Tea at Trianon: New Research Overturns Claims about Humans and Chimps

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 13, 2025

New Research Overturns Claims about Humans and Chimps

From Science and Culture Today:

How many times have you heard it said that the human and chimpanzee genomes are so similar that they are only “1 percent different” at the level of their DNA? This shows, we were told, not only that humans and chimps share common ancestry, but that humans aren’t all that special, which is a common talking point in science journalism and other public discussions. After all, we’re just slightly modified chimps! This “fact” has been discussed so much that it has become what the late biologist Jonathan Wells famously called an “icon of evolution.”

But now, new data reported in a recently published Nature paper by Yoo et al. has overturned this previous claim. The new findings reveal that human DNA is far more different from chimp DNA than previously thought.

That should be major news in the science world, yet those involved don’t seem interested in highlighting their discovery. More on that later.

Many times over the years, I’ve discussed how this 1 percent claim about humans and chimps is likely wrong. It is also misleading. No matter how similar humans might be to chimps at the genetic level, anyone who has been to the zoo knows already that chimps and humans are vastly different. After all, we’re the ones writing scientific papers about them—not the other way around. So common sense alone dictates that there is something misleading about that number and how it is used. But the new data show that the previous statistic isn’t just misleading. It’s flat-out false.

As I will elaborate in a subsequent article, this team of researchers has published “complete” sequences of ape genomes that were created ‘from scratch’ rather than using the human genome as a template. As a result, for the first time we can attempt a much more accurate assessment of the true degree of difference between the human and chimp genomes. (Read more.)