While many evolutionists proclaim that human DNA is 98% identical to chimpanzee DNA, few would lie by idly and allow themselves to receive a transplant using chimpanzee organs. As a matter of fact, American doctors tried using chimp organs in the 1960s, but in all cases the organs were totally unsuitable. The claim of 98% similarity between chimpanzees and humans is not only deceptive and misleading, but also scientifically incorrect. Today, scientists are finding more and more differences in DNA from humans and chimps. For instance, a 2002 research study proved that human DNA was at least 5% different from chimpanzees—and that number probably will continue to grow as we learn all of the details about human DNA (Britten, 2002).
Quote mining is a dishonest practice used by many Creationists. The so called "quote" you provided was first posted by Harun Yahya, a fundamental Muslim Creationist known for twisting scientific papers and quoting out of context.
Roy Britten, is a well known evolutionary biologist.
"Five chimpanzee bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) sequences (described in GenBank) have been compared with the best matching regions of the human genome sequence to assay the amount and kind of DNA divergence. The conclusion is the old saw that we share 98.5% of our DNA sequence with chimpanzee is probably in error. For this sample, a better estimate would be that 95% of the base pairs are exactly shared between chimpanzee and human DNA. In this sample of 779 kb, the divergence due to base substitution is 1.4%, and there is an additional 3.4% difference due to the presence of indels. The gaps in alignment are present in about equal amounts in the chimp and human sequences.
Note also, though, that evolution has not been uniform throughout the genomes, so estimates of human-chimp divergence which consider only part of the genome can give different results (Britten 2002, Chen et al. 2001).
"It has long been held that we share 98.5 per cent of our genetic material with our closest relatives. That now appears to be wrong. In fact, we share less than 95 per cent of our genetic material, a three-fold increase in the variation between us and chimps.
The new value came to light when Roy Britten of the California Institute of Technology became suspicious about the 98.5 per cent figure. Ironically, that number was originally derived from a technique that Britten himself developed decades ago at Caltech with colleague Dave Kohne. By measuring the temperature at which matching DNA of two species comes apart, you can work out how different they are.
But the technique only picks up a particular type of variation, called a single base substitution. These occur whenever a single "letter" differs in corresponding strands of DNA from the two species.
But there are two other major types of variation that the previous analyses ignored. "Insertions" occur whenever a whole section of DNA appears in one species but not in the corresponding strand of the other. Likewise, "deletions" mean that a piece of DNA is missing from one species.
Together, they are termed "indels", and Britten seized his chance to evaluate the true variation between the two species when stretches of chimp DNA were recently published on the internet by teams from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and from the University of Oklahoma.
When Britten compared five stretches of chimp DNA with the corresponding pieces of human DNA, he found that single base substitutions accounted for a difference of 1.4 per cent, very close to the expected figure.
But he also found that the DNA of both species was littered with indels. His comparisons revealed that they add around another 4.0 per cent to the genetic differences.
"We're not any more different than we were," says Britten. "But we see a bit more divergence than before because insertions and deletions are taken into account. It almost triples the difference."
The result is only based on about one million DNA bases out of the three billion which make up the human and chimp genomes, says Britten. "It's just a glance," he says.
But the differences were equally split between "junk" regions that do not have any genes, and gene-rich parts of the genome, suggesting they may be evenly distributed.
Britten thinks it will be some time before we know what it is about our genes that makes us so different from chimps. He thinks the real secrets could lie in "regulatory" regions of DNA that control whole networks of genes. "It'll be a while before we understand them," he says"
Journal reference:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Human-chimp DNA difference trebled - 23 September 2002 - New Scientist
