And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. Genesis 1:26
"Recently, Business Insider repeated another Darwin myth in bold letters, saying, “Our DNA is 99.9% the same as the person next to us — and we’re surprisingly similar to a lot of other living things.” The article begins with a photo of primate scientist Jane Goodall kissing a chimpanzee. It goes on to push Darwinism with a list of similarities, using animated illustrations and bold print:
- The genetic similarity between a human and a human is 99.9%
- The genetic similarity between a human and a chimpanzee is 96%
- The genetic similarity between a human and a cat is 90%
- The genetic similarity between a human and a mouse is 85%
- The genetic similarity between a human and a cow is 80%
- The genetic similarity between a human and a fruit fly is 61%
- The genetic similarity between a human and a chicken is 60%
- The genetic similarity between a human and a banana is 60%
---On examination, is it not the absurd to conclude that we are as evolutionary distant from a chicken as from a banana?
---And yet, when one reads the fine print, the article admits problems such as the mice-to-humans 85%-similar comparison is for protein-encoding genes only.
For non-protein coding genes, the number is only about 50%. This qualification was not noted, but should have been, for the human-to-chimp comparison which was highlighted. Readers seeing the bold headline and scanning the list will probably miss that important fact.
The 1% Claim Shattered
This claim has long been shattered by research. An article in the American’s leading science magazine Science proclaimed “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%.”
The article was not published this year, after the books and articles repeated the myth, but in 2007, thirteen years ago! The author explained the one percent claim was known to be problematic from the beginning of its life:
When King and the rest of the researchers in the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium firstFurther research revealed many more differences: “the December 2006 issue of PLoS ONE, Hahn and co-workers reported that human and chimpanzee gene copy numbers differ by a whopping 6.4%.”
detailed the genome of our closest relative in 2005, they simultaneously provided … the most dramatic evidence of its limitations. The consortium researchers aligned 2.4 billion bases from each species and came up with a 1.23% difference. However, as the chimpanzee consortium noted, the figure reflects only base substitutions, not the many stretches of DNA that have been inserted or deleted in the genomes. The chimp consortium [only] calculated … these “indels.”
Then it was systematically determined “by applying systems biology to quantifying and analyzing genetic differences between human and chimpanzee brains. … [Working with] UCLA biostatistician Steve Horvath, Geschwind compared which of 4000 genes were turned on at the same time, or “coexpressed,” in specific regions of the dissected brains. With these data, they built gene networks for each species.” They concluded that “A gene’s position in a network has huge implications [rendering the percent similarity very limited].”
Genes that are coexpressed most frequently with other genes were found to have the most functional relevance.
Then it was revealed in a 2006 article that “Comparisons of the map of each cluster’s network in each species plainly showed that certain connections exist in humans but not chimps. In the cortex, for example, 17.4% of the connections were specific to humans.”
......quote the 2007 article which correctly asked:
Could researchers combine all of what’s known and come up with a precise percentage difference between humans and chimpanzees? “I don’t think there’s any way to calculate a number,” says geneticist Svante Pääbo, a chimp consortium member based at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “In the end, it’s a political and social and cultural thing about how we see our differences.”This was well put and should have been listened to thirteen years ago. Svante Pääbo is correct: “In the end, it’s a political and social and cultural thing about how we see our differences.” The one percent claim is not science, but a gross distortion of science for political purposes. As a result the article added “today we take as a given that the two species are genetically 99% the same.” They added, “the 1% truism should be retired.” For the last thirteen years, Darwinists have ignored this sage advice.
Here’s another fallacy: one cannot glean meaningful comparisons between the common occurrence of DNA sequences existing only in humans, but not in chimps.
Thus, the comparisons made are largely within the genic regions DNA, such as those that code for blood cell proteins like
*Another thing to beware of is that protein-coding genes can produce many different individual messenger RNA variants due to alternative splicing. For example, over a million protein varieties can be made from only 30,000 or fewer genes, which is close to the number of genes estimated to exist in humans. Many of these variants are produced through epigenetic mechanisms.
So in spite of their similarities, human genes and chimpanzee genes can produce major differences in proteins.
The epigenetic differences between humans and chimps is likely far greater than gene differences. These few points illustrate the fact that a chasm exists between human and chimp genotypes, which helps to explain the chasm existing between humans and chimp phenotypes."
CEH/Jerry Bergman, PhD
