Thanks to the outstanding analysis of scientist Casey Luskin, another icon of evolution has tumbled. (See here, here, here, and here.) It’s been widely touted for so long that human and chimp DNA is only “1 percent different” that it comes as a shock to reveal the truth. Buried in arcane language in the Supplemental Data of a groundbreaking study in the journal Nature, it turns out the difference is more like 14.9 percent.

But consider what that means. Anyone who has visited a zoo must have suspected that the 1 percent myth was a bogus statistic, intended to undercut the exceptional status of human beings. Atheists in science media and education loathe human exceptionalism. Obviously, humans and chimps are a whole lot more different than 1 percent. But…they’re also a lot more different than 14.9 percent. Otherwise, you’d have at least a few zoos where the positions of chimp and human were reversed, and they were observing and discussing us in special chimp-designed human “environments.” In fact, at 0 percent of zoos are chimps the zookeepers.

I’m not doubting the 14.9 percent figure — just reminding you that protein-coding DNA, the purely material medium plus associated material structures in the cell, isn’t the whole story, by any means. DNA alone fails wildly short of explaining the vast human-chimp difference. The myth of this purely material genome is crumbling, too, as scientists including Richard Sternberg, Michael Levin, Brian Miller, Günter Bechly, and others have recognized: transcending the material medium is a source of complex, informational patterns in what — for want of a better term — we may call the “Platonic space” of immaterial ideas, inaccessible to Darwinian evolution. Dr. Bechly spoke of these as ideas in the mind of God.

That is the subject of my new book, documenting the research of Dr. Sternberg in particular, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome. The image below, by the way, is from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History — from which Sternberg himself was chased as a heretic by supervisors and colleagues merely for editing an article favorable to intelligent design. That story is told in the book, too.

Photo credit: Casey Luskin.