Science - Chimp DNA Fully Sequenced
Chimp DNA has been fully sequenced (previously draft sequenced a year or 2 ago) and compared with Human DNA. Not suprisingly, most of the news articles assume we evolved from apes. What is interesting is that it doesn't seem to matter just how different we are, it is still taken as good evidence for having a common ancestor (Can you say tunnel vision?). It doesn't seem to matter whether it is 1%, 2%, 4% or 5%. It is apparently all the same...we are obviously related. Some "scientists" go even further with their bold, pseudo-scientific pronouncements

"Darwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes—he didn't go far enough," said Frans de Waal, a primate scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. "We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament."

Apes in every way, well, except for the differences between hair and fur, that whole knuckle walking versus fully upright walking thing, abstract thought, morality, science, blushing, running and a host of other differences.

Maybe it was his mutation caused brain that made Frans make such an obviously wrong statement. Should we really trust our brains if they arose through copying mistakes?

Another interesting thing to note

Despite the similarities in human and chimp genomes, the scientists identified some 40 million differences among the three billion DNA molecules, or nucleotides, in each genome.

Since we apparently diverged from a common ancestor 6 million years ago, that is roughly 6.6 mutations per year that get fixed within the genome (or 3.3 per year if you divide them equally amongst the 2 branching species). Given a conservative estimate of average generational time of 10 years, this means that 33 new mutations had to be fixed within the population every generation.

This seems fairly high to me. The current human mutation rate is around 3 or 4 mutations per organism. It becomes a very messy math exercise to test whether this rate is even possible, but you can be sure of one thing - the evolutionists won't bother studying this scientific question unless they are pushed by those anti-science creationists who want to stop all science being done.

Update: Most of the news articles I read state the size of the chimp genome at 3 billion base pairs (BP) (the same number as humans are reported to have), yet checking into the actual values of the two species makes this claim of equal sized genomes as false. The human genome (homo sapiens) has a CV of 3.5, which equates to roughly 3.423 Billion BP. The chimp genome (pan troglodytes) has a CV of 3.76, which equates to roughly 3.6773 Billion BP. (although there is a range of CV figures from 3.63 to 3.85 - this range equates to 3.55 billion BP to 3.77 billion BP)

So at the outset, the chimpanzee genome has 250 (or taking the lowest of the range 122) MILLION additional base pairs over the human genome. So why is the difference only reported only 40 million? It seems the difference MUST be a lot higher than commonly referred to. This would also make the required mutation rate about 3 to 6 times higher as well.

Why is this never mentioned?
- posted by Alan Grey @ Thursday, September 01, 2005