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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> while human males differ from male chimps by about 4% in genome, that still means that human males are more closely related to male chimps than they are to human females

These comparisons are stupid. How do you compare the similarity of books? Letter counts? Word counts? Is Romeo & Juliet more similar to Captain Underpants than its own translation into Italian?

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No, it's like comparing editions of basically the same book ("Hominid"), with some paragraphs using slightly different wording, a phrase added or removed here and there, old typos fixed, new typos added, etc. It's still largely the same book, but the tone is different in some key places, and the finale leaves a very different impression as a result.

Homo sapiens is wildly different from apes physiologically. (Apes look more anthropomorphic in our perception than dogs or cats, but this means nothing. Humans find two dots and a circular arc to be anthropomorphic too.)

Homo sapiens are apes and are also virtually identical in physiology compared to other apes if the external comparison group is dogs or cats.

> still largely the same book

What is your metric?

The point is our measures of genetic “distance” aren’t precise enough to make statements like OP’s. At least half of it is eukaryotic operating code, and much of the remaining is “junk” DNA we’re only beginning to understand

And more specifically they are comparing human one who has two copies of chapter x to human 2 who has a new chapter y and the chimpanzee who also has a chapter y, and saying aha look how different males are.

Imagine running a diff but with nucleotides.

I thought geneticists already do that?

> Imagine running a diff but with nucleotides

That's my point. Two different books of similar length in the same language will probably diff more closely than the same book translated. (Even if we limit ourselves to the same character set.) That says nothing about the content, just the encoding.

The analogy breaks down because there’s really only one language when it comes to interpreting nucleotide sequences.

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