Human-Chimp DNA Difference Trebled

bump. Dr. Page, can you put your argument in a nutshell? The Harun Yahya committee attacked me over it and I am unable to give a definite answer to them...http://www.harunyahya.com/70reply_andya_primanda.php

I see. So, has anyone done that? If by this technique the human-chimp 99% dif is pushed back to 95% then every other distance would also be enlarged. Any papers on this?

Dr Page, I have read the original article. (Britten 2002, PNAS). Now, I had seen that indels cannot be treated the same way as base replacements. Each base replacement equals 1 evolutionary step while each insertion/deletion event can make great differences. How do I translate the indels into evolutionary steps? By counting their average length & number?

Here is the link to the PNAS article. It's free in Indonesia, anyway.Just a moment...The NCBI entryDivergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels.Britten RJ.California Institute of Technology, 101 Dahlia Avenue, Corona del Mar, CA 92625.Five chimpanzee bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) sequences (described in GenBank) have been compared with the best matching regions of the human genome sequence to assay the amount and kind of DNA divergence. The conclusion is the old saw that we share 98.5% of our DNA sequence with chimpanzee is probably in error. For this sample, a better estimate would be that 95% of the base pairs are exactly shared between chimpanzee and human DNA. In this sample of 779 kb, the divergence due to base substitution is 1.4%, and there is an additional 3.4% difference due to the presence of indels. The gaps in alignment are present in about equal amounts in the chimp and human sequences. They occur equally in repeated and nonrepeated sequences, as detected by repeatmasker (http://ftp.genome.washington.edu/RM/RepeatMasker.html).PMID: 12368483 [PubMed - in process]

The 5% difference in Britten's result is based on phenetics, I guess. You showed me earlier that indels can make large differences in one mutation event. I am curious about how many indel events that had happened in Britten's sample. I assume that each base substitution (point mutation) equals one mutation event, but, for indels, each different base (or individual gap) may or may not represent one event. Just want to know what you say about it.