This is all true, but irrelevant to my point.
>> There is simply no zoological justification for removing humans from the ape clade, <<
Well, not if you define similarity based on common DNA. But evolutionary bottlenecks are the prime means by which two lineages are distinguished from each other. And when the two lineages are first separated, there will be a single nucleotide separating their DNA, while members of each group will have normal variations of untold thousands of nucleotides... it's just those differences won't be significant.
Hundreds of millions of years later, maybe that divergence will distinguish between two kingdoms. So what sort of differences are significant enough to justify a new clade? The ability to retain, evolve and advance societial knowledge from generation to generation? The ability to define evolutionary niches via wetware as opposed to hardcoded genes?
Comparing % differences among DNA is a proxy for the passage of time. If two species of cockroaches are nearly identical after 400 million years, are they more distantly related than trout are from people?
My references to using DNA as a proxy for relative passage of time was referring to individual nucleotides. I see from other posts you were referring to functional genes. In that case, two species of roaches, hundreds of millions of years removed will be more similar than fish and people. But I still maintain my point about how 1 genetic difference will be revolutionary, while others will have little effect and will not cause speciation.