Here's the post on Science & Culture (sic) by Casey Luskin: Happy New Year! No. 1 Story for 2025: Bombshell Overturns Myth of 1 Percent Difference.
When I open a page of Darwin I immediately sense that I have been ushered into the presence of a great mind. ... When I read Phillip Johnson, I feel that I have been ushered into the presence of a lawyer.How many times have you heard it said that the human and chimpanzee genomes are so similar that they are only “1 percent different” at the level of their DNA? This shows, we were told, not only that humans and chimps share common ancestry, but that humans aren’t all that special, which is a common talking point in science journalism and other public discussions. After all, we’re just slightly modified chimps! This “fact” has been discussed so much that it has become what the late biologist Jonathan Wells famously called an “icon of evolution.”
But now, new data reported in a recently published Nature paper by Yoo et al. has overturned this previous claim. The new findings reveal that human DNA is far more different from chimp DNA than previously thought.
That should be major news in the science world, yet those involved don’t seem interested in highlighting their discovery.
Richard Dawkins (1996)
What does this tell us about Intelligent Design Creationists? It tell us that they don't understand science and their movement is bankrupt.
There are four things you need to know about the differences between the human and chimp genomes.
- Most of the genome sequences can be aligned and the average difference is about 1.4%.
- The two genomes contain many insertions and deletions that don't align. Scientists have known this for three decades.
- Individuals in both populations also have multiple specific insertions and deletions; for example, the average two humans differ by about 1% if you count these segmental duplications. If you add up all the known deletions, about 7% of the human genome can be deleted without noticeable effect. [Segmental duplications in the human genome]
- Evolution explains the differences between the human and chimpanzee genomes. Creationists can't explain this difference and they can't explain why it's so consistent with evolution.
21 comments :
Imagine having something straightforwardly false as your top story of the year. Imagine having a person employed who deliberately doctored a figure with the intent to hide inconvenient information that would blow apart his entire case.
That's the Discovery Institute for you.
Sorry Larry, but your argument is very misleading. The 7 percent differences you mentioned for human genome variation actually investigated the highly identical segmental duplications.
But the new Nature article, studied difference in lineage specific segmental duplication, and non alienable gap differences in acrocentric and subterminal chromosomes between human and chimp. The result was about 15 percent differences between human and chimp.
You'd get similar numbers within species. That is to say, by the same method of counting differences, two different individuals in the same species (gorillas) can be 13.8% different from each other.
So Luskin cut away the part of the figure that shows that within-species differences (by the same method), then spliced the figure back together with the inconvenient data missing, because it would undermine his intended message: that the genetic distance between chimps and humans should cast doubt on common ancestry.
What's most remarkable bout Casey Luskin's deception here is that in his article he accused biologists of being the ones that hid away inconvenient data.
Does this supposed difference also count inversions, at least up to a certain size? I don't know what that size would be, but I would suspect that the alignments likely don't deal with any inversions smaller than a few hundred bases. That's not going to change the estimate by much, but every little bit helps the DI.
Peaceful Science also has a story, also posted yesterday, about Casey's big adventure, pointing out a simple mathematical error in his nonsensical calculation.
https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/discovery-institute-top-story-of-2025-casey-luskin-cant-do-maths/17596
@Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen. firstly, the amount of gap divergence for human species is only 3% according to the article:{ https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-025-08816-3/MediaObjects/41586_2025_8816_MOESM1_ESM.pdf}....... secondly , Dr. Casey Luskin edited and responded to that argument : https://scienceandculture.com/2025/05/fact-check-new-complete-chimp-genome-shows-14-9-percent-difference-from-human-genome/#:~:text=Author%E2%80%99s%20note%C2%A0(July,critics%20started%20commenting.
I'm still chortling about "Dr. Casey Luskin".
What's funny is there are examples of two humans that can have a similarity by about 84%, by the same method that "Dr." Casey Luskin is all up in arms about Chimp-Human similarity measuring at about 85%.
Whatever Casey "Figure-Doctorer" Luskin thinks he's saying by obsessing about this one particular way of measuring similarity clearly is of no value or consequence when two HUMAN BEINGS can measure even more dissimilar.
Creationism is the irony and the butt-end joke that never stop giving.
Rumraket: The point of the video seems to be that there are lots of polymorphic indels in human junk DNA, nearly as many as there are indels in comparisons of humans and chimps, also mostly in junk DNA. What Casey needs to explain is why we should care about all those indels and why "gap distance" is a reasonable measure of genetic distance.
Looking forward to Luskin's comparison of pairs of creatures that creationists believe are members of the same Kind.
I asked Tomkins about this years ago when his first few papers on this came out. He called me names and told me to do it myself.
Which creationists? That's the problem, since they don't have a unified position on this, even those who are willing to express an opinion. Hugh Ross at least used to believe that every species was a separate kind; Kurt Wise thinks that mammal suborders are kinds. The only thing everyone agrees on is that humans aren't apes, which does nothing to give you any pairs of creatures.
The number one story of 2026 was just published. I'm looking forward to your response to Vox Day's obliteration of the modern synthesis.
@Anonymous: I assume you're referring to the book "Probability Zero: The Mathematical Impossibility of Evolution by Natural Selection" written by Vox Day (Theodore Robert Beale). I haven't read the book but from what I can gather on the internet he seems to think he's more of an expert on evolution than the thousands of experts who have been studying it for 150 years.
He claims, among other things, that it is impossible for population genetics to account for the number of difference in the human and chimpanzee genomes.
He's a kook.
Vox Day
In the sample of text posted at the book's site, Vox Day quotes quite a few people as saying biologists have little mathematics. Day does not realize that there are whole subfields of biology for which that's not true, and they developed the Modern Synthesis. R.A. Fisher, JBS Haldane, Sewall Wright, and Motoo Kimura knew a lot of mathematics -- Fisher also invented about half of modern mathematical statistics. Day just goes yammering on ignorantly. No, I have not read the whole thing -- not worth the $5.
No I meant I’m looking forward to you actually refuting his argument.
Joe, that reminds me of something I said in a review of Darwin's Doubt, referring to Meyer's Chapter 9: "This is mostly about the Wistar Conference, an attempt by engineers and computer scientists to help evolutionary biologists by showing that they were wrong about everything and introducing a little mathematical rigor into the field founded in part by R. A. Fisher."
Haven't read the book and definitely won't, but a quick look at his web site suggests that he thinks the 20 million fixations in the human lineage must all be under selection, thus greatly exceeding Haldane's limit. What a maroon.
Apparently if you have something called Kindle Unlimited you can download it for free. Not sure if it's worth it at that price ...
Whoa, ass I anticipated the book is already the number one best seller in Biology, Genetics and evolution.
Pseudoscience is big business if you're alluding to Day's book.
-César
Yes Probability Zero. I haven’t read it yet but plan to. What’s pseudo about it?
I haven't read it myself either but judging by the language of the Amazon blurb - calling evolution a "creation myth", "random", "storytelling" - I can assume the contents will be equally unscientific.
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