There’s nothing wrong with that. There are probably some good Youtube videos out there. There are also some really bad ones. Without some background knowledge it is really difficult to differentiate between the good and bad videos.
Quite honestly, much of the secondary press (articles written about science) is terrible. If you ask scientists what they think of the science described in the popular press you will probably hear a lot of complaints. There are a few good authors out there, such as Carl Zimmer who I strongly recommend, but there are a ton of journalists and other authors who get the science wrong.
no problem, feel free to do, but you have to always add:
the similarity numbers apply only to the part of the genomes which we were able to sequence, because, we were unable to sequence the both genomes in full.
I still think Youtube is a bad place to learn about science because there are terrible videos on Youtube that can easily mislead the general public. My mind hasn’t changed.
Just because you (and we in general) haven’t come up with any useful use of that percentage it doesn’t mean that the question is useless. Or ill intentioned like you suggest.
To be honest, the avoidant and defensive stance of some replies from “the sober scientific side” made me feel the usual “creationist like vibes”. I don’t mean to deny anyone’s views, it’s just the only way I have to portrait this particular gut feeling…
Anyhow, I’ll provide some suggestions for the importance of knowing the exact percent, that I didn’t manage to find in this thread:
A too low of percentage, doesn’t have to contradict current evidence for the time of split or even for the values of the molecular clock, instead, it could provide evidence and a way to estimate inter-hominid breeding;
I can also imagine that given the nomadic and curious nature of human beings, intra species breeding might also influence the rate of change, for example two parallel gene pools evolving over thousand of years and then joining themselves. This could have happened dozen of times, on different scales and with way more than 2 pools changing simultaneously. Furthermore, if these different populations were spread over different environments, it justifies how evolutionary pressure influenced them differently. These might might be reasons for why our change rate may need different tuning to what’s done for other animals;
Given that human beings were the only animal species developing culture, tools and language, it might me fallacious to argue that our molecular clock has the same rates as found in nature
To us, the pace of change isn’t only tied to the environment, but to our own developments.
My proposed mechanism for this possible acceleration is epigenetics. It might have kicked in some mechanism to influence the speed of the changes. Which that me suggests some evidence for an analogue mechanism to epigenetics but for influencing gene mutations. Why wouldn’t a super advanced mechanism like DNA (in comparison to our computer programs) have also advanced Reflection mechanisms? Reflection is the capability of code to change itself;
Finally, we are far from understanding how consciousness relates to matter (materialism vs dualism vs idealism vs neutral monism), or what is its role in the quantum world. Is our consciousness quantum in nature? That’s Penrose’s Orchestrated objective reduction theory.
So, given the possibly quantum nature of consciousness and the observers influence on the quantum world, maybe language and self-awareness (different from my definition of consciousness which is simply: having a subjective experience, which predates intelligence) gave us more tools to interact with our epigenetics or something else.
I do feel some cringe when suggesting this but maybe there’s some sort of “manifestation” in the New Age sense, that can change our genes;
All in all, knowing the exact value would alows us to dispel theories like these and exercise our scientific minds to put forth new ones.
This was a very exciting thread to read, I thank @RichardBuggs for all of his elegance, his answers were delightful to read.
I hope there will be some future advances following this discussion, and now that I mention it, if any biologist here is interested in a collaboration with a Computer Scientist I’d be really happy about it.
I’m not sure you’ve understood what Dennis was saying there. There are many uses for specific measures of the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees. For example, your suggestion here
is indeed a possible application of measuring that genetic distance – and it’s one that has been put into practice, initially in a study by David Reich and Nick Patterson. But that study, like pretty much all applications, used a more specific measure than the overall identity that you’re talking about – it used the single-base substitution rate. Other measures might be appropriate for different kinds of study. But what no one has ever come up with a use for a single measure that lumps all of the other measures together. If some researcher does find an application for such a measure, they’ll define it precisely and estimate it from data. Until that happens… yeah, most interest I’ve seen in the overall identity has come from those attacking evolution.
How does knowing the overall similarity help in dispelling theories like those?
From what I can see, the specifics of mutations are much more important than the sum of all bases involved. Scientists often focus on substitutions because those occur at a much more clock-like rate which makes them more conducive to understanding the temporal history of populations. Indels may be useful as genetic markers, but the size of of indels would seem to be secondary to the actual number and placement. If you think epigenetics is somehow involved, then the rate of CpG mutations may be of more interest due to methylation and deamination, not the overall difference as a percentage.
I really don’t see any use of an overall percent difference in any of the scenarios you list.