Let me play devil's advocate for a second. To live in the ninety-nine percent, rather than the one percent, may be impossible.

First, part of the 99% genetic identity appears to be the ability to distinguish between (if not outright prefer) your genetic material from someone else's. This starts with your immediate family, extends to your kinship group, and perhaps goes on from there. That may be something that is nearly impossible to give up.

Second, what does that 99% genetic identity really tell us about human beings? It doesn't necessarily tell us anything mystical at all. It tells us that the vast majority of what goes into producing a human being affects parts of the body that are for the most part "dark" to us (like the dark matter that makes up the vast majority of the universe). Those strands of DNA have to produce all of the internal organs, a creature with a larger-than-average brain, the ability to digest a wide range of foods, to walk upright, with two legs and two arms and hands with opposable thumbs, with sexual reproduction, etc. At DNA's level, all of this takes up hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Everything else that we care so much about is just a few toggled options in a long style sheet.

So it's not necessarily human beings that become newly wondrous and magical at this revelation, but the life process itself. We are nothing like starfish, but we are made with the same language.

One thing that interested me in Clinton's speech was that he didn't talk about race (which is usually what's brought up in this context), but rather intelligence, etc., which does, I think, put things in a different light.

The more meaningful, alternate statistic is that there is more genetic variation within racial groups than there is between individuals of different racial groups. This suggests not that we care too much about distinctions, but that the distinctions that have shaped so much of our history, and continue to shape so much of our politics, practices, and psychologies, are based on a mistake.

By the way, it's 99.9%, not just 99.

I think the most important part of this exchange has been the introduction of the style sheet metaphor, which I now officially love.

#robin { hair: brown; eyes: brown; height: 5238px }

@Howard: Bien sur, 99.9% - I was only trying to simplify for fast typing.

@Robin: I was particularly pleased with the style sheet metaphor myself. :)