A Recent Paper Indicates a 14% Difference Between the Genomes of Humans and Chimps

The intellectual empire of Darwinism was not built on honest speech.  Darwinism got launched by the word trick of using the phrase "natural selection" for a claimed survival-of-the-fittest effect that was not actually any such thing as selection. "Selection" is a word meaning a choice by a conscious agent, but the so-called natural selection depicted by Darwin was no such thing, being a mere blind accidental process rather than any willful act of selection.  Darwin was also guilty of larger deceits, such as the glaring deceit (in a passage of The Descent of Man) of claiming that " there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties."  This appalling lie continues to be repeated by the disciples of Darwin, and a few days before writing this post I saw the same witless claim repeated by one of the evangelists of Darwinism, who cited Darwin as his "proof" for this obviously false claim. 

A very silly thing to say

Following in the footsteps of their adored master, the apostles of Darwinism have for a very long time been guilty of dozens of deceits and misrepresentations large and small. In my post here I have a numbered list of 80+ such deceits, word tricks, misleading statements and tall tales.  One of the worst of these deceits has been the massive repetition by Darwinists of a claim that human genomes and chimp genomes are 98% or 98.6% the same. Typically the claim is made without any citation of its source. The word "genome" refers to what is in DNA. The genome includes the set of all genes in the DNA of an organism. 

Below are some of the leading scientific sources where this false claim has been made:

• “We share more than 98 percent of our DNA and almost all of our genes with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee.” (Nature)
• “Most studies indicate that when genomic regions are compared between chimpanzees and humans, they share about 98.5 percent sequence identity.” (Scientific American)
• “Humans and chimps share a surprising 98.8 percent of their DNA.” (American Museum of Natural History)
• “Humans share about 99 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, making them our closest living relatives.” (Science)

There are many scientific papers contradicting such a claim. A 2005 paper had the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees."  A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," suggesting the claim of 98% similarity was in error. The 2021 study "An ancestral recombination graph of human, Neanderthal, and Denisovan genomes" published in the journal Science states, "We find that only 1.5 to 7% of the modern human genome is uniquely human," and later states, "We find that approximately 7% of the human autosomal genome is human-unique and free of both admixture and ILS."  A 2002 paper is entitled "Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels." 

Recently we had the publication of another paper showing how false is the claim that human DNA is 98% the same as chimpanzee DNA. The paper is one entitled "Complete sequencing of ape genomes," which you can read here. The authors act just as if they were trying to make it almost as hard as possible for readers to get a clear statement of how they debunked the claim that human DNA is 98% similar to chimpanzee DNA. The main body of the text says little more than this on this topic:

"Overall, sequence comparisons among the complete ape genomes revealed greater divergence than previously estimated (Supplementary Notes III–IV). Indeed, 12.5–27.3% of an ape genome failed to align or was inconsistent with a simple one-to-one alignment, thereby introducing gaps."

To get a graph that shows a comparison between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome, you must go to the trouble of opening up the paper's Supplementary Information, as a PDF file. You can do that by using the link here. The average reader will still by stymied, as nowhere in that file do we have a simple quote clearly stating a degree of difference between chimpanzee DNA and human DNA.

Finding the relevant figure requires the following pieces of luck that 99% would not be likely to experience:

• First, you have to know that the Latin name for the chimpanzee species is Pan troglodytes. 
• Then you have to notice that in Supplementary Table VIII.37 the authors are using "mPanTro3" as a tag for the chimpanzee genome. 
• Then you have to somehow find out that the authors are using "hg002" as a tag meaning the human genome. 
• Then you have to somehow find your way to Supplementary Figure III.12, where the seventh row and the eighth row has a comparison between "PanTro3" (the chimpanzee genome) and ""hg002" (the human genome). 

Finally, if all this luck occurs to you, you can get to the relevant visual depiction, which is found in the red rounded rectangle below, where we see a depiction (according to one measure) of the difference between the human genome ("hg002") and the chimpanzee genome ("PanTro3"):

Notice the numbers above. They are about 13%. What the authors have found is that by one important measure (a "gap divergence" measure), there is about a 13% difference between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome. 

Casey Luskin in his post here helped to clarify what is meant by this "gap divergence" measure and another measure called SNV (single-nucleotide variant). He gives us a hypothetical stretch of DNA showing examples of such "gap divergences" and SNV differences:

In the diagram one line represents part of human DNA, and the other line represents part of chimpanzee DNA. The blue parts are parts where you cannot compare the human DNA part to the corresponding part of chimpanzee DNA, or vice versa. 

To compute the total difference between the human genome and the genome of the chimp, we must add these two different types of differences (corresponding to the blue parts and the yellow parts in the diagram above). The paper says that the SNV differences (single-nucleotide variant differences) between humans and chimpanzees are about 1.5%.  To compute the total difference between the genomes we need to add up the 13% "gap difference" measure stated in the paper and the 1.5% SNV measure. That leaves you with a total difference of about 14.5% between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome. 

So the Darwinist authorities who so often told us that there was merely about a 1.5% difference between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees were very much in error, off by a factor of about 1000%. Previous studies published years ago had already shown the falsehood of the the claim of a 1.5% difference between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees, suggesting that that the actual difference was several times larger. But Darwinism evangelists kept citing that phony figure of a 1.5% difference, a figure that was never well-established. 

It is rather obvious why we were so long deceived in this matter. Darwinists have always tried to make the ocean-sized gap between humans and chimpanzees and other apes look like a small gap, as a way of trying to make more credible claims of a natural evolution from an ape-like predecessor to humans. 

A recent article from the very mainstream site LiveScience.com helps clarify that the difference between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees is much greater than 1 or 2 percent. The article tells us this:

"The truth is that the frequently cited 98.8% similarity between chimp (Pan troglodytes) and human (Homo sapiens) DNA overlooks key differences in the species' genomes, experts told Live Science....the 99% figure is misleading because it focuses on stretches of DNA where the human and chimp genomes can be directly aligned and ignores sections of the genomes that are difficult to compare, Tomas Marques-Bonet, head of the Comparative Genomics group at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC/UPF) in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science in an email.

Sections of human DNA without a clear counterpart in chimp DNA make up approximately 15% to 20% of the genome, Marques-Bonet said. For example, some bits of DNA are present in one species but missing in the other; these are known as 'insertions and deletions'...

So, while earlier studies suggested a 98% to 99% similarity, comparisons that include harder-to-align regions push that difference closer to 5% to 10%, Marques-Bonet said. 'And if we account for the regions still too complex to align properly with current technology, the true overall difference is likely to exceed 10%,'  he said.

In fact, a 2025 study found that human and chimpanzee genomes are approximately 15% different when compared directly and completely." 

What happened is that our mainstream biology authorities for quite a few recent years engaged in the most outrageous deceit by making the false claim that human DNA is 98% the same or 99% the same as chimpanzee DNA. This is only one of innumerable lies and deceits and misleading claims that over the decades have been used to prop up the dubious claims of Darwinists. 

Acting like a giant echo chamber, the ideological soldiers of the materialist mainstream tend to uncritically repeat any useful-sounding sound bite that seems to them like a good talking point. So by a process of social contagion in a herd-like conformist community, an incorrect talking point can become a belief community speech custom, with the same false claim repeated on a thousand web pages and in a thousand professor lectures. 

In the year 2025 the materialist-oriented newspaper The Guardian published an article confessing how scanty is the claimed fossil evidence for the evolution of humans from apelike predecessors. It stated this:

"Our direct knowledge of the first few million years of human evolution derives from a collection of bone fragments that could no more than halfway fill a large shoebox....Attempting to reconstruct the history of early humanity from the available evidence is, it has been said, akin to trying to divine the plot of War and Peace from just 13 of its pages, picked at random."

The wikipedia.org article on "Chimpanzee-human last common ancestor" (CHLCA) confesses, "no fossil has yet been identified as a probable candidate for the CHLCA." Faced with the weakness of fossil evidence backing up the claim that humans and chimpanzees are descendants of a common ancestor, the assertion that human and chimpanzee genomes were 98% or 99% similar seemed to serve as a crucial substitute talking point.  Now that it is clear that such a talking point was untrue, our confidence in such an ancestry claim should be disrupted or shattered. 

Is the recent LiveScience.com article an indication that scientists will no longer give us deceptive miseducation on this topic, and will tell us the truth on this topic from now on? Not quite. The article gives us some evidence of the deceit continuing. The article ends with a quote by a scientist saying, "Humans and chimps are made up of essentially the same building blocks (proteins), but these are used in somewhat different ways to make a human versus a chimp." This sentence misleads us in four ways:

• Organisms such as chimpanzees and humans are not honestly described as being "made up of" proteins. Physically a human is made up of a skeletal system and organ systems, which are made up of organs and other components, which are made up of tissues, which are made up of enormously organized cells, which are made up of organelles, which are made up of protein complexes, which are made up of proteins. You vastly misstate the amount of organization in the human body when you say that humans are made up of proteins. 
• Proteins are way too complex to be honestly described as "building blocks." A building block is something all made of the same thing, usually clay. Protein molecules are very complex components built up of hundreds or thousands of very specially arranged amino acids, with each protein molecule having thousands of well-arranged atomic parts. The continued use of the dishonest phrase "building blocks" to refer to things with thousands of well-arranged parts is an inexcusable deception which can be easily avoided by using the term "building components." 
• It is not true that humans and chimpanzees are made up of the same proteins, because a 2005 paper had the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees."  
• Given all the physical differences and mental differences between bipedal humans who can speak very well and fast and non-speaking chimps who normally walk on four limbs rather than two, it is misleading to claim that proteins are merely used in "somewhat different ways" in humans. 

We can expect that lies about a mere 1% genomic difference between chimps and humans will long continue, just as many biologists have long continued to tell the even worse lie that there is in DNA or its genes a blueprint, recipe or program for making a human body (a lie told because of reasons explained here). The ideological motivation for telling the first of these lies is basically the same as the ideological motivation for telling the second of these lies.