date is set up before you're home from the maternity ward.
yeah, we prefer the term American Crackers!
I'm reminded of the Better Off Ted episode Get Happy
Linda suggests that Veridian let its employees have decorations in their company. Veronica agrees, but the company selects the decorations and assigns them to the employees. Linda discovers that she's suddenly a cat person, while other employees have cars, Green Bay Packers, or space decorations.
"Veridian Dynamics. Teamwork. It keeps our employees gruntled."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
... white people are racist
how dare you say white people are racist!
Indeed! This is quite possibly, without exaggeration, the single most cruel and inhumane thing you can do to another person. Accusing another person of racism is so low that, I daresay, it ought to be considered a hate crime! I know I certainly won't stand for being accused of racism. I am a white human being with dignity, and I deserve better than that!
Do my asian friends not exist? Or am i not human? Or are asians and white people far more closely related on a genetic level than i've previously been led to believe?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I have only a few close friends. They're mixed races and ethnicity, so I'm obviously not going by phenotype. I think a lot of it is the demographics of the group more so than DNA.
Nothing to see here, move along.
I'm sure that a few will claim "no, you are just anti-science" or some such but lets check a simple fact. 2000 genes were used in this study. What percentage of the human genome is this? Not only would this mean that "correlation == causation", but that correlation of 8.024e-6 (yes, that is a very small number) is the "normal".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Something that counters the unproven merits of diversity?! No! Actually, this study would probably be valuable in determining why levels of trust are higher in homogenous societies - Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published a book that detailed this. That is, if this study isn't de-funded for politically incorrect results.
They did study a relatively cosy community, which was predominantly white. They removed as many families and evidence of distantly-related friends as they could using the Manichaikul et al. 2010 kinship metric, which has been cited 34 times (a fairly good number of hits for a two-year interval.)
The upshot of this study, in my opinion, is that the things that make people compatible friends happen to be reflected (to a degree) in certain markers in the genome. It doesn't necessarily indicate anything about race or relatedness, and you can probably predict that two people of radically different ethnicities may like each other as friends because of similarity simply due to the subset of markers that are important. It's a bit misleading of the authors to imply that this is somehow a pan-genome phenomenon when obviously there are plenty of things in the genome that could change without any detectable impact.
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I think I've heard that song before.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Can I marry her or not? PS: Does the article talk about friends of opposite sex?
I've lived around the world and have a variety of friends.
Well neat. You alone must be a representative sample set of humanity that dwarfs this mere 1932 person sample group for statistical relevance. Thank goodness you know more about statistics than people doing a population study!
I'm assuming these 2000 individuals for the study were in environments that just happened to have similar genes around them.
Actually, if you read the study (OMG! I must be new here!), then you'll see that they address this point:
"There are (at least) four possible reasons that friends may exhibit homophily in their genotypes. First, correlation in genotypes may be a trivial by-product of the tendency of people to make friends with geographically proximate or ethnoracially similar individuals who also tend to share the same ancestry. Thus, it is important to use strict controls for population stratification in tests of genetic correlation (below, we rely on the widely used principal components method to control for ancestry). [...] Third, people may actively choose particular environments, and, in those environments, they may be more likely to encounter people with similar phenotypes influenced by specific genotypes. If people then choose friends from within these environments (even at random), it would tend to generate correlated genotypes."
[...]
"To eliminate the possibility that the results are influenced by people tending to make friends with distant relatives, we use only the 907 friend pairs where kinship â 0 (recall that kinship can be less than zero when unrelated individuals tend to have negatively correlated genotypes)." (ed: They do the same with 907 stranger pairs.)
In the end, they find that people prefer friends that share genes for the same sense of smell and the same linoleic acid metabolism. We also strongly prefer people with different genotypes for immune system function. While there are hundreds more homophilic and heterophilic gene correlations, those were the three that were most over-represented between people. There are many other genes that friends share, but most of those vary from pair to pair of people and are either idiosyncratic preferences or possibly just coincidences. Those three genes are not.
It's pretty well known that human select their lovers in part by smell. It's interesting that we pick our friends too that way. The paper gives a few good theories for why that's true (based on older research) and also does so for the immune system. The linoleic acid thing seems to have baffled them a bit, though they make a stab at explaining it as possibly being related to food safety and keeping the community on the same page about what's good to eat.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm stuck with this bastard, for now. Just wait til I die, though!
Seriously. My friends would not be very closely identified with each other - or me. Nor would my wife or children!
I believe that "genetic purity" is a code word for incest.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It sounds to me like they shot an arrow into the side of a barn, then drew a bulls-eye around it, afterwards.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Amusingly I found that in Tokyo bars (in friendship terms) I had more in common with the locals than with caucasian Americans with whom I share the same European ancestry.
Nevertheless I am broadly drawn towards females who are similar to me. Those who look most dissimilar do not rate on my "wish to procreate with" list.
For the article's hypothesis to work, it's the second point that matters most. It means that the people who are born around you will be more like you and so are there for available friendship.
Not everyone is like me, and I'm glad of that. The more diverse the gene pool, the stronger the specie.
This study fails on two counts: Americans are statistical outliers; the conclusion is fallacious due to poor understanding of causality.
For those for whom this is TL;DR -- Americans are the worst possible population to base any form of human study on (let alone a flawed study) - ref Solomon Asch's conclusion. The short summary @ neuroecology ; the longer discussion @ pacific standard.
But try this little thought experiment: take some random Anyville, USA. How much have they travelled, how diverse is their population? How do populations move? How many are going to marry from the same town, as did their parents and grandparents, and how many are going to have children and grandchildren doing the same? And even if the population started out with diversity, you can lather, rinse, repeat the marriage/procreation suds and end up with a genetically similar pool of people - the town itself holds massively similar people on average.
Those of us who are more footloose and have moved around further are still statistical anomalies, insomuch as we often hail from outside of these wells of similarity. That is not to say that since we're so different, we cannot make friends with those whose families are long time residents, nor does it exclude the idea of having a multicultural community of extremely different people, DNA-wise.
But at its core, the fault of this study is basic: a textbook example of correlation-causation fallacy.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
No kidding. I'm thinking that the majority of people live, breed and die within a few hundred miles of where they were born and this goes on generation after generation. One would expect a certain homogeneity in the range of genes within that population.
So you're saying that *all* your neighbors are your friends?
Ezekiel 23:20
The suspicion that part of social compatibility can be explained through superficial genetic traits has been explored before. The bibliography on page 21 of the totally free and unpaywalled arxiv PDF has a few citations that seem pretty similar.
That being said, I'm not so sure about some of their conclusions; they make it sound like there are purely mechanistic reasons why we seek out the friends we do. Consider the following:
The implications of the finding regarding homophily on genes related to linoleic acid metabolism are unclear. Linoleic acid is a precursor for substances involved in a broad range of important bodily processes (ranging from adipocyte function to bone formation to the regulation of gene expression) (42), and the component genes in the pathway are related to the metabolism of cholesterol, steroids, and various ingested substances, though it is intriguing that linoleic acid compounds might be used by moths as pheromones (43). Possibly, this pathway is related to the restrained consumption or the specific metabolism of various foodstuffs, traits for which homophily may be advantageous and heterophily self-injurious.
Personally, I think this is patently absurd and that there is no way this could influence personality or human behaviour. It seems to me to be more likely that the linoleic acid genes either have some wildly obscure indirect effect on personality that we can detect, or that they're simply inherited by chance with something that does.
It would have been wonderful if people here actually bothered to RTFA so we could argue about whether or not biochemically-inclined sociologists are out to destroy civilization by being too narrow-minded. On the plus side, this is a biology paper that was submitted to Arxiv, which means that it probably is having trouble getting into a major journal (i.e. it's very possibly being regarded as crap by journal editors due to its weird conclusions.)
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All humans have "similar" DNA
Wow, what an amazingly useless statement. Hey, scientists! SlithyMagister has declared that there is no point in describing genomics at a more fine-grained level than the species level. Field's closed -- everyone out!
Of course, the issue is the matter of degree of similarity. They found that friends were more similar than strangers, to the point that they were as similar as fourth cousins. That would be fascinating on its own, but they also found that friends were specifically more similar in two ways -- sense of smell and linoleic acid metabolism -- and specifically different in immune system function.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
What country isn't "segregated"? From Sweden to Singapore, ethnic groups have created their own communities. Gated neighborhoods aren't an American-only thing, either. You'll have to explain your reasoning further.
So what they're saying is that my DNA is particularly unique?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This doesn't really work in today's world, though. Sure, in suburbs and villages, that probably has something to do with it. Cities, though? A city hash millions of people living in it, many of them not even originating from that city at all. Walk a hundred meters and you'll probably stumble on people from 10 different countries at the very least. I have serious doubts that you, by happenstance, always pick people who grew near your own place of birth.
Absolute bullshit.
Highly segregated as compared to where? Give some examples of less-segregated places. Hell, Europe is the home of the Quarter - Jewish quarter, Muslim Quarter, Turkish Quarter, Dutch Quarter, etc. ~That~ is fucking segregation.
If anything, since Americans (with some exceptions) move around their country far more than (in my experience) other people move around their countries, the US is one of the better places to make a study like this. I dont live in the region my family is from...my parents didnt live in the region their parents did, etc.
You'd be hard pressed to find many Americans who dont have a few different ethnicities in their backgrounds - I'm Irish, Dutch, Portuguese, American Indian and German. Pretty average, for an American.
Does that mean I have canine DNA?
Now you will have to excuse me - I have some territory to mark
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
A paper which suggests that fugly people usually date fugly people. lol
Personally, I think this is patently absurd and that there is no way this could influence personality or human behaviour. It seems to me to be more likely that the linoleic acid genes either have some wildly obscure indirect effect on personality that we can detect, or that they're simply inherited by chance with something that does.
I agree, and this paper to me continues a trend of portraying humans as nothing more than organic machines. Emotions and morality are often portrayed by the same publishers as malfunctions in the organic machine which must be mended by science (I did not detect that in TFA, just pointing out that it is a regular occurrence).
It should be obvious that we are not simply machines. Appeals to intellect are used to convince people that rational thought is incorrect.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
My best friend's a sponge - we share 70% of the same genes.
If this behavioural trait is true, it may explain the "friend zoning" that women do in an evolutionary way. The best of friends (and the closest in genetics) rarely get laid because it would be a from of inbreeding. If organisms have a way to detect and closely associate with genetically similar individuals, it wouldn't be a stretch that mating strategies would evolve to seek individuals from outside this close group.
And then again, there's the women who like to make their rounds with entire circles of friends. I don't think any male has yet to comprehend that mating strategy.
That awesome Booo-Tay? All the sisters got back!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That doesn't make the findings impossible. The genetic variation is known or could be estimated given the demographics of a person's locale, and you could compare the profile of expected (if friend making was completely random) to actual pretty easily. If they don't match up, then there's some selection going on.
For example, if you're white and live in the bronx, and significantly less than half of your local friends are hispanic, then obviously race factors into who you make friends with in some way. You could do the same thing with genetic markers.
I wouldn't go so far as to say we're not machines at all, just that we're not simple machines; ultimately, everything must have a comprehensible mechanism, or evolution cannot function. Possibly that's what you meant, but I just want to underscore that my concern is that there's a profound amount of functional reduction going on because of a shortsighted, overly-analytical mindset: the authors are looking at a single brick with a bit of mortar on it and assuming the brick belongs to a barbecue pit, when we know there's a skyscraper sitting right in front of them. This is not only bad psychology but bad behaviourism—even B. F. Skinner's radical reductions of human activities came with the caveat that he was too humble to speculate on the underlying reasons for the causal links he observed.
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I don't agree that we are simply machines. Humans have incredible capacity for learning and emotion. Our psychological behavior has very little to do with the mechanics, and everything to do with what we learn and see in society as well as our social standing. We can learn that learning is fun, or we can learn that learning is horrible. We can learn courtesy, or learn to be barbaric. We can learn that lies are good, or learn that lies are bad (and this is complex, because we learn loads of grey area in that one).
To claim that we like people only because a mechanic is denying what makes us human.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
But there are mechanisms for learning; mechanisms we know must exist and, to some extent, even understand. The subtleties in them form the foundation of who we are when we are conceived, and interplay with our experiences as life continues. They are the tie-breakers that prevent us from being completely at the mercy of our situations, and what ties us to our parents even if we have not met them.
What these people do is claim there is nothing more, and it is obvious they have no knowledge of cognitive science (or possibly other people). That is self-evidently wrong. But there's nothing inhuman about being a machine if that machine can learn, grow, and discover the universe. Would you deny personhood to an artificial intelligence with the same potential?
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I believe we agree much more than I initially suspected. My point being that while our physical bodies are combined natural organisms, what makes us "human" is not our physical bodies. "Part != Whole" and all that. I am pretty sure that you are saying something very similar.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Absolutely; I'm saying that although the non-physical component of our humanity must obey the laws of the universe (i.e. that there's no soul), that's no excuse for assuming we're dumb, instinctual creatures; the "linoleic acid pheromone romance" hypothesis utterly conflicts with the rest of what we know about how the mind and brain works. It is not wise to shave with Occam's razor without illumination!
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So that's why I don't have any friends...
- I stole your sig.
Have gnu, will travel.
We don't need a mechanism, per se - not on a macro level, that leads to deterministic outcomes. We simply need a process...
Viewing evolution as having a mechanism is imposing a narrative view on the occurrence, after the fact - much like reaching 60, and looking back at the "story" of your life. It is our insistence in structuring our perception around narrative - this leads to foolish notions. Such as the "idea" which assumes thought emerges from the correct arrangement of fats and proteins.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If there were simply a mechanism for learning, we would be able to determine algorithmically how to operate that mechanism withing defined parameters, and control for variables, to get predictable results with near-uniform outcome.
Please excuse my French, but "No fucking way."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
We are as certain of the physical laws of the universe as our sensory perception and intellectual tools for extrapolation - this includes maths - can relay perception.
I suspect the quaintness of Flatland renders the parable juvenile, for those who come to this line of inquiry after Fermi, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohrs, Godel and Feynman. Nonetheless, the case that we cannot conceive of existence, beyond that of our electromagnetic chauvinism, is telling.
Godel was convinced that God must exist, and that mathematically, set logic failed - were no such as God is.
It is convenient to dismiss Godel as having gone mad. This is the typical opinion held by those with minds inferior to that of Einstein. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
And why do strangers become friends? Sometimes it's from finding they have common interests. If they find out they're from the same region of the country they can become friends over that, even if they're currently living a thousand miles away from home. Friends form also from people at the same college or university and those are regional as well, even big name colleges tend to have a majority of students coming from the same state or region (ie, Harvard undoubtedly has far more students from New England than from California, whereas the reverse is true at Stanford). Or you find friends at college because you both carpooled to the same county over christmas break. Or you become friends because you like the same sports team, which is again very regional.
Ie, if you map out where your friends were born it wouldn't be suprising to find a sort of bell curve clustered around where you were born, even if you still have many friends who were born far away. Of course there will be exceptions but that doesn't disprove that people in general tend to have regional affiliations.
That doesn't disprove anything. This is about people in general, not about one person in particular, and it never said you will become friends with everyone close to you. You may be not be friends with 200 of your neighbors but at the same time you're not friends with 4 million people from China.
This is statistics too. No one said that this was true for every single human being. If someone says that more people voted for Obama than for Romney, stepping forward to say "that's not true, I voted for Romney!" is irrelevant.
Most cities around the world you will find that people with the same ethnic background are far more likely to become friends than if they have different backgrounds. People in the same social class are more likely to interact and become friends, even in cities. New York is a huge city and yet it has very distinct neighborhoods, and in many ways is very parochial compared to smaller towns.
No one but you said people "always" pick those near their place of birth.
Nothing in this study said that ALL your friends have similar DNA. If you're an exception then that's great but it doesn't undo the statistics.
Though do you really have no friends from your home town, no friends of your own race, no friends from the social class you were born into, no friends of the same religion, etc?
He wouldn't even need to be in the cage if he'd stop throwing his feces at everyone.
I think you may be drawing unintended semantic distinctions—I would not say that a "process" of evolution would be any different than a "mechanism." It happens, it happens in a way, that way is predictable. (Excepting of course for the stochastic realities of quantum randomness.) I did not mean to suggest there is some agent picking the exact direction of evolution, only that, if an organism's functioning is not based around some mechanism whose behaviour is primarily predictable, then evolution has nothing to optimize, and would be impossible.
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I think you're misunderstanding my use of the word "mechanism" here. I'm not saying there are fixed gears and circuits that explain how we work (there quite obviously aren't!), only that there are patterns, pathways, and systems behind the brain and hence the mind. There is a way in which the mind works, it's not some magic supernatural black box instilled by some indecisive buffoon on a cloud.
I'm a little weirded out by the "near-uniform" part, though. Do you truly believe that, placed in a situation with no new knowledge, you would consistently make significantly different choices? Most decisions are the results of our experiences and our immediate concerns; at best, the maximum variability in the outcome occurs when we fail to think things through. But as with catching your balance when you slip, it has been greatly beneficial to evolution to try to avoid screwing up (Hence why Larry Niven's contribution to the Crosstime series is bullshit.)
Granted, there is a tiny spot in our model of how the central nervous system works to allow for quantum randomness to interfere with otherwise completely deterministic decision-making (the transposon activity we discovered a couple years ago), but I personally would argue most arbitrary decisions come from reflecting on forgotten knowledge or memories, a little like "casting the runes" over uninitialized RAM to get a random number. (An example: what is the most random-sounding two-digit number you can think of, and why?)
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Godel set out an ontological proof for the existence of God which, like the earlier Saint Anselm proof that he built his on, boils down to "God exists because he is good, and good things must exist." In the Anselm proof, the 'good' quality is "greatness;" in Godel's, it's (moral) "positiveness." Such ontological proofs categorically rely on premises that are incompatible with empirical realism, and are ultimately circular. (Which is fairly ironic, as Descartes himself proposed one.)
I don't think it's fair to characterise his opinion of set logic as being a "failure," either; his theorems established limitations on what it could describe, and as a result helped precipitate the end of positivism, but to have the conviction to pursue such ideas he must have seen set theory as incomplete and accepted it that way to begin with. It's not that he thought it was a failure, it's that other people felt it was a failure after he showed them the truth about what it could and could not do. Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and many other prominent logicians had already been doing this for thirty years when Godel's big works were contributed.
He definitely was a little crazy, though—he starved to death, weighing less than half his healthy weight, obsessively paranoid that someone was trying to poison him.
As far as the physical laws of the universe go—keep in mind that the impact on science of Godel's work has been the acceptance that we may not know everything about the universe because we cannot detect it. If, once technology has reached its absolute maximum, we still cannot detect a phenomenon, then in all likelihood it will be something that does not affect us—otherwise we'd be able to detect its effect!
As far as we know, the human mind doesn't depend on any of that stuff, though. There's enough mystery about how the brain works, and we're making enough headway in figuring it out, that at present we're not even sure the quantum randomness implied by this weird story is required.
Remember, the universe is plenty capable of being beautiful even when it isn't inexplicable.
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I would think that this would be much more interesting in a more egalitarian and pan-racial society.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
And there many "white" Americans who've got some African ancestry and don't even know it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Remember, the universe is plenty capable of being beautiful even when it isn't inexplicable.
Wonderful sentiment. I will go further and say, it is most beautiful when being inexplicable. It dominates us, as a sub-set, yet contains and includes us - and we marvel at it - not at our mastery and prowess.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yes.
I do not think that with reduction of variables, we can be plottted like pool-balls on a frictionless surface, bounded by perfect elasticity.
The other parable I like for this, is Groundhog Day. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Be very afraid of a group of white men who want something. The indigenous peoples of the Americas found that out. When people are the same it's very easy to focus your energies in the same direction.
When you are hanging out in your diverse group are you the inept and incompetent one?
Are you sure? Consider a poem. The best formalist poetry (not counting free-form poetry) fits an incredible number of very difficult constraints and yet creates an intricate image without apparent effort. If that poem is then labelled with its metre by someone who understands that metre, and then you try to reproduce the same beauty and find you cannot, then that frustration commands a much higher respect for the author than merely witnessing the poem's beauty from afar (perhaps, for our metaphor's sake, in a language you don't even understand, thus making it nothing more than beautiful gibberish) and having no further insight into how it works.
I, for one, definitely prefer marvelling at the beauty of how something works and how intricate its assembly is, not just the image it creates from afar. That image is merely an illusion; more a part of your imagination and expectations than of the thing itself.
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Groundhog Day isn't a parable for that at all—Bill Murray keeps his knowledge of the universe through each iteration of the day, and is shaped by his experiences. In fact, it agrees with the alternative, as he is able to predict the behaviours of absolutely everyone every single time, as they have no knowledge of subsequent events. They have no innate randomness; they are completely deterministic.
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