On a new episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin rebuts the oft-repeated claim that the human and chimp genomes are 98-99 percent similar as surely resulted from Darwinian common descent. Luskin cites an article in the journal Science which describes the 98-99 percent claim as a myth. The original figure was derived from a single protein-to-protein comparison, but once you compare the entire genomes, and use more rigorous methods, the similarity drops several percentage points, and on one account, down into the mid 80s. Additionally, the chimp genomes used in the original comparison studies borrowed the human genome for scaffolding, thus artificially boosting the degree of similarity. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
