The announcement in June that scientists have compiled a "working draft" of the human genetic code merits celebration on several counts. In its sheer scope, the project is an intellectual achievement of millennial proportions. The information it yields promises to revolutionize the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease. Equally important, as President Clinton emphasized at the announcement ceremony, is its witness to our common humanity.
Biologists have long suspected that the vast majority of human genes are shared across the species. Early in the genome project, researchers determined that it didn't much matter whose genes they mapped -- despite differences of skin color, body type, gender and ability, the maps would be virtually identical.
As compelling as this evidence is, we would caution against oversimplifying its implications. The fraction of a percent of genes that aren't universal play a disproportionate role in defining our world. On the one hand, as basic building blocks of individual and group identity, they account for much of life's texture and, arguably, much of its meaning. On the other, they have inspired conquest, enslavement, misogyny, the Holocaust and the social construct of race itself.
Over time, human societies have evolved and clashed and fragmented as if our 99.9 percent shared inheritance didn't count for much. But against this dissonance, the idea of human oneness has persisted, like a biological memory. Religions enshrine it to varying degrees. Individuals grasp it through faculties such as empathy, love and conscience.
Thinkers in the interdisciplinary field of memetics assert that ideas resemble genes in their capacity for self-replication -- in this case, from mind to mind. These "external genes," called memes, proliferate through countless modes, including learning, pleasure, usefulness and fear. Many memes are short-lived, as in fads or false alarms. Others, like chess or a belief in UFOs, thrive in the narrow but well-tended niches of subcultures. Fire-building, family and deity are examples of memes with the deepest roots and broadest reach.
Global communication is charting what may turn out to be a "DNA" of common values, manifested in recognizably similar ways across cultures. Residents of Palo Alto, Calif., have adopted the Filipino meme of bayanihan to express their own spirit of cooperation and shared responsibility. Utne Reader recently introduced its audience to the meme of voluntary teamwork called talkoot, which Finnish villagers are using to resist the erosion of rural economy and culture. The Zulu meme of ubuntu is resonating in communities around the world with its premise that "a person is a person through other people."
The Human Genome Project lends scientific credence to a fact of life that the Oglala Lakota people have observed for centuries, not from decoded genes but from lived experience: Mitakuye oyasin -- "We are all related."