Replies

A new addition to the Talk Origin Creationist Claim list.

Claim CB144. Human and chimp genomes differ by more than one percent.

For years, evolutionists have hailed the chimpanzee as "our closest living relative" and have pointed out that the DNA is 98 to 99 percent identical between the two. Scientists now say the difference is 4 percent, double what they have been claiming for years.

Source:

DeWitt, David A. 2005. Chimp genome sequence very different from man.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2005/0905chimp.asp

Response:

1. The difference between chimpanzees and humans due to single-nucleotide substitutions averages 1.23 percent, of which 1.06 percent or less is due to fixed divergence, and the rest being a result of polymorphism within chimp populations and within human populations. Insertion and deletion (indel) events account for another approximately 3 percent difference between chimp and human sequences, but each indel typically involves multiple nucleotides. The number of genetic changes from indels is a fraction of the number of single-nucleotide substitutions (roughly 5 million compared with roughly 35 million). So describing humans and chimpanzees as 98 to 99 percent identical is entirely appropriate (Chimpanzee Sequencing 2005).

2. The difference measurement depends on what you are measuring. If you measure the number of proteins for which the entire protein is identical in the two species, humans and chimpanzees are 29 percent identical (Chimpanzee Sequencing 2005). If you measure nonsynonymous base pair differences within protein coding regions, humans and chimps are 99.45 percent identical (Chen et al. 2001). Whatever measure is used, however, as long as the same measurement is used consistently, will show that humans are more closely related to chimpanzees (including the bonobo, sister species to the common chimpanzee) than to any other species.

References:

1. Chen, F.-C., E. J. Vallender, H. Wang, C.-S. Tzeng, and W.-H. Li. 2001. Genomic divergence between human and chimpanzee estimated from large-scale alignments of genomic sequences. _Journal of Heredity_ 92(6): 481-489.
2. Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium. 2005. Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome. _Nature_ 437: 69-87.

Thank you very much for finding this. I hope it clears up things for our little tempest in a teapot.

Great post. That sums it up in a nutshell.

Thank you for the ping! I have a question about the relationships between human and bonobo in relation to the common chimpanzee. What's the time-line for the splits between the three, etc.

Thank you for posting this. It appears some people cannot accept direct source but need it to be filtered from some outside politically correct clearing house known to be an official arm of their cult, such as t.o.

They'd have been drifitng in the ether without this official missive.