Mahir Adnan
Esteemed Member
- Messages
- 105
- Reaction score
- 0
- Gender
- Male
- Religion
- Islam
Atheists claim that chimp and human possess 98% similar DNA. But truth is,there lies a huge difference. Because, calculation of percentage is not accurate.
Imperfect Calculation
A review by Gagneux and Varki describes a list of genetic differences between humans and the great apes. The differences include ‘cytogenetic differences, differences in the type and number of repetitive genomic DNA and transposable elements, abundance and distribution of endogenous retroviruses, the presence and extent of allelic polymorphisms, specific gene inactivation events, gene sequence differences, gene duplications, single nucleotide polymorphisms, gene expression differences, and messenger RNA splicing variations
(Gagneux, P. and Varki, A. 2001. ‘Genetic differences between humans and great apes.’ Mol Phylogenet Evol 18:2–13.)
Specific examples of these differences include:
- At the end of each chromosome is a string of repeating DNA sequences called a telomere. Chimpanzees and other apes have about 23 kilobases
(a kilobase is 1,000 base pairs of DNA) of repeats. Humans are unique among primates with much shorter telomeres only 10 kilobases long.
( Kakuo, S., Asaoka, K. and Ide, T. 1999. ‘Human is a unique species among primates in terms of telomere length.’ Biochem Biophys Res Commun 263:308–314.) - While 18 pairs of chromosomes are ‘virtually identical’, chromosomes 4, 9 and 12 show evidence of being ‘remodeled.’5 In other words, the genes and markers on these chromosomes are not in the same order in the human and chimpanzee. Instead of ‘being remodeled’ as the evolutionists suggest, these could, logically, also be intrinsic differences because of a separate creation. (Gibbons, A. 1998. ‘Which of our genes make us human?’ Science 281:1432–1434.)
- The Y chromosome in particular is of a different size and has many markers that do not line up between the human and chimpanzee.
( Archidiacono, N., Storlazzi, C.T., Spalluto, C., Ricco, A.S., Marzella, R., Rocchi, M. 1998. ‘Evolution of chromosome Y in primates.’ Chromosoma 107:241–246.) - Scientists have prepared a human-chimpanzee comparative clone map of chromosome 21 in particular. They observed ‘large, non-random regions of difference between the two genomes.’ They found a number of regions that ‘might correspond to insertions that are specific to the human lineage.
( Fujiyama, A., Watanabe, H., Toyoda, A., Taylor, T.D., Itoh, T., Tsai, S.F., Park, H.S., Yaspo, M.L., Lehrach, H., Chen, Z., Fu, G., Saitou, N., Osoegawa, K., de Jong, P.J., Suto, Y., Hattori, M., and Sakaki, Y. 2002. ‘Construction and analysis of a Human-Chimpanzee Comparative Clone Map.’ Science 295:131–134.)
These types of differences are not generally included in calculations of percent DNA similarity.
Impossible to Calculate Accurately
A 2007 essay in the journal Science, "Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%," says this:
Could all of what’s known and come up with a precise percentage difference between humans and chimpanzees? "I don’t think there’s any way to calculate a number," says geneticist Svante P��bo, a chimp consortium member based at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "In the end, it’s a political and social and cultural thing about how we see our differences." [Emphasis added.] for details : http://science.sciencemag.org/content/316/5833/1836.summary
Probable Similarity
Geneticist Richard
Buggs has explained, the genetic similarity between humans and chimps may be even lower than 95%:
"To compare the two [human and chimpanzee] genomes, the first thing we must do is to line up the parts of each genome that are similar. When we do this alignment, we discover that only 2400 million of the human genome’s 3164.7 million “letters” align with the chimpanzee genome — that is, 76% of the human genome. Some scientists have argued that the 24% of the human genome that does not line up with the chimpanzee genome is useless “junk DNA.” However, it now seems that this DNA could contain over 600 protein-coding genes, and also code for functional RNA molecules.
Looking closely at the chimpanzee-like 76% of the human genome, we find that to make an exact alignment, we often have to introduce artificial gaps in either the human or the chimp genome. These gaps give another 3% difference. So now we have a 73% similarity between the two genomes.
In the neatly aligned sequences we now find another form of difference, where a single “letter” is different between the human and chimp genomes. These provide another 1.23% difference between the two genomes. Thus, the percentage difference is now at around 72%.
We also find places where two pieces of human genome align with only one piece of chimp genome, or two pieces of chimp genome align with one piece of human genome. This “copy number variation” causes another 2.7% difference between the two species. Therefore the total similarity of the genomes could be below 70%. " http://www.refdag.nl/chimpanzee_1_282611
Is 95% Similarity Possible?
Haldane problem
The famous evolutionary geneticist J.B.S. Haldane (1892–1964) was one of the three founders of the field of study known as population genetics. Haldane articulated a serious problem for evolutionary theory in a seminal paper in 1957—the ‘cost of substitution’.
( Haldane, J.B.S., The cost of natural selection, J. Genetics 55:511–524.)
When a beneficial mutation occurs in a population, it has to increase in the number of copies for the population to progress evolutionarily (if the mutation remained in one individual, then evolution cannot proceed; this is fairly obvious). In other words, it has to substitute for the non-mutated genes in the population. But the rate at which this can happen is limited. A major factor limiting the rate of substitution is the reproduction rate of the species. For a human-like creature with a generation time of about 20 years and low reproduction rate per individual, the rate of growth in numbers of a mutation in a population will be exceedingly slow. This is basically the ‘cost of substitution’.
Imagine a population of 100,000 apes, the putative progenitors of humans. Suppose that a male and a female both received a mutation so beneficial that they out-survived everyone else; all the rest of the population died out—all 99,998 of them. And then the surviving pair had enough offspring to replenish the population in one generation. And this repeated every generation (every 20 years) for 10 million years, more than the supposed time since the last common ancestor of humans and apes. That would mean that 500,000 beneficial mutations could be added to the population (i.e., 10,000,000/20). Even with this completely unrealistic scenario, which maximizes evolutionary progress, only about 0.02% of the human genome could be generated. Considering that the difference between the DNA of a human and a chimp, our supposed closest living relative, is greater than 5%,2 evolution has an obvious problem in explaining the origin of the genetic information in a creature such as a human.
