On a different, yet similar, note from my post about River Phoenix, I thought about my deep feeling of connection with River Phoenix for some time and I have come to the consideration that perhaps when we feel strongly that we see ourselves in another person - their personality, their facial expressions, the way they display their emotions, even maybe similar physical features, too - maybe we literally are seeing a little bit of ourselves in them. We are a considerably homogenous genus (Homo) - there is only one of our species in existence anymore - sapiens. Other genuses have multiple species such as dogs/wolves - Canis familiaris (dog), Canis latrans (coyotes), Canis Lupis (wolf), Canis mesomelas (jackal). But us humans only have the one, Homo sapiens sapiens. Apparently, there were two other subspecies - archaic and neandertalensis as well as other Homo species. However, these species and subspecies all died out 30,000-1,600,000 years ago. Back to my point: we are a considerably homogenous genus/species. We are 98.4-99.4% identical in genetic sequence to chimpanzees. Uh-oh...I just ran into a snag in my thesis here - this paper that I just referred to for my sequence identity suggests that chimps should also be considered part of the Homo genus because of these identical sequences. Well, that really does throw a snag into my argument except I don't know how well-accepted that new classification is. I don't keep up with taxonomy or phylogeny research.
In any case, my point was more about how similar we are to each other - humans - and that we, therefore, easily share many of the very small variations in our DNA that give rise to our subtle differences in characteristics (which include personality, facial expressions and emotions as well as physical features that we can see or susceptibilities to diseases) even if we cannot easily connect our family lineages to each other. Therefore, I hope my train of thought is clear: maybe when I look at pictures of River Pheonix or watch him in movies or read interviews with him and I feel like I can see a little bit of myself in him...well, maybe there is a little bit of him in me, you know? Purely genetically speaking, of course.
If we agree with my suggestion above, the next obvious question is: what makes us the different beings that we are if we share nearly 100% of our DNA sequences with each other (it's somewhere in the 99.99% range, I think, although I would honestly need to do some research on that - but if Chimps are up to 99.4% identical to us in DNA sequence, then it's certainly higher than that in our similarities between individual humans)? It's an intriguing question - of course, it includes the assumption that our DNA determines who we are, which there is ample evidence that is not the case - take identical twins, for example - they have almost 100% identical DNA sequence (except the DNA in lymphocytes which need to change in order to produce the diversity of antibodies made in order to protect against exogenous agents in the body and mount an immune response) - they still have different personalities. - sometimes wildly different! We know that personalities are a combination of something innate (encoded in our DNA?) and experience - there are anecdotal cases of people who have almost complete amnesia and do not remember who they are or any of their memories but who still know how to talk, write, all motor skills - people from their life (who they knew before) describe that these people have somewhat different personalities from before they had the amnesia which suggests that your personality is shaped by your experiences and memories formed from them as well as whatever is innate.
Anyway, these are just thoughts, you know? I'll write more about the concepts of personality and what makes us who we are - our consciousness? - in a different post. Time to post this one!
If we agree with my suggestion above, the next obvious question is: what makes us the different beings that we are if we share nearly 100% of our DNA sequences with each other (it's somewhere in the 99.99% range, I think, although I would honestly need to do some research on that - but if Chimps are up to 99.4% identical to us in DNA sequence, then it's certainly higher than that in our similarities between individual humans)? It's an intriguing question - of course, it includes the assumption that our DNA determines who we are, which there is ample evidence that is not the case - take identical twins, for example - they have almost 100% identical DNA sequence (except the DNA in lymphocytes which need to change in order to produce the diversity of antibodies made in order to protect against exogenous agents in the body and mount an immune response) - they still have different personalities. - sometimes wildly different! We know that personalities are a combination of something innate (encoded in our DNA?) and experience - there are anecdotal cases of people who have almost complete amnesia and do not remember who they are or any of their memories but who still know how to talk, write, all motor skills - people from their life (who they knew before) describe that these people have somewhat different personalities from before they had the amnesia which suggests that your personality is shaped by your experiences and memories formed from them as well as whatever is innate.
Anyway, these are just thoughts, you know? I'll write more about the concepts of personality and what makes us who we are - our consciousness? - in a different post. Time to post this one!
