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Asked by 1998georgia to Hitesh, Hywel, Mae, Nik, Tiffany on 14 Jun 2012.
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Nicola Ibberson answered on 14 Jun 2012:
absolutely. We all have the same set of genetic material, and we all have genes for the same things. But the version of a gene that we have can very much depend on what our origins are. This is often a result of environmental pressures on our ancestors: for example, living in a hot country means that people with darker skin that doesn’t burn as easily will be more likely to survive and reproduce, which in turn means that the version of the skin gene that codes for darker skin will become widespread in those areas of the world.
Other versions of genes may become widespread in a certain race because it allows resistance to a particular disease that is a problem in that part of the world, e.g. the sickle cell gene variant (seen often in those with African background) offers resistance to malaria, which can be a fatal illness.
Other versions of genes become common in different races simply because those populations of people started off very small, and so there were not many different versions of that gene floating around in the gene pool in the first place. So one particular version can become common just by chance.
Now that we can all fly around and live where we please, we are becoming a very mixed group of people, with little bits of our genes coming from all the many different backgrounds of our recent ancestors. This can be good for genetics, as it introduces many more ‘versions’ of genes in to the population, which makes it less likely that a ‘bad’ version can take hold and cause problems.
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Tiffany Taylor answered on 14 Jun 2012:
Brilliant question. On average, different humans races are the same in 99.9% of their DNA. So the different races are very similar indeed. However, the letters in the DNA are called nucleotides (these make up the code for the genes), and there are about 3 billion nucleotides in the human DNA, so you can expect about 3 million differences in the DNA between people from two different races – so this is where are differences come from. It is also important for you to know that not all the DNA actually codes form something important, some of it is just there but doesn’t do anything – we call this junk DNA. So not all these 3 million differences are going to have an effect, but if these differences happen in a gene (which does code for something important) that is when we see differences. Obviously the genes which control skin colour will be different between people from different races, but there are other differences too, for example in Africa where they are at risk from malaria (a deadly disease) they have differences in their genes which allow them better able to fight this disease, or is Asia where they do not eat much diary in their diet (milk, cheese, yoghurt etc.), they are not able to digest it like we can.
So yes, there are differences in the genes, but we are much more similar than we are different, in fact we are 99.9% similar, so the differences really are just in the small details – not in the big things.
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Hywel Owen answered on 14 Jun 2012:
Great question.
I’ve often heard that genetically we are 80% the same as bananas. I just looked it up – it’s not 80%, but it’s still 50%. So we are half banana, genetically speaking. We are 80% the same as cows though, and 98.8% the same as chimpanzees. I think the message is that the difference in humans between different cultural groups are very, very small.
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Hitesh Dave answered on 20 Jun 2012:
Yes, we do have different type of genes in different races…as Nik mentioned our version is very much dependent on our parents gene family..
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