That 0.1% Variation in the Human Genome
For some reason, today I got to thinking about Bill Clinton’s class day speech at my graduation, where he kept repeating that humans are essentially 99.9% genetically identical; he used it to demonstrate why we shouldn’t emphasize our differences, but instead our similarities and find our connections. It’s an admirable moral goal, anyway, from a political point of view.
But if you look around, it’s relatively easy to find patterns that can roughly categorize people into races. I am Asian. It’s very easy to tell, from my hair color, my skin color, and the bone structure of my face. I’m a bit of a lightweight when it comes to alcohol, and I get that “Asian glow” after a drink or two. Some of my friends are very, very white. Some are Hispanic, some are African-American, some are Middle-Eastern. We can see all this polymorphism, so clearly the 0.1% does make a very big biological difference. After all, genetically we are something like 98% similar to chimpanzees, and yet we see huge differences. 0.1% of 3 billion bases is still 3 million bases.
So I looked around on the internet, and found this old, but wonderful, PLoS interview with Neil Risch, a population geneticist, who in 2002 published a refutation of an NEJM opinion article dismissing the clinical relevance of race. So really, that whole 99.9% thing is a bit misleading, since that 0.1% matters a great deal. So why mention genetics at all? Genetics has no real relevance for big-picture global issues of politics, war and peace, and all that, or for social issues on the level of being kind to each other.
And really, there’s no need to make that sort of weak genetic argument. You can look around and see for yourself that humans are pretty much similar. Everyone is born on basically the same pattern, with mothers and fathers, relatives, with mostly four limbs, two eyes, a nose and mouth, with a brain that loves, a mouth that talks, a heart that pumps, hands that grasp. A smile is a smile in every culture, a laugh is a laugh. There are variations on this theme, especially with modern medicine and technology, but mostly people are the same. We don’t need the human genome project to tell us that. Basing your ethical tenets on really shallow inferences from biology is usually not a good idea. Leave biology for biology and medicine, and just look around.
