No, a New Paper Did NOT Discover Humans and Chimps are "Only 85% Similar"

[Dan_Eastwood]

Oops, yes, too late. Maybe she will come here to correct me?

[Dan_Eastwood]

@AllenWitmerMiller

(By the way, I’ve been surprised to get away with simian in front of some audiences—but many nowadays don’t know what the word means.)

They probably thought it was a synonym for something else.

[Art (Arthur Hunt)]

I think Martin Neukamm, a contributor to this discussion and to The Pandas Thumb, is quoted in this article. Perhaps Martin can give us some insight into the interaction with the author.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Art

I think it must be repeated over and over and over again - the important point, that confounds all the gyrations coming from the DI camp, is that the study being championed by the DI shows that chimp and human genomes are more similar than are two different gorilla genomes. It’s hard to spin this any other way than that chimps and humans share a common ancestry.

I wouldn’t be so sure. Separated from context, that could be spun as “According to scientists, a chimp and a human are more alike than a gorilla and another gorilla. This is the kind of nonsense that scientists have been getting away with saying. Thank God Trump will be putting an end to that.”

It has become evident that attacking the legitimacy of scientific authority itself is a major goal of the American far right movement. This better allows policy decisions to be driven by ideology alone. From its beginning the Discovery Institute has been exemplary of this tendency, even though its actual influence has been negligible.

[AnEvolvedPrimate]

I’ve never understood the mental gymnastics creationists undergo when rejecting 99% (or 96%) similarity, but somehow accepting 85% similarity. The latter is still mostly similar between humans and chimps.

Tomkins published an article on Answers in Genesis back in 2017 where he explains away similarity as being a result a creator reusing genetic sequences. He ends with claiming that “similarities don’t have anything to do with chimps evolving into humans.”

If similarities don’t matter then why do they care whether it’s 85%, 96%, or 99% similarity? The same rationale could apply regardless of absolute percentage.

The Untold Story Behind DNA Similarity

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Art

I think Martin Neukamm, a contributor to this discussion and to The Pandas Thumb, is quoted in this article. Perhaps Martin can give us some insight into the interaction with the author.

Let’s tag @Martin_Neukamm and see if he can be persuaded to comment.

[Martin_Neukamm]

Dear Art,
In fact, I had no contact whatsoever with the author. She merely quoted me, which was a pleasant surprise. Nevertheless, I do miss the reference to the fact that gap divergence in non-coding regions predominantly has no effect on the phenotype.

[GutsickGibbon (Erika, MRes Primate Biology, Behavior, Conservation)]

There are so many important points to remember in all this as popsci articles continue to come out.

1. We have known for many years that the alignment numbers are necessarily lower than the aligned sequence identity. In fact, previous estimates are not substantially different than in Yoo et al.

2. The human/human similarity by the alignment calculation drops to as low as 90%. That makes the ~85% much less impressive no?

3. As others have mentioned, the gorilla/gorilla alignment can be lower than the human/chimp alignment. This again underscores the reason why alignment numbers are not used when we ask “how similar are two organisms genetically”.

4. Casey Luskin grossly misrepresented at best (lied at worst) about this study, illuminating the motivations of the DI yet again.

Let’s hope their bullying doesn’t sway the Smithsonian. Normally I would say there’s not a chance but we live in strange times.