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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

> It reveals that the white, indigenous English share about 40 per cent of their DNA with the French, about 26 per cent with the Germans, 11 per cent with the Danes and in the region of nine per cent with the Belgians.

Don't we share a ludicrous amount (>50%) of DNA with bananas? What's the more precise (and less false) statement hiding behind this?

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The news article is a simplification. A more accurate characterization would be "considering only sequences differentiated among the sample set, indigenous English share 40% of their DNA with the French..." This isn't strictly correct but it's a close enough approximation to what the study authors actually did.

Global DNA variation of humans is about 0.5% of genes.[1] So I think that implies an average Brit shares 40% of that 0.5% with the average French. 0.4*0.005 == 0.002 -> 0.2% of the genome.

Funnily, as a casual observer I would agree that the English language is 40% French (vocabulary) and 26% German (structure).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation

Even of the part that varies among humans, it's hard to believe that English people share only 11% with some other Europeans.

I remember reading once that we're 98% similar to chimpanzee's. So I'm 98% chimpanzee, and only 40% French... I can live with that.

> What's the more precise (and less false) statement hiding behind this?

Damage control due to the recently increasing friction caused by massive immigration.

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