Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e
Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e a year ago
It is worse than that. There is drift within an organism. The genome on your scalp is different than the genome on your toes.
Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e a year ago
It is worse than that. There is drift within an organism. The genome on your scalp is different than the genome on your toes.
> There is drift within an organism. The genome on your scalp is different than the genome on your toes
> Also chimeras exist
This provides a deep insight into the nature of multicellular life. People think that a "unicellular organism" eventually turned into a "multicellular organism". But they're not so distinct. The latter is really still just a bunch of cells coordinating, but their coordination is so deep, and the number of cells and functions so large, that emergent properties arise.
Worse than that, by count, only a minority of the cells using a person's DNA make up that person. The number of other cells are 10x, but being smaller, only make up 1% to 3% by mass. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-human-micr...