In response to claims that humans and chimpanzees are descended from a common ancestor, Gladys posted a link to a creationist site which (in her mind) refuted this claim. I said I’d try digging out a reference: here it is.

The following article by The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, “Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome”, was published in Nature, volume 437 (1 September 2005), pages 69-87. The names of the people who make up the Consortium, and their institutional affiliations, are listed at the end of the article. If you have trouble finding the journal, try your nearest university library – if they don’t have it, you can probably get at an online version from one of their computer terminals.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading this, but there are 173 references listed, and a number of these need to be consulted for more detailed information. I expect any creationist who wants to challenge the idea that we now have direct evidence, from genetic analysis, that chimps and humans share a common ancestor, to provide some specific criticisms of *this* paper.

The abstract at the beginning of the article reads:

‘Here we present a draft genome sequence of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). Through comparison with the human genome, we have generated a largely complete catalogue of the genetic differences that have accumulated since the human and chimpanzee species diverged from our common ancestor, constituting approximately thirty-five million single-nucleotide changes, five million insertion/deletion events, and various chromosomal rearrangements. We use this catalogue to explore the magnitude and regional variation of mutational forces shaping these two genomes, and the strength of positive and negative selection acting on their genes, In particular, we find that the patterns of evolution in human and chimpanzee protein-coding genes are highly correlated and dominated by the fixation of neutral and slightly deleterious alleles. We also use the chimpanzee genome as an outgroup to investigate human population genetics and identify signatures of selective sweeps in recent human evolution.’

If this isn’t enough to convince Gladys and her fellow creationists, I will post a link to an article by a Christian biologist who comes to the same conclusion that non-Christian scientists came to many years ago – humans and chimps are descended from a common ancestor, as Darwin predicted in 1871 – this is listed as the first of the 173 references.

Salaam Ken Smith

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Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … “I remember I once asked Azazel if he wanted my soul and he didn’t even know what it was. He asked me what it meant and it turned out I didn’t know what it was, either.” George Bitternut in “Azazel”

Feb. 2007