Casey Luskin and Sean McDowell discuss human and chimpanzee DNA

I listened to a lot of different apologetics-related shows last week, and the very best one was Dr. Casey Luskin appearing on Dr. Sean McDowell’s podcast to discuss new findings about chimpanzee and human DNA. Have you ever heard the argument for common descent that says “human and chimpanzee DNA only differ by 1% so of course they have a common ancestry”? I had a friend in high school who believed that. Let’s see what the evidence says.

This is the YouTube episode from Sean’s popular YouTube channel:

This is 64 minutes long.

Here are the questions from the interview:

• How did you first get interested in the topic of origins, and human origins in particular?
• What interested you in the topic of human-chimp genetic similarity?
• Can you give us some examples of people who’ve claimed that we’re 99% genetically similar to chimps or apes or kind of 1% different from them as they use that to make an argument for common descent slash evolution?
• How do museums present the data to visitors?
• When did that data that questions the 1% chimp-human DNA difference first emerge?
• What is an “icon of evolution”?
• Does human-chimp genetic similarity falls into that category of “icons of evolution”?
• Do you have a sense of how significant this piece of evidence is for supporting Darwinian evolution?
• How was the original 1% genetic difference calculation made?
• So now we have new evidence that the 1% number was wrong. A new paper suggests that there is a 15%. How did they calculate that?
• Are these numbers being challenged? Are critics accepting them, saying this is the new data?
• Now, one response that I’ve heard is that our genome is full of what’s called junk DNA. So, the differences are like repetitive DNA and thus junk. Thus, we can ignore them and get a much smaller number getting closer to that 1% if we assess the genome that way. Is that fair or reasonable?
• Humans can vary by as much as 10% difference in DNA, so is 15% between humans and chimps really a big difference?
• Does a small genenetic difference automatically imply common ancestry or it could be because of a common creator?
• Is this new 15% difference evidence against common descent?
• You’ve written a piece in the New York Post about how this is presented in museums. Did the museums respond at all? And if so, what did they say?
• Are there other areas of scientific misinformation at the Smithsonian that either you saw when you were there in person or you’ve just seen in your research?
• Where does this go next as far as you can see?
• If a follow-up comes in a journal article as prestigious as Nature and they go, you know what, we got it wrong, it’s 0.5% genetic difference and we blew it, whether two years, five years, 10 years, will you come back and say, you know what, I’ll own it.

If you don’t have time to watch the whole video, Casey did write a nice recent article in the New York Post about it.

He writes:

The National Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Origins vastly distorts the scientific evidence on human evolution, seeking to convince visitors that there’s nothing special about us as human beings.

“There is only about a 1.2% genetic difference between modern humans and chimpanzees,” the exhibit starts, with large photos of a human and apes. “You and chimpanzees [are] 98.8% genetically similar.”

No doubt you’ve heard this statistic before because many science popularizers say the same thing.

Yet it’s been known for years that these numbers are inaccurate. Thanks to a groundbreaking April paper in the journal Nature, we know just how wrong they are.

For the first time, the paper reports “complete” sequences of the genomes of chimpanzees and other apes done from scratch. When we compare them to humans, we find our genomes are more like 15% genetically different from chimpanzees’. That means the true genetic differences between humans and chimps are more than 10 times greater than what the Smithsonian tells us.

It’s very good for him to point this out, because we a lot of people go to these taxpayer-funded museums and believe things that we now know have been discredited by the progress of science. I had a friend in high school who saw this in some History Channel or Discovery Channel documentary, and he believed it. So I think it’s important for Christians to know that there is evidence available now, to push back against the claim. Even if you don’t know how to discuss it as well as Sean and Casey, you should know how to pull up this discussion, or maybe the New York Post article, and respond.