Splatulance t1_isia4bj wrote
Reply to comment by promonk in When it's said 99.9% of human DNA is the same in all humans, is this referring to only coding DNA or both coding and non-coding DNA combined? by PeanutSalsa
Typically the question of variance comes down to an aggregate statistic. The most common is "the maximum likelihood estimate", which for a normal enough distribution (bell curve) is the mean.
It's called maximum likelihood because most of x is most likely to be close to the mean.
The more samples you have, the more genomes in this case, the better you can estimate the actual average. With enough samples the actual population mean is overwhelmingly likely to be the same as your estimate.
If the vast majority of people have 99% identical whatever, that's a very tightly grouped distribution around the mean with very low variance. It's practically a vertical line instead of a curve.
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