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Popularity, Proteins, and the Matthew Effect

Several weeks ago in class, we discussed the power law and the tendency for popularity to follow the “rich get richer” pattern in which those that gain huge popularity become even more popular relative to their peers as a result. They often receive this initial popularity by chance, and once they have it it is self-reinforcing, generating even more popularity out of what already exists. This phenomenon has been termed the “Matthew effect” by sociologist Robert Merton, and is applicable to a wide range of topics including social networks, biology, economic wealth, political power, scientific collaboration, and technology.

In the article “The Matthew effect in empirical data,” Matjaž Perc discusses these many applications of the theory. He gives examples of many studies in which the data collected fit a power law distribution, suggesting that the Matthew effect was present in the observations. In social networks, he gives an example of a study in which sexual contact was shown to follow the Matthew effect. Those with many sexual contacts in the last 2 to 4 years were found to have even more proportional to their peers at the low end at the end of a 1 year period. This is relevant to the popularity discussion in class, as those that were the most “popular” sexual partners tended to become even more popular in that realm.

In the field of biology, the Saccharomyces cerevisiae protein network has shown the properties of the Matthew effect as well. Perc explains that older proteins in the network are more well-connected and these proteins gain more interactions based on their superior connectivity. The existence of connections for these proteins makes it even easier for them to gain more, which is consistent with the trends of the Matthew effect. This example is interesting in that it shows the power law is relevant outside of the popularity context we used it for in class. It also has applications in biology, as shown here, as well as physics, astronomy, Earth sciences, and more! It is funny to think of a well-connected protein as comparable to a best-selling book, famous actor, or popular sexual partner, but in fact the underlying mechanism supporting these four is the same: the Matthew effect.

Article link: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/98/20140378#sec-2

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