As Casey Luskin reported last year, a recent paper in Nature cast doubt on the widely believed claim that human and chimpanzee DNA differ by only about 1 or 2 percent, arriving instead at a figure of about 15 percent. German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig was asked about the 98 percent similarity claim during a 2018 interview on German TV. He replied:
That is a story that is proclaimed in popular science even today, and which is simply wrong. In 2005 the chimp DNA has been sequenced. Now, 13 years later, we have found out that many things have been overlooked. One geneticist who has presented the data in-depth calculated a correlation of roughly 70 percent instead of 98 percent, other geneticists — all of this is still in flux and is actively discussed — have arrived at a number of 80 percent.
But even if we consider the value of 98.4 percent, the difference of 1.6 percent means 55 million different nucleotides in the DNA between ape and human. But these 55 million differences may be multiplied by a factor of ten and you then end up with 550 million specific nucleotide differences.
This story of 98 percent difference was a wonderful piece of propaganda: man is just an ape in a green Peter Pan costume. What they have overlooked is that we are not only very similar to apes with regard to protein sequences, we are also very similar to the mouse…and the mouse and yeast share many genes, so we could say a mouse is just yeast in a Peter Pan costume… So I find this whole similarity argument inherently questionable.
Similarities are determined by functionality, for example, basic metabolic processes. These are of course very similar — they have to be very similar. Oxygen-processing organisms everywhere have correspondingly specified complex systems for generation of energy using ATP and so on.
A Longtime Intelligent Design Proponent
Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig earned his PhD in 1979 from the Institute of Genetics at the University of Bonn and worked as a geneticist for over 30 years, most of this time with the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Köln, Germany. Lönnig, now retired but still a very prolific writer, has been an intelligent design proponent since his 1971 master’s thesis from the Free University of Berlin.
Lönnig was, as I mentioned, the guest for a 42-minute interview on German TV in 2018. With permission from the producer, I uploaded a copy of the TV interview to YouTube and added English subtitles, based on a translation by Arne Schirmacher. My YouTube version also now has accurate German subtitles. The copy with English subtitles currently has over 7,800 views, while the original posted by the German TV station has 40,000.
Although the title is “Paleontology and Evolution,” the interview deals with a wide range of related issues, and below I have listed some main topics of the interview with links to the beginning of each discussion, along with a short sample from Lönnig’s comments. One of the most interesting topics for me is the “attempt to accelerate evolution” which took place in the 20th century in laboratories across Europe, including at Lönnig’s Max Planck Institute. See what happened when Darwinian theory was applied to try to improve human life; possibly the first attempt to put that theory to practical use! Lönnig’s comments on Neanderthal man also agree with recent discoveries reported at Science and Culture Today.
To start at the beginning go here, and be sure to turn on English subtitles unless you speak German.
From the Cambrian Explosion to a Blade of Grass
1:33 — The Cambrian explosion. “The Cambrian explosion starts about 544 million years ago according to current geological time estimates, and we find this: almost all body plans of the animal kingdom appear abruptly.”
7:49 — Naturalism as dogma. “Naturalism means: we have to explain natural phenomena by natural causes, excluding intelligent design. This is declared as a dogma…That which must not be, cannot be.” (“Es kann nicht sein, was nicht sein darf” — a German saying that the late Günter Bechly also used here to describe dogmatic naturalism.)
8:57 — Who designed the designer? “If it was possible to believe for two thousand years that the universe had no beginning, why are we not allowed to state a hypothesis that the designer had no beginning as well?”
12:14 — Living fossils. “This totally unexpected stability conflicts with the idea of …’everything evolves.’”
14:25 — Human evolution (Australopithecus and Neanderthal man). “If we met a Neanderthal man today wearing a suit on a subway, he would not attract attention in any way.”
17:28 — The origin of life. “If you ask a specialist who knows what is going on, even if he is the most determined opponent of intelligent design theory such as Dawkins, he admits ‘We don’t know how life has arisen.’ However, to the viewers it is conveyed that it is quite simple.”
20:45 — Are human and chimpanzee DNA 98 percent similar? “What they have overlooked is that we are not only very similar to apes, with regard to protein sequences, we are also very similar to the mouse… So I find this whole similarity argument inherently questionable.”
23:48 — An attempt to accelerate evolution. “In the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research we had one of the largest Cesium radiation sources in Europe. A very smart man, one of the former directors of the Institute, admitted ‘We have irradiated grains by the truckload, but nothing new came out of it at all.’”
28:25 — Is there a scientific consensus in the ID-Darwinism debate? “That would be the most reasonable reaction, ‘We leave this question open for now and continue to research.’ But the current view is — and there are official statements from the AAAS and others — that intelligent design is not science and has no place at all within natural sciences.”
33:32 — Intelligent design is not dependent on religion or the Bible. “We need to distinguish two topics. One is the intelligent design theory which is based on and starts from the object. For example, we look at photosynthesis and ask ‘How did photosynthesis come about?’ This question can be asked without any religious background by a natural scientist, without mentioning ‘The Bible says so and so….’”
34:25 — Scientists cannot build a blade of grass. “Interestingly, the same people who admit that they are unable to create a single blade of grass tell you that they are absolutely sure they know how it came about, namely random mutation and selection, and there is no designer behind it.”