Casey Luskin’s science reporting here on humans and chimps has touched a nerve and Darwinists are still screaming about it. “Gutsick Gibbon,” aka Erika, is an absurdly longwinded PhD student. On July 9 she published a YouTube video attacking Dr. Luskin for 3 hours and 37 minutes, just 4 minutes shy of Gone with the Wind. But fortunately, another YouTuber has cut to the chase in only 8 minutes and 59 second. For this concision, you can thank “Creation Myths,” aka Dr. Dan, a biologist at Rutgers.
Dan thinks he has a “gotcha” revelation to share about Dr. Luskin: that when Casey republished an image here from a paper in Nature, he left part of it out. This, in Dan’s view, is nefarious deception because Luskin’s true and insidious purpose was to go after “the concept of human-chimp common ancestry” and that part seemed to undercut the purpose. As Luskin later explained in an update to the post, and I agree with him, the rest of the image was irrelevant to his argument.
A Mind Reader
Ah, but Dr. Dan fancies himself a mind reader and confidently tells us what Casey was actually thinking: “He’s making the case that the larger number [14 percent compared with 1 percent] means humans and chimps don’t share a common ancestor. He’s not saying that, but literally everyone reading knows what conclusion they’re supposed to draw from all these articles.” (Emphasis added.)
Oh really? Casey was explicit from the beginning of his series (long before Dr. Dan and his friends started their recent mind-reading exercises) that he doesn’t think the percent similarity tells you whether humans and chimps share a common ancestor. As he wrote, “the percent genetic similarity between humans and chimps really does not address the question of whether the two species are evolutionarily related.”
I guess Dr. Dan is reading my mind, too, as the editor who hit “publish” on every article Dr. Luskin wrote that Dr. Dan is criticizing. Dan, let me tell you what I was thinking: I presume that humans and chimps share common ancestry. The purpose of the articles that Dan references is spelled out in the first headline we published: “Bombshell: New Research Overturns Claim that Humans and Chimps Differ by Only 1 Percent of DNA.”
The target was claims from science museums and science educators that, as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History puts it, “You and chimpanzees [are] 98.9% genetically similar.” This is the 1 percent myth that we’ve all heard repeated endlessly.
Why It Matters
The myth matters because a toxic lie being advanced in our culture denies the exceptional status of human beings in nature. Many evils follow from that denial. I’ll stop believing it’s a lie when you show me an actual talking gibbon making overlong evolution videos on YouTube.
We have been hammering away at all this. For instance, I’ve written that in light of a Trump Administration move to weed out ideological bias at the Smithsonian, bad science like the mindlessly echoed “98.9%” figure should be fixed too. I’ve also noted that all these figures vastly understate the true gap between humans and chimps. That gap can’t be calculated from the physical genome, as I explain in my new book about the thinking of evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome.
Dr. Dan chatters about the “gap divergence within gorillas,” and how “the 1 percent difference and 14 percent difference are calculated using different methods.” But he misses the point. If I were a mind reader, I might say he does so deliberately. If the Smithsonian admitted that the truth is much more complicated than the simplistic 1 percent myth, that would be quite acceptable.