Question

10. If there are very few differences in the DNA of two different species, what can we infer about their relationship? For example, human and chimpanzee DNA are about 98.8% the same, while human and gorilla DNA are 98.4% the same. Which species is more closely related to humans based on this information, chimpanzees or gorillas?

Answer 1

Chimpanzees.

Step-by-step explanation:

DNA sequence similarity is helpful to determine the evolutionary relationship between the organisms. The evolutionary tree can easily be constructed if the percentage of the DNA sequence similarity is known.

The human shows 98.8% sequence similarity with chimpanzee. The sequence similarity between human and gorilla DNA is 98.4%. This means Chimpanzee are more closely related to humans than gorillas.

Thus, the answer is chimpanzee.