WE HAVE been humbled as never before this week. While we congratulate
ourselves on the momentous achievement of sequencing the human genome, the
genome itself is telling us we are not so special after all.
It turns out we have only five times as many genes as a bacterium, a third
more than a worm and about twice as many as a fly. 鈥淭he genomic view of our
place in nature will be both a source of humility and a blow to the idea of
human uniqueness,鈥� says Svante P盲盲bo of the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
The genetic information flooding in confirms that around 40 per cent of our
genes are similar to those in nematode worms, 60 per cent are similar to those
in fruit flies and 90 per cent are similar to those in mice. We differ from our
closest relatives, chimps, by only 1 per cent of our DNA, or 1 base pair in
100.
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Looking at the human genome will also change the way we think about race. Two
people of the same race may look alike, but they may actually be more
genetically different than two individuals from quite different ethnic groups.
鈥淭he differences between people of the same races are so large that it鈥檚
ridiculous to think of races as different鈥攐r as even existing,鈥� says Luigi
Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University.
If anything, points out P盲盲bo, we are all Africans, since all the
genetic differences found in other parts of the world are just a subset of the
variations found in Africa. 鈥淜nowledge of the genome should foster compassion,鈥�
he says.
