Creation Moment 7/21/2024 - The 1% Myth

"We still commonly see statements that human and chimp DNA are ‘almost identical’, with only 1% difference claimed. For example, in a 2012 report on the sequencing of the other chimpanzee species, the bonobo:

“Ever since researchers sequenced the chimp genome in 2005, they have known that humans share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, making them our closest living relatives.”

And this was not from some disreputable source, but from the publishers of Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Science is considered one of the top two science journals in the world (the other is Nature from the UK).

---The original 1% claim goes back to 1975.2 This was a long time

before a direct comparison of the individual ‘letters’ (base pairs) of human and chimp DNA was possible—the first draft of the human DNA was not published until 2001 and for the chimp it was 2005. The 1975 figure came from crude comparisons of very limited stretches of human and chimp DNA that had been pre-selected for similarity. The chimp and human DNA strands were then checked for how much they stuck to each other—a method called DNA hybridization.

Q: Would a 1% difference be ‘almost identical’?
A: The human genome has about 3,000 million ‘letters’. If the 1% figure were correct, this would amount to 30 million letters difference, which would take 10 Bible-sized books to print. This is 50 times as much DNA as the simplest bacterium. This is actually a huge difference that far exceeds the ability of even the most optimistic evolutionary scenarios to create, even given the claimed millions of years.

Q: What is the real difference?
A: In 2007 Science published an article on the similarity of human and chimp DNA titled, “Relative differences: the myth of 1%”. Author Jon Cohen queried the continued use of the 1% figure, citing comparisons following the publication of the draft chimp DNA sequence of around 5% difference. And yet the 1% myth is perpetuated in 2012 in the same journal.

Illustrating how wrong this is, in 2012 Drs Jeffrey Tomkins and Jerry Bergman reviewed the published studies comparing human and

chimp DNA.5 When all the DNA is taken into account and not just pre-selected parts, they found,
“it is safe to conclude that human-chimp genome similarity is not more than ~87% identical, and possibly not higher than 81%.”
In other words, the differences are huge, possibly greater than 19%. Indeed, Dr Tomkins made his own thorough comparison and found the difference to be ~30%. Also, the Y-chromosomes, found only in males, are radically different, contrary to evolutionists’ expectations.

The large difference does not tally with evolutionary expectations but it is consistent with us being created separately from the animals. God made the first man from dust (then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. Genesis 2:7) and the first woman from his rib (And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Genesis 2:22), not from any ape-like creature. And humans, unlike other creatures, were made in the image of God 

(Then 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 birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. Genesis 1:26, 27), a special creation." 

CMI