Common ancestor of humans & Chimps?

 

A chromosome-by-chromosome comparison of chimpanzee and human DNA. The chimp DNA was cut into slices of varying lengths (see legend on the right), and a similar sequence was searched for on the relevant human chromosome, which is shown on the horizontal axis.

(Copyright Answers in Genesis, published at http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/arj/v6/n1/human-chimp-chromosome in a study by Jeffrey P. Tomkins)

 For the whole article, click the link below.

http://blog.drwile.com/?p=9851

...Dr. Tomkins just published a new study, and as far as I can tell, it makes the most sense of any BLAST analysis done so far. In this study, he chopped up the chimpanzee genome into “slices” that were as small as 100 base pairs long or as large as 650 base pairs long. The chimpanzee genome is 2.9-3.3 billion base pairs long, so obviously these slices are incredibly small compared to the entire genome. He then looked for each “slice” on the human chromosome that is supposed to correspond to the chimp chromosome where the slice was found. The two slices didn’t have to match exactly; they just had to be similar enough to think that they could be related to each other.


The graph at the top of this post shows his results. Notice that the similarity hovers around 70% for all chromosomes except the Y chromosome. The size of the “slice” affects the result a bit, but really not much. In the end, this leads Dr. Tomkins to conclude:

Genome-wide, only 70% of the chimpanzee DNA was similar to human under the most optimal sequence-slice conditions. While chimpanzees and humans share many localized protein-coding regions of high similarity, the overall extreme discontinuity between the two genomes defies evolutionary timescales and dogmatic presuppositions about a common ancestor.

Is this the last word on the subject? Most certainly not. I think it is probably the best comparison attempt made so far. Also, the fact that the Y chromosome has a remarkably low level of similarity compared to the other chromosomes is consistent with another study. In addition, the results essentially agree with Dr. Buggs’s analysis, which was based on a completely different strategy. At the same time, however, there is a huge discrepancy between this analysis and Dr. Wood’s analysis. In addition, as we learn more about genomes and how they work, we will probably find better ways to compare the genomes of different organisms.

For right now, however, it seems clear that humans and chimpanzees are not nearly as genetically similar as most evolutionists would have us believe.