Apes and Humans Not So Close After All
Posted in Creation/Evolution on June 7th, 2007 by dhawkinsmo
“The conclusion is the old saw that we share 98.5% of our DNA sequence with chimpanzee is probably in error. For this sample, a better estimate would be that 95% of the base pairs are exactly shared between chimpanzee and human DNA.”
Roy J. Britten, California Institute of Technology, “Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels,” PNAS | October 15, 2002 | vol. 99 | no. 21 | 13633-13635
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/99/21/13633%20
For quite some time now, Darwinists have been quoting this “old saw” … “See how close chimps and humans are? Of course we share a common ancestor! Quit thumping your Bibles and start paying attention to Science!”
To which I reply, “Creationists are not thumping their Bibles. It seems that it is rather some Darwinian activists who are doing the ‘bible thumping’ and their ‘bibles’ include Darwin’s Origin of Species., atheist activist Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion among others.”
This preliminary study by Britten was confirmed by his later study with 3 colleagues and with a much larger sample 6 months later (Britten, et al. 2003) and by a Nature article in 2005. Interestingly, Britten wrote in his 2003 study that
Thus the 5% human-chimp difference already published (1) is likely to be an underestimate, possibly by more than a factor of 2.
Hmmm … so it’s possible that our differences are as high as 10%!! Read more »