Human-Chimp Genome Similarities Investigated

morgueFile/hotblack

EDIT: The link at the end of this post is now out of date and in dispute. See "A Fresh Look at Human-Chimp DNA Similarity" and "New Study Indicates Chimp DNA is 88% Similar to Human DNA". Further research is planned.

Some of us have believed for a long time that these are exciting times for creationists. The evidence supports creation, despite screeching to the contrary.

Evidence refuting evolution is accumulating, and sloppy science (as well as unethical practices) of Darwin's Cheerleaders is coming to light. For example, that alleged huge simian similarity between humans and chimpanzees? The biases of evolutionary scientists caused selective citing and extremely misleading results. (By the way, even if the similarities were indeed very high, that is not proof of evolution. Instead, it shows a Designer using efficient methods.) This paper was released at the end of December, 2011. Here, take a good, hard look:

To provide a fresh and less-biased global set of analyses, large-scale comparative DNA sequence alignments between the chimpanzee and human genomes were performed with the BLASTN algorithm. One group of experiments was conducted with query and subject low-complexity sequence masking enabled while the second set had masking parameters disabled. Each group of sub-experiments tested fifteen combinations of three different word sizes (7, 11, and 15) and five different e-values (1000, 10, 0.1, 0.001, and 0.00001) for a total of 1.2 million attempted genome-wide alignments. Individual BLASTN query jobs each involved a data set of 40,000 chimpanzee whole genome shotgun sequences (WGSS) obtained from the National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI) and queried against four different human genome assemblies (GRCH37, GRCH36, Alternate SNP Assembly, and the Celera Assembly).

The use of low complexity sequence masking had the effect of decreasing computational time about 5–6 fold, lengthening the alignments slightly, lowering the number of database hits, and lowering the percent nucleotide identity slightly. Depending on the BLASTN parameter combination, average sequence identity for the 30 separate experiments between human and chimp varied between 86 and 89%. The average chimp query sequence length was 740 bases and depending on the BLASTN parameter combination, average alignment length varied between 121 and 191 bases.

You can read the rest of the article by geneticist Jeffrey Tomkins, entitled "Genome-Wide DNA Alignment Similarity (Identity) for 40,000 Chimpanzee DNA Sequences Queried against the Human Genome is 86–89 Percent", here.