Bizzare Facts

It sounds like a setup for a joke: 'Why are you acting like a banana? Because we share 60% of the same DNA!' But it is a genuine biological fact. **Humans** and **bananas** share approximately **60%** of their genetic code. This does not mean you are half-fruit; rather, it underscores a profound truth: all life on Earth shares a common ancestry and uses the same fundamental biological toolkit to survive.

The genes we share with bananas are largely what scientists call 'housekeeping genes'—the essential instructions for basic cellular functions like replicating DNA, controlling the cell cycle, repairing damage, producing proteins, and metabolizing nutrients. Whether you are a human or a banana plant, your cells need to perform these same fundamental tasks to stay alive. Evolution is efficient; once it finds a gene or protein that works well for a critical process, it tends to keep it and pass it down through billions of years of evolutionary divergence.

To put this in perspective, humans share about 98-99% of their DNA with chimpanzees, 85% with mice, and 60% with bananas. The further back in evolutionary time you go, the lower the percentage of shared DNA, but even a banana plant is part of our extended family tree, branching off from a common ancestor roughly 1.5 billion years ago.