ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.

Welcome to ID the Future.

I'm your host today, Emily Reeves.

I'm excited to be joined by Dr. Casey Luskin, who holds a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg

and a law degree from the University of San Diego.

Casey is also knowledgeable about evolutionary biology, having studied it extensively during his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of California at San Diego.

He has also written extensively on the topic of human origins and has continued to engage with the field for the past 20 years, making him a well-informed voice on this subject.

So welcome, Casey, and maybe you can share just a few words about your personal interest in human origins and human chimps similarity before we dive into today's topic.

Yeah, thank you so much, Emily, for having this conversation. And yeah, I've been interested in the topic of human origins for a long time.

My PhD research was not on human origins, but while I lived in South Africa,

doing my PhD, I had quite a few opportunities to go to some of the fossil sites that had

some of these very famous hominid fossils. But increasingly, I think that I've become interested

in the genetic aspect of human origins. Wrote a review of it in 2021 for Revolution News.

In 2022, published a chapter in a South African academic book

that sort of looked at attempts to compare the degree of genetic similarity

between chimpanzees and humans.

And what I discovered is that one of the issues that has hampered

attempts to come up with an accurate measure

of the degree of human chimp genetic similarity is the fact that many previous drafts of the

chip genome used the human genome as like a scaffolding when they constructed the drafts of the

chimp genome. And this made the chimp genomes appear more human-like than they actually are.

And so this new nature paper that I think we're going to talk about is really excited because they now have a de novo or from scratch draft of the chimp genome,

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