Who cares about family:
One of my favorite sites is run by a hostess who takes the sobriquet “hbd chick.” (http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/) Her material is heavy with data.  How in the world she is able to collect so much of it I have no idea.  I am most impressed.  Recently she cited a study (http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/friends-vs-family/) that examined peoples values in dozens of countries.  Two of the questions were essentially “How important is your family to you?” and “How important are your friends to you?” 

As you know, for biological purposes if your family is not important to you you have opted out of the gene pool.  Then I thought it would be interesting to see whether there was a correlation between societies where family was treasured and societies where friendship was treasured.  I looked at the data, punched a few keys and got this graph:

Friendship is on the horizontal axis.  Family is on the vertical axis.
The point of 100 friendship, zero family is not real but tossed in
for orientation.  

Obviously the result is heavily influenced by noise, and there are systematic errors like “Does one culture mean exactly the same thing by ‘very important’ as another culture?” in some countries your “friends” are going to include a higher percentage of distant family than in other cultures.  Still, I think a fair person would say that the population of points tends upwards and to the right.  That is to say those who say family is “very important” to them also tend to be those who say friends are “very important” to them.

The suggestion, “If you don’t care about your family you don’t care about anybody,” is not far behind.

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