Are We Really 99% Chimp?
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It’s often said that we humans share 50 percent of our DNA with bananas, 80 percent with dogs, and 99 percent with chimpanzees. Taken literally, those numbers make it sound like we could pluck one cell from a chimp and one from a human, pull out the tangled bundles of DNA known as chromosomes, unroll each one like a scroll, and read off two nearly identical strings of letters. But in reality, the human and chimp scrolls don’t sync up so easily. In the six to eight million years since we split from our last common ancestor, chance mutations and natural selection have changed each of our genomes in radical – and unique – ways. Two human scrolls fused, leaving us with 23 pairs of chromosomes to chimps’ 24. Other large mutations revised huge sections of t...
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It’s often said that we humans share 50 percent of our DNA with bananas, 80 percent with dogs, and 99 percent with chimpanzees. Taken literally, those numbers make it sound like we could pluck one cell from a chimp and one from a human, pull out the tangled bundles of DNA known as chromosomes, unroll each one like a scroll, and read off two nearly identical strings of letters. But in reality, the human and chimp scrolls don’t sync up so easily. In the six to eight million years since we split from our last common ancestor, chance mutations and natural selection have changed each of our genomes in radical – and unique – ways. Two human scrolls fused, leaving us with 23 pairs of chromosomes to chimps’ 24. Other large mutations revised huge sections of t...
