The science faculty was keen to get academics collaborating and favoured a shared environment.
It meant that a shared environment could not be creating this difference.
"I see the internet as a shared environment where we all have a role to play in keeping it safe," he explained.
Virtual twins can seem very similar in their early years, she said, but in the long term a shared environment is not "going to have a lasting impact".
Often the characters are markedly different types thrown together by circumstance and occupying a shared environment such as an apartment building or workplace.
The idea is that the internet is a shared environment, like the oceans or airspace, which requires international co-operation to make the best use of it.
Assemblance attempts to answer the question: "How do we create things together in a shared environment, where we can't always trust each other, but we need to act together regardless?" This, indeed, is the situation we find ourselves in now.
The crucial point is that obesity in both mother and child is not simply a matter of a shared environment in which both eat too many fatty foods, the forum argues.
Seen for what we are, co-inhabitants of a slim wet planet, co-evolved under the same strains, the same harmonies, collaborators in a shared environment, how could the resemblances be less than they are?
Researchers have known for years that longevity runs in families, but they have debated how much that is due to genetic influences, and how much to a shared environment.
Nobody could ever ethically run that sort of controlled experiment with humans, but Kempermann's study provides convincing evidence that — in a fellow mammal with which we share a basic brain organization — neither genetic identity nor a shared environment is enough to guarantee a common fate.
