Science has never been my strong suit – or any suit actually. In high school I had difficulty memorizing the Periodic Table and frankly what I can recall is that somehow some of these chemicals bind together to form compounds, the only one I remember being H₂O. In college biology (required course) there must have been a shortage of frogs because they paired us up for the dissecting thing – for which I am grateful yet today because I just could not bring myself to using that scalpel.

Even with this scientific deficiency, however, I was intrigued by a feature article in USA TODAY (July 8, 2010) on gene research. The writer stated that each one of us has 100 trillion cells. Within each cell are 46 bundles of DNA, 23 from each parent. Each bundle is made up of four chemicals that are paired two by two in a twisted ladder call a double helix. The Human Genome Project yielded the precise sequence of these so-called base pairs, packaged in roughly 20,500 genes.

Now, here is the absolutely incredible part. What the researchers have found is that, genetically speaking, the planet’s 6 billion people are 99.5% identical! In other words, only .5% of our makeup accounts for all of the traits that distinguish one person from another, whether it is height, weight, hair and eye color or heart disease and cancer risk.

This gives a whole new meaning to “we are more alike than different.” In fact, we are 99.5% more alike than different. So, I wonder. What is it about the .5% that makes us want to reject one another? Why does one group (or individual) see themselves as better or more valued or more correct than another group (or individual)? Why is it that we allow .5% of 3 billion base pairs to be the justification for snubbing another human being?

So, I wonder some more. What would it be like if we focused on the 99.5%?

Les Robinson, September 2010