And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. Genesis 1:24
Early studies, using crude techniques and based on a small fraction of the genetic code, led to claims of 97% to 99% similarity, depending on who was telling the story.
---However, with the chimp DNA now decoded, the similarity when all the DNA is included is not more than 87% and arguably below 70% .
Q: What if human and chimp DNA were, say, 98% homologous?
Q: Would it mean that humans could have evolved from a common ancestor with chimps?
A: Not at all.
DNA carries its information in the sequence of four chemical compounds known as nucleotides, abbreviated C, G, A, T.
Groups of three at a time of these chemical ‘letters’ are ‘read’ by complex translation machinery in the cell to determine the sequence of amino acids, of which there are 20 different types, to be incorporated into proteins.
The human DNA has 3 billion nucleotides. The amount of information in these 3 billion base pairs in the DNA of every human cell has been compared to that in 1,000 books of 500 pages each.
---So, if humans were ‘only’ 2% different, this still amounts to 60 million base pairs, equivalent to about 20 large books of information. Even this is an impossible barrier for mutations (random changes) to cross, even given the several million years claimed as the time available for this to happen."
CMI