How sweet it is
#2: Mar 6th 2021 at 7:27:43 AM
Opening. I can go with either a rename or a cut.
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
WarJay77
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
(Troper Knight)
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
#3: Mar 6th 2021 at 9:21:56 AM
This does seem like an actual trope. A rename could help it. Maybe even send it to TLP.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
ccorb
from A very hot place
Since: May, 2020
Relationship Status: It's not my fault I'm not popular!
#4: Mar 6th 2021 at 10:30:11 AM
Maybe something like Same Genetics Same Relation?
Rock'n'roll never dies!
eroock
Since: Sep, 2012
#5: Mar 6th 2021 at 6:22:06 PM
Not seeing an issue with misuse. A rename probably won't help with the underperforming. A push to TLP might though.
WarJay77
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
(Troper Knight)
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
#6: Mar 6th 2021 at 6:22:59 PM
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Well, the name certainly sounds pretty clunky. Clunkier names don't do as well since they don't get remembered as well.
eroock
Since: Sep, 2012
#7: Mar 6th 2021 at 7:02:49 PM
^ That argument would make sense if users can't remember the name and at the same time weren't able to find the concept by doing a quick search (who gives up after just not remembering a trope?). "genetic code" lists Only Point Two Percent Different on the first page for me. I rather suspect there is a lack of awareness of this concept having been troped in the first place.
Edited by eroock on Mar 6th 2021 at 7:24:21 AM
Tabs
Since: Jan, 2001
#8: Mar 7th 2021 at 12:41:56 AM
Seems like it. Searching "genes same", "DNA percentage", and "genetically similar" all yield this trope on the first page. I wouldn't have thought this was tropable, or a common enough thing.
Piterpicher
Veteran Editor IV
from Poland, for real
(Series 2)
Relationship Status: Armed with the Power of Love
Veteran Editor IV
#9: Mar 7th 2021 at 12:36:50 PM
I vote cut or TLP it with a new name. Ccorb's suggestion sounds good.
Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)
idonom
from wouldn't you like to know, weatherboy
Since: Apr, 2016
Relationship Status: Shipping fictional characters
#10: Mar 7th 2021 at 1:33:02 PM
Y'ALL JUST GOT SHREKT
How sweet it is
#11: Mar 8th 2021 at 3:21:50 PM
Hooked.
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
Zyffyr
from Portland, Oregon
Since: Apr, 2010
Relationship Status: Complex: I'm real, they are imaginary
#12: Mar 8th 2021 at 7:15:16 PM
Not that it really matters since misuse isn't really an issue, but 4 of the 5 ZC Es are poorly worded versions of entries under the correct usage category.
Edited by Zyffyr on Mar 8th 2021 at 7:15:26 AM
How sweet it is
#13: Mar 18th 2021 at 6:50:06 AM
Looks like we're cutting and sending to TLP. Calling
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
How sweet it is
#14: Mar 29th 2021 at 9:45:45 PM
Wick wise, we got only 21
. Unless if someone else does it, I'll do it tomorrow.
Any volunteers for the draft?
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
WarJay77
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
(Troper Knight)
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
#15: Mar 29th 2021 at 9:50:30 PM
I thought we were just Salvage-Yarding them now, unless an a sponsor actively agrees to do it.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
GastonRabbit
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
from Robinson, Illinois, USA
(General of TV Troops)
Relationship Status: I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
#16: Mar 29th 2021 at 11:35:27 PM
I'd prefer if we did that.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 29th 2021 at 1:35:45 PM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
How sweet it is
#17: Mar 30th 2021 at 6:37:02 AM
Alright, sounds good. In case anyone shows interest, we can archive on-page examples (if they're valid).
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
How sweet it is
#18: Mar 31st 2021 at 9:03:42 AM
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
Archive for when it gets into TLP. Misused examples are omitted.
open/close all folders
Image
Chosen in Image Pickin' thread:
:
Examples:
Anime & Manga
- The Angels in Neon Genesis Evangelion, who despite being a species of bizarre, physics-bending monsters, some of which look 'very' different from humans, share 99.89% of their DNA with humans (although is complicated a bit by the fact that the Angels are humans. Maybe.) Though the reasoning for this is a bit sketchy. According to Ritsuko, the Angels are made of Hard Light, and she found a strange sequence of Hard Light in the Angel's tissues, which for some reason she decided to compare to the human genome and came up with this trope.
- The androids from Armitage III are ranked according to the order they were created. "Firsts" are non-human robots, "Seconds" are androids, and the "Thirds" are so close to human they can get pregnant. And yes, they can reproduce with a human. The "Fourth" were modeled after plants and are arguable improved versions of natural plant life (such as trees that are capable of moving around).
- The Zentraedi from Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Robotech, justified at least in the former case in that they and humans have a common ancestor (the Protoculture).
- In fact, humans in the Macross franchise have strong genetic similarities to most known sapient species in the Milky Way, thanks to Protoculture bio-engineering.
- Cowboy Bebop has the episode Gateway Shuffle, in which an Eco-terrorist by the name of "Twinkle" Maria Murdock develops a retrovirus that transforms humans into apes. It's explained that there's only a 0.2% difference between human and monkey DNA, and the virus is designed to act specifically on the 0.2%. In a forced example of Honor Before Reason, the crew of the Bebop find themselves having to save the Europa government from being annihilated by a missile containing the virus at the expense of losing their bounty. The reasoning being that they can't collect the bounty if the ones who issued it in the first place are apes themselves.
Comic Books
- Ultimate Spider-Man has a rather inaccurate inverted example when Spidey encounters the new Scorpion... who looks just like him. He brings Scorpion to the Fantastic Four, and Reed finds that Scorpion's DNA is 94% similar to Spidey's. For comparison, that's how much humans and chimpanzees have in common DNA-wise. (Although he might be ignoring homo sapiens standard DNA, and only counting DNA that could be expected to vary from individual to individual.)
Films — Live-Action
- The Doom movie has an additional chromosome that caused people to become demons or superhumans depending on whether they're evil or good.
- Mission to Mars has a puzzle in the face on Mars involving human DNA. This movie has several DNA failures. In that scene, a character says, "That DNA looks human!" while looking at a few base pairs. Out of a few billion. Another scene in the movie has a character displaying his "dream woman" who, apparently, consists of only a few base pairs again. In this scene it was pretty obvious that Phil was just cracking wise when asked what the short segment in front of him represented. The scene was to set up the idea that Phil was very well-versed in biology so he would be believable when he identified the passcode gene.
- In Prometheus, it is revealed that the Engineers are a 100% match for human DNA, despite being ten-foot tall hairless albinos. Considering that we know very little about their environmental development, this is probably one of the most plausible bits of "science" in the entire film.
Literature
- The Abh from Crest of the Stars. Enemy propaganda says they are living robots. Their own propaganda says they are a superior race of living art. In reality, other than blue hair, Unusual Ears and a different organ in place of their sinuses, they're still human. Despite this the Abh themselves are far more advanced than the humans from Earth though and are quite arrogant about throwing their technology around in fight where they have overwhelming technological advantages.
- The Catians in Cat Planet Cuties reveal that the genetic difference between their race and humans is not even as large as 0.2%. There's only about a 0.00001% (One One-Hundred-Thousandth) genetic difference between the two species, and this plays a plot point later on.
Live Action TV
- Inverted on The Event. The people from the Inostranka crash have 2% different DNA from humans, and the president interprets this fact to mean that they're just like humans. His adviser informs him that they have less in common with humans than apes do (despite them looking exactly like us and eventually turning out to be our ancestors). This is used to argue that they don't deserve human rights, an idea which the president doesn't approve of.
- Referenced on House:
House: Oxygen saturation is 94%, check her heart.
Foreman: Her oxygen saturation is normal.
House: It's off by one percentage point.
Foreman: It's within range. It's normal.
House: If her DNA was off by one percentage point she'd be a dolphin.
Video Games
- In a rare non-human example of this trope, Mass Effect 2 has, during the Collector ship mission, the discovery that the Collectors you've been fighting are actually mutant Protheans, fair enough. Then you realize that the statues of Protheans you see in Mass Effect look absolutely nothing like Collectors, for one thing, Protheans look as if they're mammals, while Collectors are, as said before, Insectoid Aliens. However, in Mass Effect 3 DLC, you meet a Prothean, who looks a lot more like the Collectors, and it's implied that the aliens depicted in Mass Effect 1 weren't Protheans, but rather the precursors to the Protheans, called the Inusannon.
Real Life
- We share 75% of our known human disease genes with the fruit fly. Which is awesome, as we can experiment on them and not on us. A particularly weird bit of experimentation showed that injecting the gene product of the PAX6 gene (which is found in humans and other animals and turns on eye development) into fruit flies caused eyes to develop (functioning like the insect's version, appropriately called eyeless). The eye that developed was still an insect compound eye though, as the proteins that are expressed as a result of the gene being turned on are still proteins specific to forming an insect eye, not a mammal's eye. Which goes to show how important that other 25% is in terms of genetics.
- Genetically, mushrooms are closer relations to us than to plants. Also like us, fungi are heterotrophs, which means that they must 'eat' and can't make their own food like plants can. They also store energy as glycogen, as do animals and humans, as opposed to plants, which store it as starch. They also make their tissue out of chitin (the stuff in insect exoskeletons) rather than cellulose (the stuff in plants). In fact, fungi have more in common with sessile animals like sponges than they do with plants. This is true in cooking, as well; mushrooms are often treated less as vegetables and more as meat (and fungi can be used in meat-substitutes, such as TVP or portobello-burgers.)
- Dogs, Canis lupus familiaris, are a single subspecies of the gray wolf, Canis lupus, but have far greater physical differences from each other than any two species of the Canis genus.
- Jonathan Marks mocked this whole view in his book What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee (it was written before the chimpanzee genetic code was fully sequenced, and revealed to be closer to 99% identical to humans). He pointed out that, first of all, since there are only 4 base pairs, a random string of base pairs would be 25% identical to humans. Furthermore, simply because of common ancestry, almost all species on Earth are closer to us than that. He estimates that daffodils share 1/3 of our genetic material, but that saying a human being is "one third daffodil" would be ludicrous (and, by extension, saying we're "98% chimp" is ludicrous as well).
How sweet it is
#19: Mar 31st 2021 at 9:28:35 AM
Okay, page cut, idea yarded, now time to close.
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
PageAction:
OnlyPointTwoPercentDifferent
7th Mar '21 1:28:17 PM
Crown Description:
Only Point Two Percent Different isn't thriving despite being on the site since 2010. What should be done to fix it?
Total posts: 19
Only Point Two Percent Different has only 16 on-page examples (excluding Real Life) and 21 wicks, despite existing since before 2010. I think the Wiki Word is a bit long and awkward to type, and the description is bogged down by too much information about Real Life genetics. The wicks are:
Here are all of the wicks on character and work pages:
Foreman: Her oxygen saturation is normal.
House: It's off by one percentage point.
Foreman: It's within range. It's normal.
House: If her DNA was off by one percentage point she'd be a dolphin.