is my DNA making you make me quit smoking?

With this, my first post here, i suppose i should briefly also introduce myself. i am an Assistant Professor of sociology in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University.

So, i’ve been puzzling for a while over my thoughts on the numerous papers that have come out over the past few years by Christakis, Fowler et al using the Framingham Heart Study data. If you didn’t catch the story that recently ran on their work in the New York Times Magazine, i’d highly recommend taking the time to make your way over there at some point. The article does a pretty good job of summarizing what they’ve published and raising some of the pertinent questions that have been posed previously (both in print and not).