bradw

<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/09/24/humans.chimps.ap/index.html" target="_blank">CNN Article</a>

[ September 24, 2002: Message edited by: bradw ]</p>

lpetrich

The difference is likely a result of which gene regions are being compared. Much of the genome is "junk DNA", and it is more divergent than the functional parts, which are constrained by natural selection. So a lot of the previous work may have focused on the functional parts; this recent work may have included some nonfunctional DNA.

Mecha_Dude

...shit, the cretinists are gonna flip over this.

tgamble

Of course they are. They flip over anything corrected in science because they see the old data as lying to the children. Oh won't someone pleaaaaaase think of the children?!

98% down to 95%. Big deal.

RufusAtticus

The difference is in the techniques. The ~98% comes from sequence similarity. The ~95% comes from analalysing both sequence similarity and where in the genome the genes are. Basically the new study takes organization into consideration.

Valentine Pontifex

What you are basically saying is that the article writer did not understand the material. :-)

It does surprise me, if this is correct, though that genes evolved faster than the "junk" DNA sections.

Doubting Didymus

From the article:

So, this 5% difference is not known to be in the functional or the junk DNA. What really matters is how much difference is in the coding DNA. I suppose they have to sequence chimps before we can do that?

And of course, nonfunctional DNA is much more prone to mutation, since practically anything can happen there and it has no effect of the creature, while every change in coding DNA is screened by NS. Would this mean that we can safely guess that whatever the functional difference proportion is, it will probably be smaller than the overall average difference?

Vanderzyden

Hmm, I wonder if one of the mismatches is in the ancestral telomeric region of human chromsome band 2q13.

No worries. In the next ten years, it will be known how much actual similarity exists. I anticipate the findings very much.

Vanderzyden

Doubting Didymus

Why on earth do you think this would be some kind of problem, if a couple of base pairs were found to be different in the telomeres?

The real truth will come out eventually? Because the current data can not possibly be accurate of course.

You are starting to hijack threads without making any actual contributions. This is a steady and predictable downward spiral into trollhood.

Why don't you answer the questions posed to you in all those threads you ignored?

Doubting Didymus

Waiiit a minute, I see what you are saying! You think that a base pair discrepancy might include the entire fused telomeric region?

Base pairs are symbolised by a single letter on one of those big lists of ATGC you keep seeing. They are not whole regions of chromosome. a telomere is made up of a single 4 letter combination of base pairs repeated over and over. If 5% of those letters in the whole telomere section were point mutation substitutons, then it would still be a telomere.

So this data does not conflict with the ancestral centromeres and telomeres in the fused human chromosome, as a telomere with 5% difference from another telomere is still a telomere.

Or: telomeres are big. Base pairs are little.