Human-Chimps don’t share 98.8% of DNA, but less than 88%. By Vox Populi.
The narrative:
For twenty years, the standard textbook claim has been that human and chimpanzee DNA is “98.8 percent identical.”
That figure, repeated in every popular science article, every introductory biology textbook, and every “I fucking love science” tweet about how we are practically the same animal as a chimp, traces back to the 2005 Nature paper by the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium.
The headline number from that paper was approximately 35 million single nucleotide differences and 5 million indels … Forty million differences out of three billion base pairs. About 1.2 percent. [40 / 3,000 = 1.3%].
But the narrative was always a political conclusion, arrived at by ignoring the inconvenient part:
But the 35 million figure was never the total observed divergence between the two genomes. It was only the divergence in the portion of the genomes that aligned cleanly to each other. The unalignable regions — sequence that is so different that no reasonable algorithm can map one species’ DNA onto the other’s coordinate system — were excluded from the difference count and quietly placed in supplementary tables where no journalist or undergraduate would ever read them.
This was not a methodological oversight. The 2005 paper aligned roughly 2.4 billion base pairs of the chimp genome to the human reference, out of a total chimp genome of approximately 3 billion. Six hundred million base pairs of unalignable sequence existed.
The truth comes out:
In April 2025, the Eichler lab at the University of Washington published the capstone of the telomere-to-telomere genome program: complete, gapless, diploid assemblies of all six great apes, at the same quality as the human reference. The paper has 122 authors. It has been cited 98 times in the eight months since publication. It is the most authoritative comparative ape genome paper in existence, and it will be for years to come. Yoo, D. et al., Complete sequencing of ape genomes, Nature 641, 401-418 (2025). …
The total structural divergence between human and ape genomes — including all insertions, deletions, duplications, inversions, rearrangements — affects between five and fifteen times more base pairs than the single nucleotide differences that everyone has been counting since 2005.
For the chimp-human comparison, the gap-divergence minimum is 12.5 percent. For the gorilla-human, it is 27.3 percent.
The honest divergence figure for chimp-human is not 1.2 percent. It is somewhere between 12.5 and 14 percent of the genome. …
That is not a refinement. That is an order of magnitude.
Much more at the link. Over 80% of our DNA encodes for the brain, so the 88% figure is much more believable.
Political fallout: If humans and chimps share 86-88% of DNA, and gorillas only share 73% of our DNA, how much do different human racial groups share? How much do they differ?