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For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.
Well, a myth repeated often in museums, textbooks, and nature documentaries that most people now accept just as dogma is that humans and chimpanzees share about 98 to 99 percent of our DNA. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., for example, cites that statistic in its human origins exhibit as confirmation that, quote, modern humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor between 8 and 6 million years ago, end quote. The only problem is that the statistic is just wrong, likely by an order of magnitude. Even more, the science community has known that it's wrong for quite a while now. And new methods of comparing the genomes of humans and great apes show just how genetically different the two are.
In fact, the cited 1 to 2% difference hasn't been defensible in years now. As far back as 2007, authors in the journal Science called on fellow researchers to retire the myth of 1%. Geologist Casey Luskin explained in a 2023 ID the Future podcast that the estimate was derived decades ago from a single, Protein-to-protein comparison before the chimp genome was even fully sequenced. And since then, genetic science has become far more precise, and almost no modern comparisons between human and chimp genomes yield the famous 98 to 99% statistic. In fact, more precise methods for comparing genomes show the actual difference between humans and chimps to be far higher than what is constantly quoted.
In April, a groundbreaking paper published in the journal Nature gives the complete sequences of various ape genomes not compiled using the human genome as a guide. As Evolution News put it, this data reveals that, and I quote, humans and chimps differ by at least 14%. It's a major revision of the old statistic, end quote. And Luskin, an associate director at the Center for Science and Culture, had to break the bombshell story because the comparison was, for some strange reason, buried deep in the 174-page-long supplementary data of the paper. The authors derived the new figure by using a different method called progressive cactus alignment.
which allowed them to compare human and ape genomes directly across their entire length. Which parts of the genome they compared affected the number of differences. As Luskin wrote, and I quote, only 84.95% of the nucleotides in the chimp genome had an identical one-to-one correspondence with the human genome. That yields a difference of just over 15%. And the diploid or paired chromosome alignment was even more dramatically divergent.
showing a difference of over 16% between humans and chimps. When sex chromosomes were analyzed, chimpanzee X chromosomes were over 20% different than ours. Y chromosomes were an astonishing 95% different. In an open letter to the Smithsonian, Luskin highlighted the research and urged them to correct the now debunked statistic in the human evolution exhibit. The number cited, he wrote, is, and I quote, no longer scientifically accurate, leaves the average reader with the false impression that there's only 1.2% genetic difference between modern humans and chimpanzees.
Given recent findings, however, the Smithsonian and other museums have no business claiming that DNA evidence strongly supports common ancestry, but no word yet on when the museum plans to correct their exhibit. Far from being settled science, this idea that humans are nearly genetically identical to apes is what author Jonathan Wells called an icon of evolution. These are images or concepts fixed in the public imagination which bias them toward Darwinian explanations. even long after science has moved on. Might also be called a zombie idea, which should be dead, but keeps moving around and causing problems.
Even more importantly, here, the assumptions that genetic resemblance between humans and animals means we must be evolved animals depends on genetic reductionism. In other words, the idea that we're merely the sum of our genes, which is itself a matter of materialistic faith. and misinterprets the substantive evidence for design in the human body and the clear differences. No matter the degree of genetic similarity, there remains, as Luskin put it, and I quote, a vast cognitive and behavioral gulf between humans and apes. Humans write scientific papers about chimpanzees.
It's never been the other way around. Humans compose music, create art, build cathedrals, use complex technologies. are religious, write symphonies, apes do not. And besides, biological similarity between humans and apes could be explained as the mark of common design. After all, every engineer knows that a good blueprint should be reused and repurposed.
We should expect living things to share similarities if they share a design, and an infinitely wise and creative designer. Look, it's time for this icon in particular to be retired. It's time for this zombie to be killed, finally. Repeating that something is settled science does not make it or its materialistic conclusions so. the Colson Center on John Stone Street with Breakpoint.
Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for a version of this commentary that you can print out and share with others online, go to breakpoint.org.
