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This is so obviously and enormously untrue. Orders of magnitude off from a justifiable statement. Can we start defining our terms for what counts as related or genetic closeness? People here must be using very idiosyncratic understandings of these terms in order for their posts to make any sense.
Thank you for quantitatively stating this unlike other poster's baffling and wrong subjective statements about genetic similarity. The lowest outliers of estimating the genetic similarity of humans and mice are in the mid to high 80%s. I strongly suspect that Englishmen and Asians are more closely related than humans and rodents. In what manner do you mean 88% genetic similarity? How did you type any number other than 99.9%?
As an anecdote, we absolutely do see this with livestock. Females bred to a male of very different breed will visibly have more trouble relating with their own offspring than with non-relatives of their breed.
You don't really appreciate the importance of genetics until you see a group of young animals foraging in dense brush just like their sire's breed does (despite never meeting him), while the spooked mothers yell for them to come back and eat grass properly like they were taught.
Having noticed this is why Scott's line about "I don't understand why he's acting like his violent psychopath father: he couldn't have been a bad influence because they've never met!" made such a strong impression on me.
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Before writing a chest-thumping, bombastic comment with an "obviously" and an additional adverb, it's good practice to pause for a beat and consider if you're having a Dunning Kruger moment, especially when I already pre-emptively explained the difference.
The key aspects are when I mentioned "genome" in the human-chimpanzee example, and "SNPs" in the English-Italian-Southern Chinese example. SNPs are sources of common variation within humans; researchers often use SNP data when working in human genetics, as SNP data is easier and cheaper to create and obtain, and easier and cheaper to work with computationally, than genome-wide data (since among most humans, most of the genome is identical or near identical). Usually the cutoff for what constitutes a SNP is if its rarer allele copy is present in at least 1% of a given population, or set of populations. So there was no such oversight nor contradiction on my part in the above comment.
Suppose, just as a stylized example, chimpanzees and humans both had only 10 loci in their genome and just one chromosome. Now suppose a chimpanzee (PT), an Englishman (EN), and a Southern Chinese (SC) had one-strand reads of:
PT - A A A A A C C C C C
EN - T G A A A C C C C C
SC - G G A A A C C C C C
Where the first three loci are SNPs, common sites where the base varies in humans. We can use a simple metric for genetic similarity, just if the letter at a given locus is the same or not. PT and EN share 80% of the genome; PT and SC share 80% of the genome. EN and SC share 90% of the genome. We could consider 80%, 80%, and 90% to be their genetic similarities. However, if we look at just SNPs, now EN and SC have a genetic similarity of just 67%.
So now we can go back to real-world data and extend the cocktail-napkin exercise if we want to get a proxy for genome wide; previous caveats still apply. About 1 in 1,000 sites in the genome is a SNP; most sites are rare variants. Thus, we have 99.9% common variant loci, 0.1% rare variant loci. Let’s assume the previous 88% EN-SC similarity as representative of all SNPs; this is likely too permissive. However, we can balance that out by assuming all rare variant sites have a similarity of 100%, which is conservative. Now we have our back of the envelope genome-wide genetic similarity between EN-SC of 99.9% * 100% + .1% * 88% = 99.988%, and EN-Italian of 99.9% * 100% + .1% * 99% = 99.999% as the EN-EN proxy. This exercise actually worked pleasingly well and got us in the right ballpark, since the 99.9% from before is any two particular humans (and lacking the additional decimal precision), and modern West and East Eurasians diverged relatively late in human evolutionary history.
Thus, a hypothetical EN-SC offspring would share 99.994% of the genome with the EN parent, less than the 99.999% from a randomly selected EN person. The conclusion remains—despite how triggering this thought appears to be for some—a father can be more genetically similar to a randomly selected person from his population than to his own offspring, if the mother of his offspring comes from a different population.
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