"One year following Watson and Crick’s Nobel ceremony, chemist Emile Zuckerkandl observed that the protein sequence of hemoglobin in humans and the gorilla differed by only 1 out of 287 amino acids. Zuckerkandl noted: “From the point of view of hemoglobin structure, it appears that the gorilla is just an abnormal human, or man an abnormal gorilla, and the two species form actually one continuous population” (1963, p. 247). "
"Jonathan Marks, (department of anthropology, University of California, Berkeley) has pointed out the often-overlooked problem with this “similarity” line of thinking."
"Because DNA is a linear array of those four bases—A,G,C, and T—only four possibilities exist at any specific point in a DNA sequence. The laws of chance tell us that two random sequences from species that have no ancestry in common will match at about one in every four sites. Thus even two unrelated DNA sequences will be 25 percent identical, not 0 percent identical (2000, p. B-7).
Therefore a human and any earthly DNA-based life form must be at least 25% identical. Would it be correct, then, to state that daffodils are “one-quarter human”? The idea that a flower is one-quarter human is neither profound nor enlightening; it is outlandishly ridiculous! There is hardly any biological comparison that could be conducted that would make daffodils human—except perhaps DNA. Marks went on to concede: Moreover, the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative differences among genomes.... Thus, even among such close relatives as human and chimpanzee, we find that the chimp’s genome is estimated to be about 10 percent larger than the human’s; that one human chromosome contains a fusion of two small chimpanzee chromosomes; and that the tips of each chimpanzee chromosome contain a DNA sequence that is not present in humans (B-7, emp. added).
The truth is, if we consider the absolute amount of genetic material when comparing primates and humans, the 1-2% difference in DNA represents approximately 80 million different nucleotides (compared to the 3-4 billion nucleotides that make up the entire human genome). To help make this number understandable, consider the fact that if evolutionists had to pay you one penny for every nucleotide in that 1-2% difference between the human and the chimp, you would walk away with $800,000. Given those proportions, 1-2% does not appear so small, does it? "
"One of the downfalls of previous molecular genetic studies has been the limit at which chimpanzees and humans could be compared accurately. Scientists often would use only 30 or 40 known proteins or nucleic acid sequences, and then from those extrapolate their results for the entire genome. Today, however, we have the majority of the human genome sequences, practically all of which have been released and made public. This allows scientists to compare every single nucleotide base pair between humans and primates—something that was not possible prior to the human genome project. In January 2002, a study was published in which scientists had constructed and analyzed a first-generation human chimpanzee comparative genomic map. This study compared the alignments of 77,461 chimpanzee bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) end sequences to human genomic sequences. Fujiyama and colleagues “detected candidate positions, including two clusters on human chromosome 21, that suggest large, nonrandom regions of differences between the two genomes” (2002, 295:131). In other words, the comparison revealed some “large” differences between the genomes of chimps and humans.
Amazingly, the authors found that only 48.6% of the whole human genome matched chimpanzee nucleotide sequences. [Only 4.8% of the human Y chromosome could be matched to chimpanzee sequences.] This study compared the alignments of 77,461 chimpanzee sequences to human genomic sequences obtained from public databases. Of these, 36,940 end sequences were unable to be mapped to the human genome (295:131). Almost 15,000 of those sequences that did not match human sequences were speculated to “correspond to unsequenced human regions or are from chimpanzee regions that have diverged substantially from humans or did not match for other unknown reasons” (295:132). While the authors noted that the quality and usefulness of the map should “increasingly improve as the finishing of the human genome sequence proceeds” (295:134), the data already support what creationists have said for years—the 98-99% figure representing DNA similarity is grossly misleading, as revealed in a study carried out by Roy Britten of the California Institute of Technology (see Britten, 2002). .."
REFERENCES:
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Lyons, Eric and Bert Thompson (2002b), “In the ‘Image and Likeness of God’ [Part II],” Reason & Revelation, 22:25-31, April.
REFERENCES
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