How does this address my point?
Total variation!= average variation. If the average neanderthal is 4 percent different, and the total variation is the same, this implies there are significant differences between the two.
BenKenobi: "How does this address my point?"
TexasFreeper2009 gets it -- the statistics don't add up.
Someone has a decimal point out of place, or possibly is ignoring simple math in order to make some political point.
I don't know the answers, but don't like what I'm seeing.
We are told the human genome consists of about 3 billion "base pairs" -- those are the chemical building blocks which make up our DNA.
Of the 3 billion, Neanderthals are said to differ in 3 million "base pairs," or one-tenth of one percent.
Chimpanzees differ in 30 million to 50 million "base pairs" -- about one percent to 1.7 percent.
But how much diversity is there within the human population?
"The nucleotide diversity between humans is about 0.1%, which is 1 difference per 1,000 base pairs.[4][5][6]
"A difference of 1 in 1,000 nucleotides between two humans chosen at random amounts to approximately 3 million nucleotide differences since the human genome has about 3 billion nucleotides.
"Most of these SNPs are neutral but some are functional and influence phenotypic differences between humans through alleles.
"It is estimated that a total of 10 million SNPs exist in the human population of which at least 1% are functional "
I read this to say that within the overall human population are about 10 million "base pair" differences.
That's still only 1/3 of one percent, and means that normal variations among humans is greater than the supposed variations between humans and Neanderthals.
All I'm saying is that it seems scientists are doing some pretty serious DNA analysis, but the statistics we are reading don't make much sense.