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gregloa Oh i wondered if you might be referencing the Luskin article(s) about the paper by Yoo et al.
Sorry, you've been mislead about what the science is here.
Luskin: You know, the intelligent design
geologist talking about genetics.
Yeah this wasn't new information it's just been sensationalized and misinterpreted, usually for religiously motivated reasons. That's why your articles there are from creationist/intelligent design websites rather than scientific ones.
That 80% is achieved using a raw alignment gap divergence and has been widely understood for a long time. But that drop in similarity isn't just between humans and chimps but rather between any two species you might compare like rats and mice or tigers and cats.
The problem with using those numbers instead of methods like protein coding, single nucleotide polymorphism or indels (which all produce that 98ish% similarity) is that while they do produce less similarity between two species...they also produce less similarity
within the same species .
That should tell you something about how useful that comparison is.
To drive home just how really useless and non-revolutionary this "new" comparison is: Using this gap divergence that is supposedly showing 13% less similarity between chimps and humans....that difference is actually
larger within the same species of gorilla. (13.3 between humans and chimps, 13.8
within gorillas)
This is a nothing burger.
tl;dr Luskin misrepresents, misinterprets and in a couple places just lies about what that paper finds and creationists took it as gospel and even the authors of the paper are on record saying that he is mistaken about what their work showed.
As for the banana thing: Yeah, that reiterates what i just told you: we share 50-60% or our
genes with bananas, not our genome. Genes being about 2% of the genome which code for proteins.
So we share about 50-60% of genes with bananas but much less of our genome overall.
