The birthday paradox arises because with N people, there are N^2 possible pairings of people for birthday collisions, and thus the number of people required for a collision scales as sqrt(D), an unexpected result.

But here, there aren't N^2 possible pairings since each researcher would still just be studying 1 gene. So this is really as surprising as the article claims.

Aka a birthday “paradox”:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-birth...

“23 people. In a room of just 23 people there’s a 50-50 chance of two people having the same birthday. ”