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(Best Syndication News) According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, your popularity may be influenced by your genetic makeup. So if you aren’t popular you might be able to blame it on your parents.

The researchers, James H. Fowlera, Christopher T. Dawesa and Nicholas A. Christakis say that natural selection may have played a role in the evolution of social networks. Genes create a "significant impact" on our position in the popularity stakes. This could help explain why social rank is passed from one generation to the next.

Christakis, a sociology professor at Harvard Medical School believes genes play a huge role. “We were able to show that our particular location in vast social networks has a genetic basis,” the professor said. “In fact, the beautiful and complicated pattern of human connection depends on our genes to a significant measure.”

The results from the tests suggest that “modeling intrinsic variation in network attributes may be important for understanding the way genes affect human behaviors and the way these behaviors spread from person to person.”

Genes are a factor that determines whether a person is at the center of the group or on the edges. Fowler, a professor of political science at UC said "One of the things that the study tells us is that social networks are likely to be a fundamental part of our genetic heritage. It may be that natural selection is acting on not just things like whether or not we can resist the common cold, but also who it is that we are going to come into contact with."

By Dan Wilson