Re: CB144: Human and chimp genomes differ by more than one percent.

Mark Isaak wrote:

> Here is a revision. I don't think I made any changes to paragraph 1,
> certainly nothing major. Paragraph 2 is new. I considered adding a
> reference to Britten's 5% difference estimate, but I could not figure
> out where it would fit in or why it is needed.
>
> --------------------------
>
> Claim CB144. Human and chimp genomes differ by more than one percent.
>
> For years, evolutionists have hailed the chimpanzee as "our closest
> living relative" and have pointed out that the DNA is 98 to 99 percent
> identical between the two. Scientists now say the difference is 4
> percent, double what they have been claiming for years.
>
> Source:
>
> DeWitt, David A. 2005. Chimp genome sequence very different from man.
> http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2005/0905chimp.asp
>
> Response:
>
> 1. The difference between chimpanzees and humans due to
> single-nucleotide substitutions averages 1.23 percent, of which 1.06
> percent or less is due to fixed divergence, and the rest being a
> result of polymorphism within chimp populations and within human
> populations. Insertion and deletion (indel) events account for
> another approximately 3 percent difference between chimp and human
> sequences, but each indel typically involves multiple nucleotides.
> The number of genetic changes from indels is a fraction of the number
> of single-nucleotide substitutions (roughly 5 million compared with
> roughly 35 million). So describing humans and chimpanzees as 98 to 99
> percent identical is entirely appropriate (Chimpanzee Sequencing
> 2005).

Memo to Steve Shaffner: is this really the way this paper is supposed to
be cited? It seems so weird.

> 2. The difference measurement depends on what you are measuring. If
> you measure the number of proteins for which the entire protein is
> identical in the two species, humans and chimpanzees are 29 percent
> identical (Chimpanzee Sequencing 2005). If you measure nonsynonymous
> base pair differences within protein coding regions, humans and chimps
> are 99.45 percent identical (Chen et al. 2001). Whatever measure is
> used, however, as long as the same measurement is used consistently,
> will show that humans are more closely related to chimpanzees
> (including the bonobo, sister species to the common chimpanzee) than
> to any other species.
>
> References:
>
> 1. Chen, F.-C., E. J. Vallender, H. Wang, C.-S. Tzeng, and W.-H. Li.
> 2001. Genomic divergence between human and chimpanzee estimated from
> large-scale alignments of genomic sequences. _Journal of Heredity_
> 92(6): 481-489.
> 2. Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium. 2005. Initial
> sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human
> genome. _Nature_ 437: 69-87.

Good. You might want to mention that the old 98.5% figure comes from the
DNA hybridization experiments of Sibley & Ahlquist. It refers to the
mean sequence difference among those short segments (~500bp) of the
single-copy genome (repetitive elements removed) that are similar enough
to hybridize. Though that turns out to be pretty close to the figure you
get from the entire genome.

.

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