Humans and Chimpanzees are Not 99% Genetically Similar

Source: Robert Carter, "Humans and chimpanzees are NOT 99% identical," Creation Ministries International, 3 July 2025.

"Yes, humans and chimpanzees do share a lot of DNA, but when you include what they don’t share, the percent identity drops significantly, into the low 80% range."

How similar are humans and chimpanzees? "about 85%"

"The evolutionary model ... will gladly accept high similarity levels, but there is a cliff on the other side of the argument. If we are too dissimilar, they cannot explain the differences in their 6.5 million years. They do have the ability to back up the time to the most recent common ancestor, but even that ability is limited. A few years ago, some scientists were arguing for 13 million years. Some wanted to push the time even further back, but the paleontologists would have none of that because that would necessitate putting early apes in with the dinosaurs. They are stuck. The difference must be low. Period."

"Over 6.5 million years (~300,000 generations) they would expect 15 million differences between each species and our common ancestor, or about 30 million differences between us and them today. 30 million differences / 3 billion letters = 1%. THIS is why they have been quoting that 1% figure all these years, and this is why they have been resisting anything else. If the number is much greater, things do not work out in their favor. When the difference grows past that level, their models break down. It is simply too hard to explain so many differences, even in their ‘millions of years’ mindset."

"There are also questions about population growth and how it affects all calculations. Given that the human population has been expanding (since the Flood or since the invention of agriculture, take your pick), ZERO genetic variants have become fixed in the human genome for the last 10,000 years in the evolutionary timeline. How does ‘no evolution for 10,000 years’ affect the evolutionary forecast?"

"Because evolution needs new genes to arise and activate. Humans and chimpanzees do not just differ at the nucleotide level. Our genes are not used in the same ways and our brains have very different wiring pathways. Those changes would not just have to arise. No, they would have to arise, spread out and replace whatever original gene was in that place, and then integrate themselves into the already complex regulatory processes that exist. The ‘fact’ that they have been trumpeting from the rooftops since the 1970s turns out to be no fact at all. The real difference is NOT 1%. No, it is 15x greater. This is a massive problem even for the “1%” crowd. Now that we know the human and chimpanzee genomes are more than 10 times more different than they thought, the problem of evolution only becomes that much more difficult."

"God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good" (Genesis 1:25).