50% bananas

Today in “blog posts that have spent two years in the draft folder” – “Humans are 50% banana.” “Humans are 50% banana.” Perhaps you have heard this statement, or one like it. It seems to be widely-quoted. As an example it’s hard to go past this article from UK tabloid The Mirror which, in addition to the banana, also informs us that “the entire internet weighs about the same as one large strawberry”. I don’t even know where to begin with that one. A couple of years ago whilst between jobs and with time on my hands, I thought I’d go in search of the source for this factoid. I started with Twitter of course: 1. Source of the quote Bioinformatics challenge: find source for statement "humans are 50% banana" and define precisely how that was calculated — Neil Saunders (@neilfws) October 4, 2016 Lots of interest but not many leads. Lars reminded me that the quote seems to originate with geneticist and author Steve Jones. It appears to have been used by him and others in various forms over time, but the oldest and most comprehensive comes from 2002 and goes like this: We also share about 50% of our DNA with bananas and that doesn’t make us half bananas, either from the waist up or the waist down. It’s worth noting that this was not long after the initial publication of the human genome, and certainly long before any banana genome sequences were available. We should also note that it&#...
Source: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Tags: genomics humour banana human myths Source Type: blogs