Joel Kontinen
New research has shown that bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (P. troglodytes) share one per cent of their genes. This, actually, is no news, as before the 1930s bonobos were categorised as a chimpanzee subspecies. They used to be called pygmy chimps.
Christina Hvilsom, a conservation geneticist at the Copenhagen Zoo, and colleagues compared the genomes of 75 chimps and bonobos and discovered traces of interbreeding.
An article in Science suggests that this prompted them to think that the interbreeding occurred at two different stages: First, “1.5 million years” ago “bonobo ancestors mixed with the ancestor of the eastern and central chimps.” Then, “200,000 years ago, central chimps got another boost of bonobo genes.”
The researchers make much of gene flow between species. The article mentions that humans have a sizable amount of Neanderthal DNA and that coyotes, dogs and wolves also share genes.
From a Genesis perspective, this was expected. Neanderthals were fully human, and the dog kind has much more variety than early evolutionists could have imagined.
The fixity of species is a Darwinian myth.
The Biblical term 'kind' does not equal the biological concept 'species'. Living beings reproduce after their kinds, not species.
While we might see speciation happening (i.e. new species appearing), no one has ever witnessed a new kind being born.
We see all kinds of hybrids, such as ligers, zonkeys, geeps, wholpins, grolars and savannah cats, for instance.
This shows that animals reproduce after their kinds, not after their species. In other words, Moses was right and Darwin wrong – very much so.
Source:
Pennisi, Elizabeth. 2016. Chimps and bonobos had flings—and swapped genes—in the past. Science (27 October).
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