Lies evolutionists tell: Human and chimp DNA are 98% similar

People who militantly defend evolution (AKA evolutionists) like to look down their noses on the “lay” public and smugly drone on about how science is the key to knowledge, how evolution is the most rigorously tested theory in science, and how they only go where the evidence leads. If that were true, why do they feel the need to tell lies to support their theory? I'm not talking about a mere difference of opinion – like how I believe the earth is around 6,000 years old and they think it's 4 billion years old. I'm talking about continuously repeating things that are objectively false. The sad thing is, many members of the public have heard these lies repeated so often, they assume they are true.

I've written series in the past where I list 5 or 10 of some of the most egregious examples but I'm not going to write a series now. Instead, I'm going to visit this topic from time to time and make each, entire post about a single lie. If you want to read all the posts published under this topic, click “lies evolutionists tell” in the label cloud in the left column.

Have said that, on to the next lie!

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#2 Human and chimp DNA are 98% similar

When lay people are told human and chimp DNA are 98% similar, they assume it means the entire genomes are 98% similar. Evolutionists, of course, are happy to perpetuate that misunderstanding. For example, here's a quote from Scientific American:

In 1871 Charles Darwin surmised that humans were evolutionarily closer to the African apes than to any other species alive. The recent sequencing of the gorilla, chimpanzee and bonobo genomes confirms that supposition and provides a clearer view of how we are connected: chimps and bonobos in particular take pride of place as our nearest living relatives, sharing approximately 99 percent of our DNA.

I've always said that creationists don't ignore the evidence. Take fossils, for example. Both creationists and evolutionists have different ideas about how and when most fossils formed but the fossils themselves are real. When we say the fossils aren't evidence for evolution, we're not “ignoring” the fossils – we're disagreeing with certain conclusions about the fossils made by secular scientists.

What, then, am I supposed to do with this oft-repeated claim that human and chimp DNA is 98% similar? Actually, I've heard estimates ranging from 95-99%, which should have been a clue that the exact similarity really isn't precisely measured. Yet it's always cited in a way to give the impression that the similarity is “proof” of our relatedness to chimps. Since DNA is something we can study in the present, I'd always assumed the similarity was there. I wasn't going to “ignore” the evidence like creationists are often accused of doing. I simply disagreed that it was evidence that we are related to chimps.

I can see that humans and chimps have certain, physical similarities and, if DNA works like a blueprint for building an organism, then creatures that are the most similar will necessarily have the most similar DNA. Creation would predict that our DNA is most like a chimp's, less like a bear's, and least like a bird's. That's exactly what we find. So the high similarity between human and chimp DNA was never a problem for creation. I've come to realize, though, that my confidence in the reports by secular scientists about the DNA similarities was misplaced. It seems their bias toward evolution causes them to engage in some “monkey business” when comparing our genomes (pardon the pun).

The first thing you have to consider is that chimp DNA is 8-10% longer than human DNA. Here is a quote from Anthropology: The Human Challenge, p.40:

Moreover, the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative differences among genomes. Genetic evolution involves much more than simply replacing one base with another. Thus, even among such close relatives as human and chimpanzee, we find that the chimp’s genome is estimated to be about 10 percent larger than the human’s.... [T]he tips of each chimpanzee chromosome contain a DNA sequence that is not present in humans.

I'm not a math whiz or anything but even I know that if one sentence contained 90 letters and another sentence contained only 99 letters, there is no way the two sentences are 98% similar! Just knowing that chimp DNA is longer than human DNA already proves the “98% similar” claim is false.

If the difference in the lengths of human/chimp DNA is so large, how did they arrive at such a high similarity? Here's an article from Nature.com that gives you an idea. Consider this quote from the article:

“BLASTZ was used to align non-repetitive chimpanzee regions against repeat-masked human sequence. BLAT was subsequently used to align the more repetitive regions. The combined alignments were chained and only best reciprocal alignments were retained for further analysis.”

It sounds a little technical but, in simpler terms, the highly touted similarity in human/chimp DNA is essentially achieved by comparing only the most similar parts of the DNA and ignoring everything else! Carefully read the following from the same article:

“The current [human] genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps.” So human DNA is 2.85 gigabases (Gb) long. The article goes on to say the, “Best reciprocal nucleotide-level alignments of the chimpanzee and human genomes cover ~2.4 gigabases (Gb) of high-quality sequence, including 89 Mb from chromosome X and 7.5 Mb from chromosome Y.”

Again, it sounds complicated so let me make this as simple as possible. The human genome is 2.85 billion nucleotides long (2.85Gb) but only 2.4Gb was examined. You can do the math: 2.4/2.85 = 84.21%. They chose only 2.4Gb to compare because it was already the most similar to chimp DNA! So the alleged 98% similarity only occurs in 82% of the genome! Remember too that chimp DNA is already longer than a human's so the actual similarity of the entire genome is going to be even less than 82%. When a letter by letter comparison is made, estimates of the similarities range between 70-80%.

So whenever you hear the 98% DNA similarity being cited as evidence that we're related to chimps, you'll know it's a lie.