  Social networks exhibit strikingly systematic patterns across a wide range of
human contexts. While genetic variation accounts for a significant portion of
the variation in many complex social behaviors, the heritability of egocentric
social network attributes is unknown. Here we show that three of these
attributes (in-degree, transitivity, and centrality) are heritable. We then
develop a "mirror network" method to test extant network models and show that
none accounts for observed genetic variation in human social networks. We
propose an alternative "Attract and Introduce" model with two simple forms of
heterogeneity that generates significant heritability as well as other
important network features. We show that the model is well suited to real
social networks in humans. These results suggest that natural selection may
have played a role in the evolution of social networks. They also 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.
