Citations, citations, citations. Thank God the Harun Yahya article has them. Alpine, where did you get that 99% figure from? The status quo was 98.5%. And now:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2833
But note what the Harun Yahya article
doesn't quote:
The result is only based on about one million DNA bases out of the three billion which make up the human and chimp genomes, says Britten. "It's just a glance," he says.
But the differences were equally split between "junk" regions that do not have any genes, and gene-rich parts of the genome, suggesting they may be evenly distributed.
Britten thinks it will be some time before we know what it is about our genes that makes us so different from chimps. He thinks the real secrets could lie in "regulatory" regions of DNA that control whole networks of genes. "It'll be a while before we understand them," he says.
The Harun Yahya article also has a classic misquote about chicken proteins. Although the article isn't specific, it's likely that the (falsified) claim it's citing is the claim that chicken lysozymes are closer to man's lysozymes than any other species'. That's flat out wrong; chimpanzee lysozymes are completely identical to human lysozymes, while chicken lysozymes have 51 different amino acids out of 130. You tell me which is more similar. I have no idea where the crocodile quote comes from. I don't have access to the NS archives beyond 1989, so I can't tell directly what article he's citing. Any help?
For an interesting history of the whole chicken protein debacle, try this:
http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/bullfrog.html ... eye-opening.
Again, I can't access the 1999 New Scientist article quoted, but note a similar claim here:
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/worm.html
Note that while (if this is the article cited) the 75% figure from Harun Yahya's site is copied verbatim from the text, the significance of 75% in the text is very different:
Waterston's team and a group at the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, England, worked together for eight years to identify the worm's nearly 20,000 genes. To do this, they had to find and sequence about 97 million DNA base pairs, a task that required labs to work around the clock.
Collins said that by understanding what happens in the worm cells, researchers also learn what happens in human cells. Of the 5,000 best-known human genes, 75 percent have matches in the worm, Collins said.
The human genetic pattern, or genome, has 80,000 genes arranged in 3 billion DNA molecule pairs. About 7 percent of the human genome has been mapped, Collins said.
75% of 5000 = 3750 genes. So, at the time of the study, nematodes shared 3750 genes out of 20,000 with humans, and humans shared 3750 genes out of 80,000 with nematodes. That isn't a "surprising 75 % similarity between the DNAs of nematode worms and man".
