Its is often stated that we share 98.7 percent of our DNA with chimpanazees which appears to be rejected now (not in the sense the data wrong, however that the method used wasn't the best). I found in this article that we share 95% https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-the-fact-that-w/ yet on another 96% https://www.ft.com/content/43445728-1a44-11da-b279-00000e2511c8 and even other estimates on other websites. Is there an agreed upon percentage among geneticist as to how much DNA we share with chimpanzees?

Edited August 1, 20187 yr by Ray Kay

13 minutes ago, Ray Kay said:

Its is often stated that we share 98.7 percent of our DNA with chimpanazees which appears to be rejected now (not in the sense the data wrong, however that the method used wasn't the best). I found in this article that we share 95% https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-the-fact-that-w/ yet on another 96% https://www.ft.com/content/43445728-1a44-11da-b279-00000e2511c8 and even other estimates on other websites. Is there an agreed upon percentage among geneticist as to how much DNA we share with chimpanzees?

It is not as simple as just saying "we share 96% of our genes". It matters really not just how many changes there are in total, but what changes do in fact alter the phenotype. The % difference in on itself doesn't really tell us much at all when comparing different species. It is mostly useful for genetic testing of parenting, since here we are comparing DNA of two individuals of the same species:

Quote

The alignable sequences within genomes of humans and chimpanzees differ by about 35 million single-nucleotide substitutions. Additionally about 3% of the complete genomes differ by deletions, insertions and duplications.^[12]

Since mutation rate is relatively constant, roughly one half of these changes occurred in the human lineage. Only a very tiny fraction of those fixed differences gave rise to the different phenotypes of humans and chimpanzees and finding those is a great challenge. The vast majority of the differences are neutral and do not affect the phenotype.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolutionary_genetics

Edited August 1, 20187 yr by pavelcherepan

To elaborate on that it depends really what you are comparing with each other. For example, some estimates first take the genes we have in common (which are highly similar) and then estimate divergence on that level. As genes are more likely to be conserved due to their respective function, the value is expected to be very small (I believe that is where the ca. 1.2% divergence estimates come from).

On the other range of the spectrum is just to take the whole sequence and calculate the divergence from there. This will also take areas with fewer or no functional elements, duplications etc. into account. On that end we are looking at ~5-6%. Both are somewhat accurate in what they do. They are just looking from different perspectives.