4 ms·
And you are under appreciating the myriad ways differences can express themselves in nature. We share 50% of the same DNA as a banana, and we're 98.8% the same
by yomly 6y ago
And you are under appreciating the myriad ways differences can express themselves in nature. We share 50% of the same DNA as a banana, and we're 98.8% the same as a chimpanzee.
Spurious examples aside, the pandemic has highlighted ethnic differences in reactions to both pathogen and vaccine.
And from personal experience in the field, seemingly "random" confounding factors can have drastic effects - supposedly safe gadolinium based contrast agents caused NSF if you happened to have bad kidneys.
Aggregation occludes all nuance, essentially by definition.
Decisions that are correct for the aggregate can often be wrong for the individual.
But I guess that kind of thinking is why the pandemic has been such a crapshoot in the first place.
- maxerickson 6y agoMy point is that in the terms of the weird analogy, we are pretty much running the same operating system as the chimp. For instance, they studied the immune response to the mRNA vaccines in primates.
- Reason077 6y ago> "We share 50% of the same DNA as a banana" This is a widely repeated "internet fact" but it's not true. For one thing, a banana has only about 520 million base pairs of DNA, while the Human genome has 3.1 billion. In reality, depending on the search method used, at most about 24% of human genes have orthologous genes in the banana genome: https://lab.dessimoz.org/blog/2020/12/08/human-banana-orthologs https://lab.dessimoz.org/blog/2020/12/08/human-banana-orthol...