Wow, genetics is amazing?

Question

humans have the power to create computers, cure much disease, and bake cookies (without lighting the kitchen on fire), our DNA i think is about .1% different from p**p slinging apes (or gorillas or chimps i forget), why are we so different from them if we are off by 1/1000

Answer 1

Perhaps you could be more respectful towards our closest relatives, I think they would behave much better than many revellers you encounter in just about any city or town around the world...

In very recent studies the long held belief that chimps share around 98-99% of human DNA has been contested and perhaps disproven. Read this link that explains one such study and suggests a figure below 95%.http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28...  

The idea that humans and chimps have a high similarity in their DNA seems to be common knowledge. The figures quoted vary: 97%, 98%, or even 99%, depending on what sources you read. Does the data mean there really is not much difference between chimps and people ? Are we just highly evolved apes ? Similarity (homology) is not an absolute indication of common ancestry (Evolution). Whether similarity is morphological (appearance), or biochemical  (largely the same DNA) is of no consequence to the lack of logic in this argument for evolution. We know that DNA in cells contains much of the information necessary for the development of an organism. In other words, if two organisms look similar, we would expect there to be some similarity also in their DNA. The DNA of a cow and a whale, two mammals, should be more alike than the DNA of a cow and a bacterium. If it were not so, then the whole idea of DNA being the information carrier in living things would have to be questioned. Likewise, humans and apes have a lot of morphological similarities, so we would expect there would be similarities in their DNA. Of all the animals, chimps are most like humans, so we would expect that their DNA would be most like human DNA. Certain biochemical capacities are common to all living things, so there is even a degree of similarity between the DNA of yeast, for example, and that of humans. Because human cells can do many of the things that yeast can do, we share similarities in the DNA sequences that code for the enzymes that do the same jobs in both types of cells. Some of the sequences, for example, those that code for the MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex) proteins, are almost identical.

What of the 97% (or 98% or 99%!) similarity claimed between humans and chimps? The figures published do not mean quite what is claimed in the popular publications (and even some respectable science journals). DNA contains its information in the sequence of four chemical compounds known as nucleotides, abbreviated C,G,A,T. Groups of three of these at a time are “read” by complex translation machinery in the cell to determine the sequence of 20 different types of amino acids to be incorporated into proteins. The human DNA has at least 3,000,000,000 nucleotides in sequence. A proper comparison has not been made, chimp DNA has not been fully sequenced. Where did the '97% similarity' come from then ? It was inferred from a fairly crude technique called DNA hybridization where small parts of human DNA are split into single strands and allowed to re-form double strands (duplex) with chimp DNA. However, there are various reasons why DNA does or does not hybridize, only one of which is degree of similarity (homology). Consequently, this somewhat arbitrary figure is not used by those working in molecular homology. Why has the 97% figure been popularized then? One can only guess that it served the purpose of evolutionary indoctrination of the scientifically illiterate. What if human and chimp DNA was even 96% homologous? What would that mean? Would it mean that humans could have 'evolved' from a common ancestor with chimps ? Not at all ! The amount of information in the 3 billion base pairs in the DNA in every human cell has been estimated to be equivalent to that in 1000 books of encyclopedia size. If humans were 'only' 4% different this still amounts to 120 million base pairs, equivalent to approximately 12 million words, or 40 large books of information.

To sum up, even taking a figure of 98.5% DNA similarity, the remaining 1.5% still allows for a huge amount of deviation in appearance and biology between two seemingly closely related animals.

Answer 2

that 1000th gene is the determinding factor of brain development, and the brain controls how the body grown in the fetal stages of a human baby- that and RNA.

Answer 3

I always thought it was reasonably impressive that we shared 97% of our DNA with apes. (97% is the figure I have always heard quoted, anyway). Then, I heard we share 92% of our DNA with mice, and I saw it in a whole new light. lol Not as impressive as I'd thought.