Some questions...

[Pollux V]

Before I start, let me say that you are by no means obligated to answer the following questions, that they are purely voluntary, and that they are by no means ones that need to be urgently answered. I'll do the research myself regarding them if there aren't any answers to this thread. The evidence I need is for a debate I'm doing on another forum. Quoted scientific sources would be really, really really really awesome.

That said,

How much of our human DNA is shared with grass? With any virus (pick one--i.e, Yersina pestis, if that's a virus and not a bacterium)? With termites? With ants? With elephants? With chimpanzees?

If you can't find the answers to the previous questions, do you have any examples to show how humans are not as unique as we like to think we are?

What activities widely considered uniquely human do we share with other animals? Like, for instance, destroying things, murdering things, loving things, building things, conquering things, that sort of thing?

Thanks!

 

[Yes]

Chimps I think share as much as 98% of our DNA.
Sorry no "quoted scientific sources".

 

[skyederman]

It all depends on how you measure similarity. Except for some viruses, we all use DNA as our hereditary material. We share the same types of bases just in different numbers, proportions and sequences. In terms of simple amounts we have around 3 billion base pairs, fruit flies around 180 million, yeast about 12 million, E. coli around 5 million, viruses are usually in the thousands of base pairs. Barley has about 5 billion, and chimps have a little bit more than us, around 10% more.

You can also look at the percentage of the G-C pairs, as compared to A-T pairs, which vary from the 22% to 73%.

Comparing sequences is more complicated, as the actual number of base pairs varies so much. How similar can we be to a virus considering we have around million times as much DNA? Here's a link that goes through some of the recent changes fairly well (my nachos are ready, so no more typing).

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/09/0924_020924_dnachimp.html

 

[chuck u farley]

One way to look at this, concerning cellular creatures, is that many of the chemical reactions that occur are the same. Consider cellular respiration. I think that most aerobic creatures possess in their cells the same enzymes (with possibly a few amino acid variations) to catalyze those reactions. Likewise for fatty acid metabolism, construction of membranes, organelles, microfilaments, microtubules etc. Because at the cellular level so much of the stuff is almost the same, then it is likely that the enzymes are almost the same. Thus, the blueprints, the DNA, is much the same. No more typing for me either. The beer is cold. Wish I had some nachos to go with it.