Leslie Pray | Aug 18, 2002 | 6 min read
In 1975, Mary-Claire King and the late Allan Wilson, both then at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that the genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees is simply too small to account for the dramatic anatomical and behavioral differences between the two species.1 No matter what method scientists used to measure genetic distance--protein electrophoresis, DNA hybridization, immunology, or amino acid sequencing--the result was always the same: Humans and chimpanzees are 98.7% ge