Ended up posting this year to link to answer @Wayne_Rossiter’s claim on this blog post: Private Site.
As such, Richard Bugg, professor of evolutionary genomics at the University of London, decided to do the comparison, and found that, “The percentage of nucleotides in the human genome that had one-to-one exact matches in the chimpanzee genome was 84.38%” (a far cry from the presumed 98% similarity between chimps and humans). What’s really scary is that this is almost exactly the degree of similarity predicted by Jeffrey Tomkins, a young earth creationist scientist! BioLogians may have to lay down for that one. Again, clearly not what we would predict under Darwinian evolution and UCA.
This is from @Wayne_Rossiter, a biologist professor. I wrote back to him:
Rather than argue about flaws, try applying that analysis with a couple controls. Look at the mice-rate genome similarity (it will always be less than human-chimp, about 70% by Thompkin’s method). Look at human to human similarity (which will be about 89% by both Buggs’ and Thompkins method). If human-human similarity is about 89% and human chimp similarity is about 87%, that should tell you something. That is exactly what you see if you run those controls.
The exact numbers depend on precisely which one we are discussing. So WHY are their results so far off? Why do they fail the controls so badly? They have actually done it several times, getting it wrong in different ways each time. If you point me to he precise method, I’ll show you the error. It is pretty straightforward, usually, to pick out why.
The key thing is that they leave out positive and negative controls. Doing this, their results are just flat out wrong, and you can’t tell except by going into the labrynth of their explanations. Just run the controls too, and their numbers fall apart, both Thomkins and Buggs.
You, Dr. Rossiter, are a biologist, and I would expect you would know better. A computer programmer, with no biology training, He was so stunned by the claim, that he went to go measure it himself. His analysis is correct: Is 1% a myth? – roohif. If Glen can do it, I’m sure you could too. Once again, just put in the controls too (human-human and mice-rat), and you’ll have a better analysis. This isn’t the sort of thing you should rely on hearsay. The data and tools are freely available. Go check it yourself. Especially now that de novo Ape assemblies are available, you can directly check how valid Thompkins objection was. If it didn’t affect the answer much, you know his hypothesis is wrong.
About de novo genes in humans? That’s a myth too. Once again, you can go look at it yourself. Why not? James Tour on Orphan Genes
As far as not being consisting with “Darwinian evolution.” Well duh. Darwinian evolution doesn’t include neutral theory, and does not make predictions about the distance between humans and chimps. Neutral theory (non-Darwinian evolution) does make predictions, and these predictions are validated in spades: Common Descent: Humans and Chimps / Mice and Rats
You don’t have agree [with] mainstream science, but these are just the basic facts we are talking about here. You can go verify them yourself. You don’t have to take Buggs, Thompkins, or my word for it. Why not go check it out yourself?
And then I pointed him here. Hopefully he returns and can explain himself.