Answer to Question #284240 in Genetics for leeya

Question

There is an extremely high level of genetic similarity in humans, with greater than 99% sequence identity across populations. Although this similarity is extremely high, many people appear very different phenotypically. How do you resolve these contrasting observations?

Answer 1

They found that the strangers were quite dissimilar in terms of their DNA mutations, but that the pairs of friends were on average about as related to one another as fourth cousins, a genetic similarity of about 1 per cent of their DNA.