Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of Unchanging

Truth, for the Colson Center on John Stone Street.

Certain ideas just won't die, no matter how often or thoroughly they're debunked.

Most of us, for example, have heard some scientist journalist teacher or entertainer claim

that human beings and chimpanzees share about 98 to 99% of DNA.

That statistic is an example of what molecular biologist Jonathan Wells has called an icon

of evolution, or zombie science.

The often unstated implications of this undead statistic is that humans and chimps obviously

evolved from a common ancestor, and that were still on a biological level, mostly the

same.

The only problem is, the statistic isn't true.

In a recent discussion on the Discovery Institute's ID, the Future Podcast, Geologist Casey

Luskin explained that the original 98 to 99% figure was derived from a single protein-to-protein

comparison before the CHEMP genome was fully sequenced, since then we've gained a great

deal more precision.

According to Luskin, humans and chimps have about 35 million single base-paragenetic differences

and 5 million insertion deletion differences.

Humans also have 689 unique genes that aren't found in CHEMPs, and while there are different

ways of quantifying these differences, almost none of these ways yield that famous 98 to 99%

number.

2018, Queen Mary University of London Evolutionary Geneticis, Richard Bugs, performed a 1-to-1 analysis

of human and CHEMP nucleotides.

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