Philosophy Now Forum

Gustafs thought and I'd like to hear an answer as well.

Similarity? Therefore family members tend to have more similar genes than to strangers and I guess this rolls over to the species and the rest... No?

A rough analogy would be that book X shares z percent of its words with book Y. That doesn't mean that the actual content of the books need to be very similar. Humans are said to share 98 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees and 50 percent of their DNA with bananas and, not surprisingly, we are more similar to monkeys than to plants.

Arising_uk wrote:Gustafs thought and I'd like to hear an answer as well.

That they can produce sterile/fertile offspring, that X can mate with W, who is between X and Y in terms of similarity and the resulting offspring, V, can then mate with Y, or that X can mate with U, whose offspring can mate with W, producing T, which can mate with Y. Z% might determine the number of intermediate possible or theoretical (because intermediates may have gone extinct) steps N to produce a distant offspring between X and Y.

Notvacka wrote:A rough analogy would be that book X shares z percent of its words with book Y. That doesn't mean that the actual content of the books need to be very similar.

Hmm,
books...
plagiarism...
copyright...
...
patents on DNA!

You share Z% of DNA with an organism which I have patentented. Therefore you owe me 1 Zillion €.

According to http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/H ... ghts.shtml "The human genome sequence is almost exactly the same (99.9%) in all people."

I think the important part there is probably "sequence". To take the book analogy, two books might share the same letters and many of the same words but they'd only be similar if the words were similarly ordered, or sequenced.

That's my take anyway though I'm no geneticist.

John wrote:According to http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/H ... ghts.shtml "The human genome sequence is almost exactly the same (99.9%) in all people."

I think the important part there is probably "sequence". To take the book analogy, two books might share the same letters and many of the same words but they'd only be similar if the words were similarly ordered, or sequenced.

That's my take anyway though I'm no geneticist.

All life shares the same four letters in their DNA: ACGT, Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine.

Haha patents on DNA, that'll never happen! Gulp!

Though this doesn't change any of the points in the thread, just thought I'd point out that Uracil is also a part of the language of DNA, as a substitute for Thymine (or is it the other way round?). Amazingly, there's words too! The letters combine into trigrams that code for 64 possible amino acids. Even a small change in the sequence of these can result in massive differences as the produced amino acids interact with each other. Nature is bloody amazing.

bytesplicer wrote:Haha patents on DNA, that'll never happen! Gulp!

It has happened:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_patents

I know, hence my use of 'Gulp!'.
Depressing isn't it.