
Certain ideas just won’t die, no matter how often and thoroughly they are debunked. Most of us have heard some scientist, journalist, teacher, or entertainer claim that “human beings and chimpanzees share 98-99% of our DNA.” That statistic is an example of what molecular biologist Jonathan Wells calls an “icon of evolution,” or Zombie Science. The often unstated implication of this undead statistic is that humans and chimps obviously evolved from a common ancestor, and that we are still, on a biological level, mostly the same.